Blade's Lady

He cursed as the images replayed themselves in his mind. He remembered the vivid blue and red of the neon sign. The sign had said…

Gamezone.

His head came up, nostrils flaring as if he’d caught an elusive scent, one he’d been seeking for more years than he cared to count. If only to disprove it.

“Gamezone.”

He said the name out loud, letting it linger on his tongue, as if testing the veracity of the syllables.

With a harsh exclamation, he strode inside, switched on a lamp and reached for the telephone book.

He was clutching at shadows. Maybe when he came up with another blank the stranglehold on his gut would ease up.

Despite reason and cold logic, his pulse hammered as he searched through the book, ran his finger down a page…and stopped.

“Son of a bitch.”

Blade’s heart slammed once, hard, against the wall of his chest. His gaze narrowed at the bold type advertising a games arcade in one of the seedier areas of town, but no matter how hard he looked at the address, it didn’t disappear.

Gamezone.

Blade stared at the garish blue and red sign. A sign he remembered but had never seen.

His gaze swept the surrounding area, noting the unmistakeable uniformity of state housing jammed cheek by jowl with clusters of badly built apartments. Definitely down at heel.

A darkened area caught his eye. A park.

He called himself crazy, but put the Jeep Cherokee in gear and cruised closer, noting the name of the park, the broken lights, the shabby plastered pillars guarding the entrance. Swinging the Jeep into a space, he pulled on a leather jacket, eased it over the fit of the Glock shoved snug in its shoulder holster, checked the knife in his boot and grabbed a torch, but didn’t turn it on.

Thunder rolled, giving a low-register warning of the incoming storm. The strengthening breeze scattered rain in his face, bringing with it scents that were city-tame, others that were earthy, wild. Something equally uncivilised unraveled inside Blade, and despite the fury and frustration that still ate at the edges of his temper, he bared his teeth in a cold grin. He stood by the Jeep for long seconds, his senses animal-sharp as he stared across the expanse of grass and trees with eyes peculiarly well-adjusted to the smothering blackness.

When he’d been with the Special Air Service he’d been called names—he’d been called lots of names—but he couldn’t completely deny the wolf’s blood that was purported to run in his veins. He felt like howling right now.

He should be tucked up in bed, getting his beauty sleep. Or, better still, tucked up in bed with a beauty and getting no sleep at all. Not hunting a…ghost.

A chill went through him, along with echoes of urgency and the compulsion that had driven him out into the night. He had to check. Gamezone had been real. For his own peace of mind, he had to check.

If she was real…

He rejected the thought. She couldn’t be real. Better to think about what he was going to do when he didn’t find a woman—like which psychiatrist he’d choose to oversee his therapy, and whether or not he should have himself committed.

He searched the area, coldly, efficiently, and found nothing.

Finally he walked the perimeter and found the storm water drain…and his ghost.

Chapter 2

She was lying, curled as defenceless as a baby, amidst grass, mud, crumpled cans and takeaway wrappers.

Her very stillness was chilling. For a moment, Blade thought he was too late and that she was dead, but the first touch told him that wasn’t so. The pulse beating at her throat was regular and strong. His ghost was alive, but hurt.

His relief was followed by a short, hard jolt of rage. Blade lived his life on simple terms. He was—or had been, until a few weeks ago—a soldier. In more primitive terms, a warrior. The art of war, the hunt, had been his game. It had excited him as little else had, and he had played it well. But one of his rules had been that women and children had no part in the action. He thought that rule was simple enough even for the bad guys to understand. It ticked him off big time when they didn’t.

Gently, he felt down the length of her body, testing for broken bones; then ran his fingertips over her scalp. When he encountered the goose egg in the centre of her forehead, he flicked on the torch, which was taped so that only a thin slit of light played over her pale features.

Long, wet hair was slicked back from a face that was less than beautiful, more arresting than pretty, an intriguing blend of delicacy and strength and Ambrose Park dirt. She was average in height, maybe taller, and despite having the firm muscle tone of someone who either exercised regularly or worked physically hard, she was finely built. Delicate.

Blade’s stomach twisted as the description registered, and for a dizzying moment a dream image rose up to overlay that of the woman lying on the ground. Fiercely, he shook it off. A lot of women were slender, finely built; it didn’t mean a thing. This woman was real, not a dream.

Cleaned up, he bet she would be something—the kind of woman who should be wearing a slick business suit and sexy high heels, not the loose jeans, sweatshirt and cheap nylon raincoat she was wearing. He put her age at mid-twenties, but something about the taut, moulded shape of her cheekbones and jaw suggested more than the usual strength and character of a woman that age. Even unconscious, there was no softness, just pared-down intensity.

He shook her. She stirred but didn’t open her eyes.

Lightning sheeted across the sky, throwing his shadow across the woman and burning her inert form into his retinas with a searing clarity. Thunder rumbled again, and tension coalesced between his shoulder blades as the rising wind buffeted his back. Too much noise to hear if whoever had attacked the woman was still skulking around, and he could do without the lightning.

He shook her again. She groaned, a husky thread of sound. Her head lolled toward him, and Blade saw the blood, angling across her temple, trickling down one of those exquisite cheekbones. Her eyelids flickered, ridiculously long, velvety lashes lifted, and her blank gaze fastened briefly on his before she sank back into unconsciousness.

Anna knew someone was shaking her.

She tried to wake up, but it was like swimming through molasses, she never quite seemed to make it to the surface. She was tired—so tired—all she wanted to do was sleep, but the voice was insistent, low, dark, with a kind of delicious rumble that she fixed on like a beacon. The hands that held her were shiveringly hot, like an electric charge tingling along her arms. The man, for it was a man, was like fire. The warmth from his body beat against her chilled flesh in waves, and that low voice continued to cajole—as soothing, as animal rough, as a purr. It wasn’t a voice she’d heard before, but it was oddly familiar all the same. It caught her attention and held it, even against the heavy drag of sleep.

She didn’t feel afraid of the voice, although a part of her wondered distantly at her lack of fear; she was too busy listening to the rich, dark cadences, the intriguing roughness, and soaking in the beguiling heat of his hands. She wanted to get closer to that whispery rumble, the magical heat that seemed to reach out and enfold her, and she wondered dreamily what it would feel like, how hot it would be, if she reached out and wrapped herself around him.

The tenor of the voice changed, became more urgent. Abruptly, Anna remembered where she was, the danger she was in. She needed to open her eyes, to wake up. Despite her puzzling response to the man, she didn’t know the voice, and she couldn’t afford to trust it.

Blade tightened his grasp on the woman’s shoulders and shook her again, this time more sharply. He wanted her out of here, ASAP. The drizzle had thickened into hard-driving gusts of rain, and he had a nasty itch running up his spine. He didn’t know how she had ended up in the storm drain, or who she could possibly be, but he didn’t intend for either of them to stay there any longer than they had to. The woman in his dream had been in some kind of trouble, and so had this woman.

It had to be sheer coincidence that he’d found her. City parks were prime spots for trouble of all kinds, especially in areas like this. There would be a logical explanation for her presence that had nothing at all to do with the dreams. He was determined to have that explanation.

Her eyes flickered, opened wide and fixed unblinkingly on him. She went rigid in his grip.

“It’s all right.” He pitched his voice low. “Someone attacked you. You’ve been unconscious. I’m going to take you to a hospital.”

“No hospital.” Her voice was husky, but surprisingly steady.

Anna stared at the man who held her, his large, powerful form crouched over her as he used his body to shield her from the thin, icy rain that whirled in the weak beam of a torch. She struggled to orient herself and failed. She felt as if a giant fist had closed around her heart, her lungs, squeezing until her head spun and she had to fight for breath.

It was him, she thought starkly. Her knight.

He said she’d been unconscious. Maybe she still was, because the man gripping her arms could have strode straight from her dreams. She knew those midnight eyes, the bold slant of his cheekbones, the exotic hollowing beneath; the carnal promise of that mouth framed by that squared warrior’s jaw.

In her dreams he had been vague, veiled, as if a mist had obscured her vision, shifting occasionally to allow tantalising glimpses. Now it was as if a strong wind had blown the mist away; he was pulled into sharp focus, and he was…overwhelming. He should have been clad in dark armour, a helm held carelessly under one arm, his face and hair damp with sweat as he grinned in reckless triumph at another jousting victory. He shouldn’t be here. Now. He belonged in a hundred other places, a hundred other times—between the pages of the novel she was writing.

She wondered if she had conjured him up, if the shock and strain of running from the man who had attacked her, the blow to her head, had affected her mind.

If she was hallucinating, the illusion was nice, she decided a little giddily. Very detailed. Better than the fuzzy images of her dreams, or anything she had ever imagined or committed to a page.

Deliberately, she inhaled, and caught the scents of mud and grass and rain, and the faint drift of something far more potent—warm male and damp leather. The scent of him grounded her with a thump.