LITMIR.BIZ

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under the dash, slowing her escape.

      He was already swinging out, striding around to help her down. He gripped her elbow, steadying her when she almost fell—and another of those quivering shocks travelled up her arm. It was too much. She jerked free, stumbling back, almost oblivious to the cold, steady rain streaming down her face, penetrating the collar of her raincoat and trickling down her neck.

      He was talking to her, that smoky, soothing rumble again, as if he were trying to gentle a wild animal. She stared at him blankly for long seconds, not comprehending a word he was saying.

      He held both hands up, palms out, in a gesture that cut through her confusion and suddenly made her feel foolish. He had only been trying to help her.

      Mortified heat warmed her cheeks. He’d sheltered and protected her, driven her home—his actions those of a man used to caring for women, used to handling them. If he hadn’t grabbed her just then, she would have fallen.

      “I’m sorry, I’m not…” She stopped, feeling even more clumsy, more inept. Not what? she thought bleakly. Not used to kindness? Not used to men touching her?

      “You’re shaken. You’ve got a head injury. All I want to do is see you safely inside.” His mouth quirked at one corner. “Out of the rain.”

      The rain. God, the rain. They were both getting soaked. She drew a breath. “Okay.” With a nod that she instantly regretted, she started up the cracked concrete path.

      Anna paused at the door to her apartment, which was little more than a one-room bedsit. She turned to thank him, but he forestalled her.

      “I know you don’t trust me, but I’m not leaving until you’ve either called a doctor or you let me take a look at that bump on your head.”

      Once again, Anna was struck with confusion. The mere thought that anyone wanted to help her, take care of her, was so alien that for a moment she couldn’t take it in. She fingered the swelling, flinching at the hot bite of pain. Her fingers came away streaked with blood. “You’re a doctor?” She didn’t try to hide her disbelief.

      Blade curbed the desire to reach out and try to soothe her with touch. It wouldn’t work, he decided dispassionately. She was as jumpy as a cat with its paw caught in a trap, and just as likely to lash out at him. It wouldn’t take much for her to kick him out on his ass, and he couldn’t allow that to happen. Not until he’d found out the answers to some questions. “I’ve had medical training. I was in the military until a couple of months ago. ‘Combat’ medicine.”

      For a moment, Blade thought she wasn’t going to go for it, and he was knocked off balance by another emotion entirely—one he wasn’t pleased to admit to. Something about his ghost caught at his gut, grabbed him deep and hard. He felt…proprietary, protective. He had found her, and he was responsible for her. He wasn’t willing to let her go just yet.

      When she put her case down and began digging for her key in her raincoat pocket, relief and satisfaction uncurled inside him. She didn’t want to, but she was going to trust him.

      His gaze narrowed as he noted the strain she was still under, and the unusual control she was exerting 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

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