around, except for a gang of youths who were loitering at the other end of the alleyway. From the sound of their raucous voices Mina guessed they had been drinking. She thought about turning back and going the long route to the station, but she was tired and, having grown up in central London, she considered herself fairly streetwise. Keeping her head down, she continued walking, but as she drew nearer to the gang she noticed they were passing something between them and guessed it was a joint.
Her warning instincts flared. Something about the youths’ body language told her that they were waiting for her to walk to the far end of the alley. She stopped abruptly and turned round, but as she hurriedly retraced her steps the gang followed her.
‘Hey, pretty woman, why don’t you want to walk this way?’ one of them called out.
Another youth laughed. ‘There’s a film called Pretty Woman, about a slag who makes a living on the streets.’ The owner of the voice, a skinhead with a tattoo on his neck, caught up with Mina and stood in front of her so that she was forced to stop walking. ‘Is that what you do—sell your body? How much do you charge?’ As the gang crowded around Mina the skinhead laughed. ‘Do you do a discount for group sex?’
Mina swallowed, trying not to show that she was scared. ‘Look, I don’t want any trouble.’ She took a step forwards and froze when the skinhead gripped her arm. ‘Let go of me,’ she demanded, sounding more confident than she felt.
‘What if I don’t want to let go of you?’ the skinhead taunted. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ He slid his hand inside Mina’s jacket and she felt a surge of fear and revulsion when he tugged her shirt buttons open. The situation was rapidly spiralling out of control. The youths were drunk, or high—probably both—and on a cold autumn night it was unlikely that anyone was around to help her.
‘You’d better let me go. I’m meeting someone, and if I don’t show up they’ll start looking for me,’ she improvised, thinking as she spoke that her friends at the pub would assume she had gone home.
The skinhead must have sensed that she was bluffing. ‘So, where’s your friend?’
‘Here,’ said a soft, menacing voice.
Mina’s gaze shot to the end of the alleyway that she had entered a few minutes earlier and her heart did a somersault in her chest. The light from the street lamp behind him made his blond hair look like a halo. Surely no angel could be so devastatingly sexy, but to Mina, scared out of her wits, he was her guardian angel, her saviour.
The skinhead, surprised by the interruption, had loosed his grip on her arm, and Mina wrenched herself free.
‘Aksel,’ she said on a half-sob, and ran towards him.
‘IT’S ALL RIGHT, Mina, you’re safe,’ Aksel murmured. He felt the tremors that shook her slender frame. When she had raced down the alleyway he had instinctively opened his arms and she had flown into them. He stroked her auburn hair, one part of his brain marvelling at how silky it felt. At the same time he eyed the gang of youths and felt a cold knot of rage in the pit of his stomach when the skinhead who had been terrorising Mina stepped forwards.
‘Can’t you count, mate? There’s six of us and only one of you,’ the gang leader said with a show of bravado.
‘True, but I am worth more than the six of you combined,’ Aksel drawled in an icy tone that cut through the air like tempered steel. He never lost his temper. A lifetime of controlling his emotions had taught him that anger was far more effective served ice-cold and deadly. ‘I’m willing to take you all on.’ He flicked his gaze over the gang members. ‘But one at a time is fair, man to man—if you’ve got the guts of real men.’
He gently put Mina to one side and gave her a reassuring smile when her eyes widened in fear as she realised what he intended to do.
‘Aksel...you can’t fight them all,’ she whispered.
He ignored her and strolled towards the skinhead youth. ‘If you’re the leader of this pack of sewer rats I guess you’ll want to go first.’
The skinhead had to tilt his head to look Aksel in the face, and doubt flickered in his eyes when he realised that his adversary was not only tall but powerfully built. Realising that he was in serious danger of losing face, he spat out a string of crude profanities as he backed up the alleyway. The other youths followed him and Aksel watched them until they reached the far end of the alley and disappeared.
‘You have got to be nuts!’ Mina sagged against the wall. Reaction to the knowledge that Aksel had saved her from being mugged or worse was setting in and her legs felt wobbly. ‘They could have been carrying a weapon. You could have been hurt.’
She stared at him and felt weak for another reason as she studied his chiselled features and dark blond hair that had fallen forwards onto his brow. He raked it back with his hand and gave her a disarming smile that stole her breath.
‘I could have handled them.’ He frowned as Mina moved and the edges of her jacket parted to reveal her partially open shirt. ‘That punk had no right to lay a finger on you. Did he hurt you?’ Aksel felt a resurgence of the scalding anger that had gripped him when he had seen the skinhead gang leader seize hold of Mina. A lifetime of practice had made him adept at controlling his emotions, but when he had seen her scared face as the gang of youths crowded round her he had been filled with a murderous rage.
‘No, I’m fine. Oh...’ Mina coloured hotly as she glanced down and saw that her shirt was half open, exposing her lacy bra and the upper slopes of her breasts. She fumbled to refasten the buttons with trembling fingers. Nausea swept over her as her vivid imagination pictured what the gang of youths might have done to her if Aksel had not shown up.
‘Thank you for coming to my rescue—again,’ she said shakily, remembering how he had helped her order drinks at the bar earlier. The memory of how she had thrown herself into his arms when he had appeared in the alley brought another stain of colour to her cheeks. ‘By the way, I’m sorry I behaved like an idiot and hugged you.’
His lips twitched. ‘No problem. Feel free to hug me any time you like.’
‘Oh,’ Mina said again on a whispery breath that did not sound like her normal voice. But nothing about this evening was normal, and it was not surprising she felt breathless when Aksel was looking at her in a way that made her think he was remembering those few moments when he had caught her in his arms and held her so close to him that her breasts had been squashed against his chest.
Keen to move on from that embarrassing moment, she quickly changed the subject. ‘What are you doing here?’
Aksel had been asking himself the same question since he had left the Globe Theatre after the performance. His car had been waiting for him, but as his chauffeur had opened the door he’d felt a surge of rebellion against the constrictions of his life. He knew that back at his hotel his council members who had accompanied him from Storvhal would be waiting to discuss the new trade deal. But Aksel’s mind had been full of the Shakespearean tragedy that had stirred his soul, and the prospect of spending the rest of the evening discussing politics had seemed unendurable.
No doubt Harald Petersen, his elderly chief advisor and close friend of his grandmother, would be critical of the fact that he had dismissed his driver and bodyguard.
‘I am sure I don’t need to remind you that Storvhal’s wealth and political importance in the world are growing, and there is an increased risk to your personal safety, sir,’ Harald had said when Aksel had argued against the necessity of being accompanied by a bodyguard while he was in London.
‘I think it’s unlikely that I’d be recognised anywhere other than in my own country,’ Aksel had pointed out. ‘I’ve always kept a low media profile at home and abroad.’ Unlike his father, whose dubious business dealings and playboy lifestyle had often made headlines around the world.
After