by Fiona Brand
He came to a halt in front of her, as confident naked as he was dressed, and Anna decided that he had every right to be.
He picked her hand up and wrapped it around the broad base of his arousal in a movement that closely mirrored the dream. A ripple of shock went through her at the unexpected contact, the way his hot flesh bucked beneath her grip.
His hand covered hers before she could pull back. "You didn't hurt me," he murmured. "I liked it."
The texture of him was alien yet fascinating, satin-sleek and pulsing with life, and so incredibly hard. Blade was beautiful in a powerful, masculine way, like a big cat or a blooded stallion, and Anna found she wanted to touch, to stroke, to learn every part of him, but this … this part of him fascinated her.
She was almost twenty-seven; she knew what a naked man looked like, even if she had never had sex, but she had never considered she would find a man's private parts … beautiful. She moved her fingers, stroking the length of him, exploring the solid bluntness of his shape, the silky heat and slickness of his skin. She felt him tighten in her hold, heard his harsh intake of air.
"Next time…" he said hoarsely, stilling her fingers with one hand, then starting on the buttons of her shirt. "Next time you can do anything you want to me."
She felt the shirt slip from her shoulders; then his arms went around her. The shock of him naked against her took her breath. It was like being on fire; every part of her burned.
Something cool brushed the backs of her legs – the coverlet, then Blade was pulling her onto the rumpled bed with him. He bent and kissed her, his weight gradually settled on her, pressing her into the mattress, as his mouth played with hers – long, tender kisses that made her ache with their sweetness, gentle bites and teasing nips, kisses that became increasingly deep and wild, so that she moved restlessly beneath him, testing the resistance of his heavy weight, burying her fingers in his hair.
He nuzzled her neck, trailing downward, the glide of his body against hers an exquisite torment. His mouth fastened on one breast, and she gasped, arching beneath him at the rush of pleasure. He transferred his attention to the other breast, seemingly fascinated by her changing textures, her sensitivity to his touch. She felt the nudge of his knee parting her legs, his hand, heavy on her stomach; then it dipped lower, cupping her.
A shudder went through him. "You're already wet," he said softly.
He continued to kiss her as his fingers parted her folds, and she went still in an agony of apprehension and desperate curiosity, then burning pleasure, as he began gently stroking her. His finger slid into her, probing. He withdrew, then slid into her again, this time with more difficulty. She realised there were two fingers now, moving in a disturbing rhythm, probing deeper each time, gently stretching. He withdrew, and she felt the slick heat of his fingers as he continued to stroke, her whole body arching at the almost unbearable flood of sensation.
Just when she thought she couldn't take any more, he reached down and fitted himself to her opening.
Heat poured through her like the first onslaught of a fever as he pressed inward. He leaned forward, his expression taut, absorbed, as he continued to press into her, rocking gently. Her fingers dug into his shoulders, and she drew her knees up. The movement eased the tight constriction, so that he penetrated her shallowly.
He shuddered in her arms and stilled, his hands cradling her face, gaze fixed on hers, gauging her every reaction. He was holding her as if she would break, holding himself in check, and it ran through her mind that this was completely different to the dreams. The sensations Blade's touch triggered were almost too intense. There was no misty veil, no dream to buffer her now. Everything was sharply edged and vividly real. And the scent… She hadn't known how erotic the hot male scent of him would be. She wanted to be closer, to touch and taste him, breathe him in.
The slow penetration started again, and she tensed, although there was no pain.
The whispery rumble of his voice poured over her, soothing, enticing. His hands stroked her face, his gaze almost unbearably tender. His weight shifted, easing up on the pressure between her legs. His chest brushed her breasts starting a shimmer of pure delight. One hand gripped her nape, tilting her head back. His mouth came down on hers. He was taut in her arms, fine tremors running beneath his skin, heart slamming heavily in his chest.
She stroked his back and he groaned, almost purring with pleasure. His mouth closed on her breast. The tug of sensation arrowed straight to her loins, shoving her over some invisible line, transforming the faint discomfort of stretching into hot, burning pleasure.
He continued to croon and stroke, encouraged her to stroke him, coaxing, gentling as he rocked, easing himself deeper inside her.
Without warning, the slow building of pressure exploded into searing pleasure and she arched, pressing against him. He went rigid against her. She heard a soft curse, then his hips recoiled and he plunged inside her, gliding deep.
Her fingers sank into Blade's shoulders.
He withdrew and pushed deep again. The hot tingling pleasure intensified, spreading upward, stealing her breath until her lungs ached and her heart pounded, and the night seemed to draw in, no longer cold, but swirling close, a suffocating mantle of darkness.
A rough sound tore from Blade's throat. "This is … killing me"
The effort of control was etched on his face. His jaw was rigid, the line of his mouth set, as if the control he was enforcing was painful, and suddenly she realised holding back was painful for him.
The cords of his neck and shoulders were taut. Sweat sheened his skin, making every movement a fluid shift of copper. A muscle jumped in his jaw as he withdrew, then pushed back in.
The penetration, the raw physicality of the act, was still alien, but the heat and weight of Blade, the piercing tenderness of his gaze holding hers, the intense pleasure of being so close to him, held its own lure. She'd read enough, heard enough, to know that making love was a dicey business and didn't always bring pleasure. She'd dreamed enough to know the pleasure. Yet this … she hadn't dreamed this. It was more. There was no other explanation, just more, and it threatened to overwhelm her.
They lay locked together on the rumpled sheets, the room flooded with moonlight.
"Wrap your legs around my waist," he demanded.
Abruptly, he shifted, too, pulling her more firmly beneath him. Anna twined her arms around his neck and held on as his rhythm became shorter, sharper, and once more pleasure coiled through her, catching her by surprise, spinning her off balance.
For a panicked moment, she thought she was falling; then Blade's arms closed around her, anchoring her against him, holding her as the world shimmered out of focus and there was nothing left but the sun exploding inside her, burning away the cold, banishing every last shadow.
Chapter 11
Blade pulled on his jeans and prowled onto the terrace. The moon had set, and rosy dawn lightened the eastern horizon so that the sea shimmered like beaten copper, and the angular shapes of city buildings were softened, as if they were carved from ancient stone instead of more modern materials.
As the sky rapidly lightened, he grimly catalogued the disaster the last few hours had been, from the moment he had chased Anna down in the library to this morning's debacle.
He would have kicked himself if it would have done any good, but he suspected it wouldn't. When it came to Anna, he thought with what was in his pants, not his head.
Tonight she had needed rest, kindness. Protection. She had needed his help. She had been a virgin.
All he had wanted to do was strip her naked and take her down onto the icy tiles of the terrace. He hadn't been that crude, but it had been a near thing.
He hadn't worn a condom.
He never had unprotected sex. The condom had occurred to him, but he had instantly rejected the thought of wearing one. His mind, his whole body, had been on fire, brought to a fever pitch of madness by the dream. He had needed to know that she was feeling him inside
her. He wouldn't have been able to tolerate even a thin latex barrier between them.
It had flashed through his mind that he wanted to impregnate her, and even that hadn't been enough to stop him. When he had poured himself into Anna's body, the moment had held a primitive power that still shook through him.
The breeze freshened with the dawn, bringing with it the distant, mournful cry of gulls.
The morning hadn't changed a damn thing, he decided bleakly. Even though he knew he should have protected Anna against pregnancy, he still felt a fierce satisfaction that he had probably already impregnated her. If there had ever been a politically correct cell in his body, the wild heat of their lovemaking had incinerated it.
He wanted Anna pregnant. He wanted her bound to him.
If she was pregnant, she would have to marry him.
Satisfaction filled him at the thought. The decision felt right. It wasn't as if they were strangers; they had known each other for years. They'd been making love to each other for years. The ring on her finger was just a damn detail.
He felt her presence behind him and half turned, one hand wrapped around the railing. He studied her rumpled hair, pale skin, the shadows beneath her eyes. "Are you all right?"
"Yes."
The answer was unequivocal, and it startled him.
She walked toward him, once more dressed in his shirt. Her step was a little uneven, as if she was tender from his lovemaking. Not a big surprise, when he had all but attacked her.
She hesitated, then took a last step and slid her arms around his waist, cuddling in against his chest. "I love you."
Blade stiffened with surprise. His hands settled on her shoulders. He wanted to crush her to him, he wanted to take her back to bed. "I shouldn't have touched you."
She tipped her head back, her expression changing from soft to guarded. "Why not?"
"Because my control was … questionable. Because you were exhausted and needed to sleep."
"I'm not made of porcelain. I didn't break."
His brows jerked together. Didn't she have any sense? "I could have hurt you."
She frowned and stepped back from him, dislodging his hold. "You didn't hurt me. I liked what you did. But that's not what we need to talk about." She hugged the shirt to her chest, and her expression smoothed out to the remoteness he disliked so much. "You said you found me in Ambrose Park because I called out to you. I need to know what you meant by that."
Blade propped himself against the railing and folded his arms across his chest. "I had a dream about a woman running through mist and rain. She was being hunted. I knew she was hurt, that she had fallen. She called out to me for help, and for the first time I had a clue I could use. One of the images that flashed into my mind was the Gamezone sign. I looked it up in the telephone book and came searching until I found you."
His gaze narrowed on her face. Her features were so calm and still, she could have been moulded from porcelain. "I've thought this through, and the only answer has to be that you have some kind of psychic talent that somehow relates to a mental link with me. It's my guess that you broadcast and I pick it up. However it works, I've been having visions, sharing in your dreams, since I was about sixteen. The first bad one was when you were just a kid and were swept away in a river, on the point of drowning. I've had several like that. A burning house, a fall down a cliff. You were hit by a car once." He paused. "There was another accident with a car, but I don't know what happened – the images stopped."
His head came up sharply. "The car going over the cliff. The accident that was supposed to have killed you."
Anna rubbed her hands up her arms, as if the memory chilled her. "Henry came back later and finished the job by pushing the car over the cliff and saying I must have been in it."
"That would explain why I didn't dream any more. The danger was over. You stopped broadcasting."
She stared at him steadily. "I didn't know I could do any of that. When I thought of you, called out to you or dreamed of you, I didn't know anything was happening! I thought you were just a fantasy inside my head. There have been people in my family with psychic talent, but I didn't think I'd inherited anything much."
"What else can you do?" It came out sharply, but Blade was too edgy to soften the demand. When it came down to it, he was a plain old-fashioned kind of guy; he liked logic and clean explanations. If there was anything weird happening, his first instinct was to strip it down to its essential components – like a car engine – and examine how it worked. But he couldn't do that here, because he didn't know the first thing about any of this.
"I'm not a trick dog," she snapped. "I … feel things."
He waited, every muscle in his body tensed.
Her expression closed up again, her eyes going blank so he couldn't read what she was thinking. It perversely irritated him, even though he knew he was the cause of it.
"Don't worry," she said, as cool as ice. "I won't grow another head."
Suddenly Blade could hear in her voice the expensive finishing school she must have attended, see the haughty disdain in the tilt of her chin. He felt briefly knocked off balance. He didn't know how he could ever have missed what she was: a lady – from the top of her silky head to the tips of her dainty toes.
"I can pick up on moods sometimes," she said abruptly, staring somewhere just left of his shoulder, "but usually only if the emotion is strong, and directed at me. I never thought of it as anything too unusual, an amplification of what everyone picks up from body language and speech, but I guess it is strange. I knew Henry hated me when I was quite small." Her eyes challenged him. "He hated that I knew what he was feeling, that he couldn't hide it from me."
"I don't like it, either," Blade admitted. "Can you control it?"
Her eyes narrowed on him, steel grey, not a sign of mist to be seen. "I don't know," she said flatly.
Even though she had braced herself for it, his rejection of how different she was still hurt. He wanted her, even needed her to some extent, but he had yet to accept – and maybe would never fully accept – what she was. She was still reeling from discovering the dreams had been real, and she had been brought up in a family that expected psychic talents.
"It doesn't matter." His hands closed on her shoulders. "We'll work it out."
His touch burst through her on an aching rush of sweet warmth. It was all she could do not to throw herself into his arms and say, "Yes, we can work it out. I know I'm weird, but, hey, I can change just for you." The reality was that she couldn't change; she couldn't turn off what happened in her head. "I'm used to taking care of myself."
"You're used to running. There's a difference."
She stiffened. "Says who?"
"How many times have you almost died?"
"I try not to keep count. It could get depressing."
His teeth came together with an audible snap. "I've been counting. Lady, there is no way I'm letting you out of my sight."
"If I'd known what I was doing to you," Anna said deliberately, "I would have stopped."
Her words dropped into thick silence.
"The hell you would."
Anna closed her eyes briefly, and tried one more time. "I pulled you into this mess, but I didn't mean to. Blade, you don't have to—"
"Forget it. I don't want out."
Her eyes flung wide. "What?"
His words were flat with conviction. It seemed he was prepared to ignore the danger, ignore her psychic talent, but Anna couldn't let go of her wariness yet. "De Rocheford doesn't know you're involved. You could help me and still keep your distance from all of this."
"Seber may have ID'ed me. He saw the Jeep."
"In the dark. Briefly."
"The man's a professional."
Anna backed up a step, needing to be free of his touch, needing to think clearly. Blade wanted her now, maybe for longer, but that was no guarantee they would stay together. She'd had many bonds broken in her life. When her father had died, she had felt it, as if s
omething had broken inside her. When her mother had died she hadn't felt that same immediacy, they had drifted too far apart, but she had known. She feared the breaking of this bond most of all. "I don't want you to become a target because of me."
"You want me to crawl under the bed and hide while de Rocheford does his best to kill you?"
His tone was incredulous, and she could see his thwarted male impatience, feel his need to assert dominance over her.
Abruptly, he turned, bracing his hands on the railing, looking into the rising sun as if he could pull answers from the burning spread of light. His back was broad and strong, deeply grooved, inflexible. The breeze disturbed his hair so that it drifted around his broad shoulders. He looked wild and grim, and she wondered that she had any control over him at all.
He would do what he wanted, regardless of her wishes. He would expose himself to danger to protect her. She felt both helpless and enraged, as protective as a tigress with a cub. For the first time in years she had someone to love, someone other than herself to protect, but trying to protect Blade was just another definition for impossible.
He turned, pinning her with his dark gaze. "I told you I just recently left the military," he said flatly. "I was in the Special Air Service for a number of years. It's not a generally known fact, because I went to a lot of trouble to keep it quiet. I've done stints with the British, Australian and New Zealand forces. In the past twelve years, I've seen a lot of bad situations, dealt with a lot of bad people. The reason I'm telling you this is that you have to trust me to take care of de Rocheford, because he's not just your problem, he's mine, too. I'm damn tired of watching you get hurt and not being able to do a thing to help."
His expression was set, his manner calm, as if all the decisions had been made. "It's taken me a long time to find you, and I was almost too late, but I've learned my lesson. Until this situation is resolved, you will stay in this suite and rest, because I need to know exactly where you are every second of the day. You will eat nice food, sleep as much as you want, order any damn thing you want from room service or the boutiques downstairs. When you need to go out, I'll be with you. I'm going to take care of de Rocheford and Seber. They are history. Believe it."