now, despite the scare she’d just had. She should be shaking, coming apart, and he should be comforting her, lending her a shoulder to cry on if that was what she wanted—but none of those things were happening.
He didn’t know what this woman needed beyond a painkiller and rest. She wasn’t asking for his attention, and, even though she’d given him a measure of trust, he’d had to prise it from her. She would snatch it back in a second if he gave her reason.
She inserted the key in the lock, pushed the door open, stepped inside and flicked a switch. The small, sparse room flooded with the dim light of a naked, low-wattage bulb. Blade followed her in, cataloguing the room in one smooth sweep, noting windows and doors—the action as natural to him as it was to carry the Glock he’d left folded up in his jacket in the Jeep.
His persona shifted from soldier to male as she set the briefcase down beside her tiny dining table and began unbuttoning her coat.
He’d already noted that she was slim; now he saw that she could stand to gain a few pounds, although he knew there were curves beneath those shapeless clothes. When he’d helped her from that ditch, she must have had a dizzy spell, because she’d stumbled. For a split second she’d gone boneless against him and he’d felt the firm pressure of her breasts against his stomach.
She was also shivering and pale, her eyes big in her face. Too damn big. They were an odd colour, a strange, riveting, silver-grey, as if mist and shadows had taken up permanent residence there.
And her mouth… Something kicked hard in his gut. He hadn’t noticed her mouth before, but now that she’d wiped off some of the mud, it took all of his attention. It was pale, lush, pretty and sultry. Grimly, he logged the growing tension in his groin as he closed the door behind him. Oh, yeah…in other circumstances, he would want that mouth.
She bent to unfasten the last button, and in the light, her wet spill of hair, which he now saw was caught back in some loose, intricate braid, took on a warmer hue. Blade stared, transfixed both by the length of her dark hair and by its coppery gleam. When it was dry, it would be a silky veil, cloaking her shoulders, falling past her waist.
Hit number two, he thought bleakly. She was delicately made, and she was a redhead. Now all he had to do was find out what she was running from, and whether or not she had a history of…unusual dreams.
Anna began to shrug out of her coat. She flinched, startled, as her rescuer helped her the rest of the way and then looped the coat over the hook on the back of the door. The easy, matter-of-fact way he carried out that small courtesy caught her attention. She had been right when she’d thought he was used to taking care of women, of handling them. The gesture had been pure gentleman, but the easy way he’d assumed she would let him take care of her had been one hundred percent male.
He studied her forehead, frowning. “You look like you’ve been in a fight. How did you say you got that?”
Anna tried to remember exactly what she’d told him, but her mind was a frustrating blank. The impression her rescuer had made on her was so vivid that she had trouble recalling anything but him. She decided to stick with the truth as far as she could. “Ran into a tree.”
His fingers skirted the edges of the bump, and her insides lurched, both at the tenderness of the bruised area and her tingling awareness of his slightest touch.
“Hate to see the tree,” he murmured.
That surprised a laugh out of her. The laugh hurt—as well as amazed her—and she groaned, lowering herself gingerly onto the single, hard-backed chair pulled up next to the table.
She heard him moving in the kitchenette. Heard her ancient fridge door reluctantly give way to the pressure of his hand, then suck closed with a tight-fisted finality, as if grudgingly giving up some of its meagre contents. A sharp sound had her eyes blinking wide in time to witness the brief tussle as he extracted ice from a frosted-up tray. A cube flipped out, evaded the snaking reach of his big hand and hit the floor. He swore as it skidded away, caught her eye and grinned.
In the dim light of her flat, his teeth were white against his skin—the wide smile so unexpected that she felt like he’d clubbed her with it.
Anna couldn’t drag her gaze from the mesmerising flash of amusement and what it did to the strong, utterly male contours of his face. She swallowed, abruptly stricken by a sense of isolation, of removal from the human condition, so intense that she had to fight the need to curl in on herself and weep. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d shared something as intimate, as silly, as that moment with the ice-cube—let alone the grin. Now that lack stunned her. She felt the deprivation as a piercing ache that drove deep, then burst outward, resolving into a twitching shiver that lifted all the fine hairs at her nape. She was starving for human contact, human warmth, and the knowledge filled her with desperate fear.
She had to pull herself together, and quickly. She was wary of any and all strangers, and had no friends to speak of. She lived this way for a good reason: to stay alive. To feel what she was feeling—this wild, famished hunger for a touch, a smile, from a man she had never met before and would never see again—was beyond odd; it was crazy.
“What’s your name?” Her demand was raspy, hollow, even to her own ears. She didn’t care. Suddenly it seemed very important that, if nothing else, she should have his name.
“Blade.”
He went down on his haunches beside her, and her awareness of the hot sensuality that was as much a part of him as that big-cat grace shuddered through her in another aching wave, as if she were caught in the grip of a fever. He’d wrapped the ice in a tea-towel, and now he gently pressed it to her forehead. All the while, he watched her with an intensity that was blatantly male, speculative, and that made her feel unbearably aware of her own femininity—something she had avoided thinking about for a very long time.
“Blade Lombard,” he finished softly.
Anna froze. Lombard. She blinked, for a moment unable to move beyond this new shock. She knew him. Or, at least, she had known him in another place, another lifetime, when she’d been a child.
A flash of memory surfaced, pitched and rolled with a disorienting sense of deja vu. Before her father died, they had lived in Sydney and moved in the same social stratosphere as the Lombards. Of course, Blade had been older—a lot older, to the five-or six-year-old child she’d been—close to adult status in her eyes. She remembered falling off a bike, and Blade helping her up. He’d comforted her, made her sit in a chair, just like this, while he cleaned her knee and applied a dressing. All the while, he’d resisted the taunts of the other children, bending all of his attention on her.
Would he remember her? she wondered on a beat of despair. And what would she do if he did? Could she risk revealing her identity to him?
The Lombards had had business connections with her father. She could vaguely remember, if not their actual faces, their occasional presence at social gatherings. She wondered if Tarrant Holdings still did business with the Lombards, if Blade and her stepfather were partners in some deal, if Blade was a potential threat to her?
She didn’t dare find out.
The incongruity of Blade Lombard strolling through Ambrose Park at this time of night, or any time—of even being in the vicinity of this rough neighbourhood—struck her more forcibly. Something was wrong. It didn’t fit. He shouldn’t have been there.
No. She couldn’t trust him, no matter how much she wanted to.
Her
