her hand. But in the instant that he was off balance she whirled and fled between the trees.
A branch struck her cheek as cruelly as a whiplash. Almost certain that the clowns were following her, she flung her body through the shrubs, burst out on to another path, and ran straight into the man who was waiting there.
Her gasp of terror drove the last of her breath out of her lungs. Yet even then Kristine did not give up. For Philippe had taught her something else. ‘Always you must have two weapons,’ he had said in his charmingly accented English. ‘One for every day, and one for the real emergency.’
She had a Swiss army knife in her back pocket. Just before the man’s arms could close around her, she hauled it out of her pocket in a blur of movement and raked the sharp point of the corkscrew down his bare arm.
He gave a grunt of pain. But he did not let go. Instead he pushed her away from him and said something urgent and incomprehensible in Norwegian.
He had been a fool to push her away, Kristine thought, and brought her knee up to his groin with malevolent speed.
His countermove was swift and decisive and her knee struck nothing but air. He gasped, ‘Stop! I’m trying to rescue you. Je suis un ami...ein Freund.’
Her fingers were already clawing for his eyes. Then her body went still as his words penetrated her haze of fear. For the first time she realised that he was not in a clown costume and that he was not fighting back: all his moves had been defensive. She said blankly, ‘What did you say?’
He was still clasping her strongly by the shoulders, the warmth of his fingers burning through her shirt. ‘I’m trying to rescue you,’ he repeated in English. ‘Against considerable odds, I might add. You did scream for help, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. Yes, I screamed...but I thought you were another one of them...the men who attacked me, I mean.’ She gave an uncontrollable shudder. It was very dark under the trees and she was still not quite sure she could trust him.
He added in a clipped voice, ‘Let’s get out on the street where I can see you.’
One hand slid to grasp hers, and he led the way down the path. Kristine’s knees felt like jelly; she stumbled after him, and as the light from the street penetrated the trees saw that her unknown rescuer was both tall and broad-shouldered, and moved with a fluid grace that seemed every bit as dangerous as the dead white faces of the clowns.
They came out on the pavement of a narrow street edged with rather grand stone buildings. The man stopped under the nearest streetlight, which was decorated with pretty baskets of flowers, and turned to face her, still holding her by the hand. In silence he looked down at her.
She was of average height. Her clothes—khaki shorts and a faded green shirt—were unremarkable, and her face was innocent of make-up. But the light shone full on her eyes, which were blue as gentians and still wide with remembered terror, and on a cap of short, feathered blonde hair. Her features had the clarity of perfect bone-structure, as such possessing an almost asexual beauty. Only in the tilt of her eyes and the sensual curve of her mouth was to be found her essential femaleness, a femaleness she was doing nothing to accentuate.
As for Kristine, she was instantly aware that her rescuer could have graced any advertisement for a Norwegian ski slope or a northern beach. Like her, he had blond hair and blue eyes. Yet the comparison ended there. His hair was darker than hers, tawny and streaked by the sun, while his eyes, blue-grey like the sea on a misty day, were tumultuous with an emotion whose source she could not begin to guess. His nose was straight, his mouth well-shaped, his jaw determined.
As the silence stretched out, she realised something else. Her survey of his external features could almost have been a defence mechanism. What she was striving to ignore was an intense and potentially devastating masculinity, focused at the moment entirely on her. To say he was attractive was to use that word only too literally.
She pulled her hand free. ‘I...thank you for coming to my rescue.’
In disconcerting contrast to the stormy eyes, his face was expressionless. He said, ‘I think you were managing just fine without me.’
He spoke English with almost no accent. ‘I—I thought they were coming after me,’ Kristine stammered, and realised dimly that she was still trembling.
‘Who were they?’
‘They were after my purse. They were dressed as clowns.’ She grimaced. ‘It was horrible, like a bad dream.’
‘I would gather you’re a visitor here—don’t you know enough not to wander around alone at night? Even though Oslo has a low crime rate compared to most European cities, pickpockets and drug addicts are everywhere.’
Some of the turbulence in his eyes was anger, she realised belatedly, although it was an anger held in check and completely under his control. Yet because of his intervention he deserved an honest reply. ‘I’m not normally so careless,’ she confessed. ‘It was stupid of me.’
‘More than stupid. Criminally negligent...you’re a very attractive young woman; it’s entirely possible they wouldn’t have stopped at theft.’
Kristine lifted her chin. ‘Yet you yourself have just admitted that I got away from them on my own.’
‘So you are high-spirited,’ he said slowly. ‘Besides being very foolish.’
‘I’m not usually foolish!’
‘Then why were you tonight?’ he demanded.
‘That’s scarcely your business,’ she fumed, clenching her fists at her sides. As she did so, the cold metal of her Swiss army knife bit into her palm, and in sudden horror she remembered how she had dragged it down her rescuer’s arm. She reached out and took him by the wrist, saying in consternation, ‘I must have hurt you—let me see your arm.’
His shirt-sleeves were rolled up. From his elbow halfway to the base of his thumb there was a long jagged gouge in his flesh, blood seeping from either side of it. She cried incoherently, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you, or at least I did because I thought you were one of them, and then of course you weren’t...’
Her fingers were slender, and bare of rings. He said, a note in his voice she could not have placed, ‘Did you do the same to them?’
She looked up, sudden mischief lighting her face and driving away the last remnants of fear. ‘I was also carrying a pair of nail scissors,’ she said. ‘I used them to very good effect.’
He gave a reluctant laugh, his gaze trained on her face. ‘Do you carry a first-aid kit, too? To minister to the trail of wounded in your wake?’
He was breathtaking when he laughed. Unconsciously Kristine’s fingers tightened around his wrist. Under her thumb she felt the heat of his flesh, under her fingertips a supple shift of bone and tendon—intricate and indelible impressions as ruthless in their way as the anger in his steel-blue eyes had been.
She let his arm fall to his side and heard herself say, ‘The apartment where I’m staying is only five minutes from here and I do keep a first-aid kit there. Will you let me wash that cut and put some antibiotic cream on it? It’s the least I can do by way of reparation.’
One by one her words repeated themselves in her
