Blade's Lady. Fiona Brand

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.

      He was here. She wasn’t dreaming. Whoever the stranger was, he was real.

      His gaze was steady on her, piercing in the dim glow from his torch. “I need to get you out of the rain, and you need a doctor,” he murmured, his voice deep, laced with that smoky rumble.

      The sound of it rippled down her backbone, tightened the tender skin at her nape in a primitive shiver of warning.

      His hand lifted to her face, fingertips searingly hot against her jaw. “If you can’t walk, I’ll carry you.”

      Anna grasped his hand, disconcerted at the sharp thrill of sensation as his fingers closed over hers, aware that the pads of his fingers and palm were rough and calloused instead of city-soft.

      “No hospital,” she repeated as evenly as she could manage, given that her heart was still pounding with the aftershock of her discovery, fanciful or not, and a heavy jolt of what she could only label as acute awareness of the man holding her. “I—stumbled and fell. Hit my head. It’s just a bump, I…” She took a breath and pulled herself into a sitting position, wincing as her head spun anew. “I can walk. My briefcase. I need my briefcase.”

      “It’s here.”

      The