LITMIR.BIZ

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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 hand automatically rose to her face, as if she could shield herself from him. When she realised what she was doing, her fingers curled, forming a fist, and she let her hand fall back into her lap.

      Blade didn’t miss the wild dilation of the lady’s pupils, her sharp intake of breath, although both reactions could have been attributed to the cold pain of the icepack settling against her forehead.

      He didn’t think so. She knew who he was.

      Not that recognition was entirely unexpected. Occasionally, some hack reporter got bored for news and sniffed around the Lombard family. The Lombard hotel chain was high profile by necessity, but some of the personal storms his family had weathered had turned into media circuses, adding a certain glamour and notoriety to the Lombard name. Like it or not, they were known.

      “And your name?” he demanded quietly.

      She stared at him, grey eyes as blank and opaque as a wall of mist.

      “Anna Johnson,” she said, without hesitation or inflection, and Blade knew beyond all doubt that his ghost lady was lying.

      Chapter 3

      Anna let out a shaky sigh when Blade left her holding the ice against her forehead while he went in search of painkillers.

      The piercing quality of his gaze had been so unsettling, she had almost given in and told him her real name. For the first time in years, the lie had seemed deceitful, rather than necessary armour against de Rocheford.

      He handed her a glass of water and a couple of Paracetamols, then shifted away to lean one hip against the kitchen counter. Arms folded across his chest, he watched her swallow the pills and drink the water.

      His steady regard was unnerving. The plain fact was that this room had always been small, but Blade made it seem claustrophobically tiny. It wasn’t just his size, although that was intimidating in itself. It was that he seemed larger than life, brimming with a male power that both fascinated and alarmed her, because he drew her so strongly.

      “Have you got family you can contact?” he asked.

      Carefully, Anna set the now empty glass down, glad for the bulk of the tea-towel wrapped in ice, because it served to obscure part of her face. “No.”

      “A friend?”

      She hesitated. If she gave him a name, she might be able to get rid of him sooner. “If I need help, I can call on Tony, from the flat above.”

      He frowned. “Boyfriend?”

      The sheer ludicrousness of the suggestion made her smile. Tony Fa’alau wasn’t an old man, but he was somewhere north of his fifties, tall and soft-spoken, with a limp. He often turned up at the library and walked her home, but tonight was one of the nights he helped his son, Mike, with security at the video parlour. “No.”

      “Good.”

      Her heart skipped a beat at the deliberate way he held her gaze, the satisfaction inherent in that one word.

      “But you should still see a doctor. I could take you.”

      His tone was neutral, but she could feel the relentless, underlying force of his will. He was a man used to taking charge, used to giving orders. With a sense of amazement, she realised he would take her over completely if she let him. “It’s only a bump on the head. Believe me, this one’s not so bad, I’ve had worse.” She stopped, aware that on top of everything else, she now had to squash the urge to confide in him.

      “Someone hit you?” he demanded softly.

      He didn’t move from his semirelaxed position, but Anna was aware of the change in him. His gaze on her had sharpened, and the relaxed pose was no longer indolent.

      “No! I—that is, I was…accident-prone as a child.”

      The intensity of his regard didn’t lessen. “What kind of accidents?”

      The killing kind.

      Anna closed her eyes briefly against the throbbing pain that thought elicited. “I had a couple of nasty falls that ended in concussions.”

      She rose to her feet, setting the now melting icepack down on the table, forestalling any further questions, hoping he would take the hint and leave. Her head didn’t spin, and her legs no longer felt like limp noodles. The rest and the ice had helped, and soon the pills would ease the pain even further.

      Blade took the hint, but in order to get to the door, he had to pass right by her. He stopped, one hand on the door handle, close enough that she had to reluctantly tilt her head to meet his gaze. Close enough that she realised with a sense of shock that he was more than just damp, he was wet through; that all the time he had cared for her, his clothes had been clinging to his skin. Even as she watched, a droplet of water trailed down his temple, but he ignored it.

      “I’m glad you don’t have a boyfriend,” he said bluntly, “but I don’t like it that you’re alone tonight. I’ll leave now, because you’re out on your feet. You need to rest. But I’ll be back tomorrow to check on you. Do you work during the day?”

      Anna thought that was a slightly unusual way to phrase the question. Most people worked during the day. “Yes,” she said, not supplying him with any details.

      The omission didn’t seem to bother him. “I’ll take you out for dinner, then.”

      Anna blinked at the flat statement, wondering if she’d heard wrong. Now she was completely

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