Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [24]
She darted into the alley, away from the muted streetlights, and she could hear her pursuers following her. She was screwed, she thought desperately, taking time to glance behind and see the three white-robed men with shaved heads moving into the shadows after her. There wasn’t going to be anything she could do about it.
Summer slammed into him hard, too busy looking behind her to notice his sudden appearance in front of her. He caught her arms and shoved her out of the way, behind him, and she fell, momentarily dazed. She didn’t need to look through the shadowed alleyway to know who had turned up at the last minute to save her. Summer scrambled back against the brick wall, watching through the pouring rain with frozen fear as the three burly men converged on slender, elegant Takashi O’Brien.
And then she closed her eyes, horrified. Violence was one thing on television and in the movies—it had nothing to do with real life. In person, the slow motion, macabre dance of it made her feel dizzy, and she couldn’t, wouldn’t watch. The sounds were bad enough.
If she had any sense, she would get up and run—there were three against one, and she only trusted the one slightly more than the very dangerous three. They would make short work of him, and she needed to use this chance to get away.
And then the noises stopped, leaving just the sounds of the heavy rain and traffic in the street beyond. She opened her eyes, to see Takashi O’Brien standing over her, and she glanced past him to discover two white-clad bodies lying in mud and rain and blood, and no sign of the third.
He held out his hand and she took it, letting him pull her to her feet. His cool, beautiful face was expressionless—no hint of censure or emotion at all. “Don’t run away again,” he said. “Or next time I’ll let them have you.”
And she didn’t doubt him for a minute.
6
If there was any chance the Shirosama’s goons would have simply killed her, then Takashi O’Brien would have let her go and good riddance. He was pissed. As far as she knew he’d nobly saved her life, twice, and she’d thanked him by taking off when his back was turned.
In fact it was himself he was mad at. Normally he wouldn’t have made the mistake of leaving her long enough to switch cars. Normally he wouldn’t have had to factor her in at all—she wouldn’t be alive.
He couldn’t afford to make mistakes, not if he wanted to live. And he did—he’d fought hard when that madman had finished with him, survived when other men wouldn’t.
The icy Madame Lambert was probably wondering what the hell was going on. During the night Taka had come up with a simple enough plan—switch to a less conspicuous car, find out where Summer had stashed the real Hayashi Urn and retrieve that, and see if he could figure out exactly what else she knew.
That had been his original mission. Keep the urn out of the brethrens’ hands, find the missing piece of the puzzle and then wipe out any trace of his presence. But Summer Hawthorne didn’t appear to be any more forgetful than she was compliant, and she wasn’t about to ignore the events of the last twenty-four hours. He had his orders about her, whether he liked them or not. He couldn’t waste any more time trying to circumvent them—the Shirosama and his followers were upping the ante, the lunar year was approaching and a mistake could be disastrous.
He stared at her, not bothering to hide his annoyance. She looked like a drowned rat again, but he was getting used to it. He actually preferred her that way; he had an annoying weakness for blond hair, and when she was drenched her hair looked brown as it snaked over her shoulders in sopping tendrils, not its usual sunlit gold. Hair color aside, he’d never once been interested in a woman with freckles.
She wouldn’t look at the men in the alleyway, which was probably just as well. One was already dead—from a broken neck when he’d thrown him against a wall, and the other would soon be gone, too, hemorrhaging from the knife