by Anne Stuart
Ms. Genevieve Spenser was a different matter. If she knew anything at all she’d break quite easily, and if he were thinking with his usual icy detachment he wouldn’t hesitate.
But he wasn’t going to touch her. He’d kill her if he had to, but he hadn’t given up hoping he’d find a way out, despite the recent orders that had been handed down by Madame Lambert. Easy enough for her to decide, when she wasn’t on the scene, he thought.
His priorities may have gotten a little skewed, but his instincts were still solid, and he knew Genevieve had been nothing more than an innocent courier, someone who happened to get in the way of something a lot bigger and badder than she could even begin to realize.
She was still looking at him hopefully. He considered lying to her, telling her he’d get her out safely. He’d never disobeyed a direct order in all the time he’d been with the Committee, and he wasn’t about to start, but she didn’t need to spend the last two days of her life being terrified.
But he didn’t want to lie to her. “I can’t help you,” he said. “Don’t waste your time on me—it won’t get you anywhere. I’ve been playing this game a lot longer than you have, and I’ve seen every angle. It’s going to be up to you. Just don’t make stupid mistakes.”
If it were up to her she’d die. There was only so much he could teach her, tell her, to give her a fighting chance. In the end it wouldn’t be enough, and he knew it. But he didn’t have to like it.
He would have preferred it if she’d gone looking for another priceless vase to throw. Instead, she stood very still, looking at him out of her warm brown eyes. She could probably see him clearly enough—he’d checked her glasses before he’d tossed them, and her prescription wasn’t that strong. She could see him well enough to know what a worthless piece of shit he actually was, and for the first time he could see defeat in the narrow shoulders beneath his white T-shirt.
But only for a moment. She shrugged, clearly dismissing him. “Where did you say the kitchen was?” she asked in a calm voice.
He wondered whether she was going to try to take some of the kitchen knives. It wouldn’t do her any more good than that tiny pocketknife—she was up against professionals. “Down the hallway to the left.” He had enough sense not to renew his request for lunch. It had been mainly to goad her, keep her off balance. He was hungry; once Harry was subdued Hans hadn’t felt obliged to exercise his culinary talents, and Peter hadn’t eaten much at all. He tended to prefer it that way before a job—it kept him sharp. But it was going to be two more days until the job was finished, and he could hardly fast until then.
Genevieve had disappeared without a word, and he leaned back and closed his eyes. He wondered whether he needed to warn the men to keep away from her. He’d already made that abundantly clear, but he hadn’t worked much with either Renaud or Hans and he wasn’t entirely sure how good they were at following directions. They were only one step up from hired thugs—they weren’t hobbled by any illusions that they were working for the greater good. Even he was beginning to doubt it.
Genevieve wouldn’t be fool enough to try to leave the house and stray into their path. Not yet. She’d build up to it, and in the meantime he’d do everything he could to make sure she’d get through the last two days of her life unmolested.
He heard her coming back a few moments later, but he didn’t bother to open his eyes. He expected her to stalk down the hallway to the room he’d assigned her, but instead he could feel her approaching him, and the trade wind brought the scent of her with it, something soft and flowery and female. He opened his eyes when she drew close, half expecting to see her brandishing a heavy knife. But no, the knife was hidden beneath the loose white T-shirt, and she was carrying a tray with a sandwich and a beer.
She set it down beside him. “You’re kidding,” he said, blinking.
“Any good terrorist needs to keep his strength up,” she said. “Besides, I haven’t given up hope of negotiating Harry’s freedom.”
“And your own besides?”
“Of course. In the meantime you just have to worry about whether I poisoned you.”
And with that she disappeared down the hallway with her long, gorgeous legs and the lethal knife hidden underneath her clothes, and if she were ten years younger he was certain she would have stuck out her tongue at him.
Genevieve did a thorough canvass of the room, ignoring the pale, muted colors, the exquisite Renoir on the wall that might have been real, the bronze figure of a ballet dancer that might have been Degas, the sliding doors with the soft Caribbean breeze blowing through, and concentrated on what was important.
The sliding doors led to a small balcony overlooking a rocky part of the coast; if she managed to make it safely down from the balcony she’d likely break her neck on the rocks. If she survived that, there were sharks, currents and a couple of roving psychopaths. No wonder he hadn’t bothered to lock her in.
She pulled the knife from beneath her shirt and tucked it between the mattress and box spring of the king-size bed that would have dwarfed any normal-size room. In this Texas-scale mansion it fit right in. At least Jensen had no idea she’d taken it—he might think she was harmless with a Swiss Army knife but he’d think twice about a lethal carving knife like this one. It was very sharp—she’d cut her finger on it when she went rummaging through the kitchen. It was as if her blood had chosen that one. She’d tucked it underneath the shirt and then went rummaging through the obscenely wellstocked refrigerator. If she was going to die, at least she was going to die well fed, she thought. And she’d never have to worry about those fifteen extra pounds again.
It was midafternoon—she could tell that much by the position of the sun—and she wondered what in hell she was going to do. The huge sandwich she’d wolfed down in the kitchen wasn’t sitting very well, and in the tropical paradise everything suddenly felt rank and rotting.
She wasn’t going to let her discomfort get to her— she was getting out of here in one piece, and she was taking Harry Van Dorn with her. She hadn’t had much of a chance to do anything worthwhile since she’d abandoned her principles and sold her soul to Roper, Hyde, Camui and Fredericks. Maybe it was time to give something back. Harry Van Dorn wasn’t going to be exterminated like some oversize tropical cockroach, on the say-so of some mysterious vigilante group. He was getting out of this alive. They both were.
She just had to figure out how.
It was getting close to midnight in London, but Isobel Lambert’s day was far from over. She stared at the transmission in disbelief. Peter Jensen, the perfect operative, the Iceman in so many ways, was balking at an order. Questioning a decree from London. It was unheard of. Unimaginable.
It was healthy.
She’d been worried about him. He’d been instrumental in Bastien’s desertion of their ranks, and he had to have wondered whether that was the answer for him. Bastien had been weak enough to fall in love— she sincerely doubted that Peter Jensen was even capable of such a liability.
Which worked in her favor—she couldn’t afford to lose him right now, when so many lives were hanging in the balance.
But even well-oiled machines could break down, and robots could go haywire, and whether Peter wanted to believe it or not, he had a conscience, albeit one buried so deep it would be hard to find.
It seemed to be surfacing at an unfortunate moment, but Madame Lambert held the firm belief that there were no mistakes. If Peter was having doubts about his orders then he was probably right to question them.
And there was nothing she could do from five thousand miles away but trust him.
8
To her amazement Genevieve had fallen asleep. When she woke, the sun was lower on the horizon and she couldn’t remember where she was.
Until she heard that infuriating voice from the doorway. “I thought you’d be busy planning your escape, not taking a nap.”
She’d locked her door. She should have known it would be a futile gesture—she could barely summon
up a trace of outrage. She’d fallen asleep in one of the chairs, and now she kept her gaze trained on the shimmering blue waters ahead of her, refusing to give him any attention. The house had been built on a knoll, and the view was gorgeous. Including the tactfully camouflaged stone wall and the shark-infested waters just beyond.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider knocking,” she said in a deceptively mild voice. “I realize it’s too much to ask you to let me lock the door, but a moment of warning would be considerate.”
He came into the room. He’d showered and changed and she could have kicked herself. For a short period of time he’d been relatively inattentive, and she could have made a run for it. Instead, she’d fallen asleep.
“It’s a good thing you didn’t try,” he said. He’d read her mind again. Was she really that transparent? No, she was a decent enough poker player when called upon. Any lawyer had to be able to bluff.
Peter Jensen was just particularly good at sensing people’s reactions, or he knew her better than she knew herself. She was much happier believing it was an innate talent, and not something personal.
“Why not?” She turned to give him her full attention. “Do you expect me to just roll over and play dead?”
A shame the mind reading didn’t go both ways. His face was completely impassive—the notion of death hung in the air with neither of them wanting to claim it.
“The house has an experimental security system,” he said after a moment. “If you try to open one of the doors or windows you’ll get an electric shock. Quite a severe one, I’m afraid, and I don’t think there’s anyone left on the island trained in CPR.”
“What about you?” Her voice was caustic. “I thought you could do anything.”
“Not my area of expertise,” he said. “I take lives, not save them.”
There was nothing she could say to that flat statement. “So we just sit here and wait for you to demonstrate your area of expertise?” she asked.
“The security system keeps the others out as well. Count your blessings.”
“Oh, I’m absolutely showered with them.”
There was a faint light of amusement in his eyes. “I do like you better when you fight back,” he said.
“My purpose in life is not to make you like me,” she said. “Unless it means you’ll let me leave. And take Harry with me.”
“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that.”
“I don’t believe that. I expect you can do anything you want.”
“I’m charmed by your high opinion of me,” he said. “But the fact remains that I have a job to do and I’m going to see that it’s done. It’s a matter of professional pride.”
“Then why are we talking?” she snapped.
“The house is booby-trapped—you try to leave, and you’ll get one hell of a shock. And I warned you about the waters around here. But the French doors off the living room are safe, and there are two swimming pools within the walls—one freshwater, one saltwater. Exercise might help you relax.”
“I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Harry had a succession of women here over the years. If you look I’m sure you’ll find something that fits. Or do without one entirely.”
“Oh, yes, there’s nothing I’d like better than prancing around naked,” she said, just managing to keep the growl out of her voice.
“Don’t you think you’re safe around me?”
“Oh, of course I do. You were only planning to kill me, not rape me.” She pushed her hair back from her face. She was close enough that she could see his expression without her contact lenses. But as usual he gave nothing away. “Unless, of course, I could seduce you into letting me go.”
For a careful man he could make a dangerous mistake. He laughed at the notion.
“You don’t think I could do it?” she demanded, incensed.
“Seduce me? You could certainly do that…and we have two days to kill, if you’ll pardon the expression. Would it make any difference? No. And the question is, would you really be able to go through with it?”
She let her eyes sweep over him in a leisurely, insulting manner that failed to elicit any sort of reaction. “Why not?” she said. “You know perfectly well that you’re passably good-looking. When you’re not acting like the gray ghost.”
“Passably good-looking?” Now she’d really amused him. “I think you’d hold out for something better than that.”
He was flat-out gorgeous, with his long black hair curling at the back of his neck, his icy blue eyes, his long, lean body. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said blithely.
“Don’t waste your time on me, Ms. Spenser. I’m an expert in all kinds of weapons, including sex. I have no emotions—I can fuck as efficiently as I can kill, and neither mean a thing to me.”
“I’d never thought of sex as a weapon.”
“You’re either lying or you’re hopelessly naive. And you don’t strike me as a hopeless romantic.”
Score one for her, Genevieve thought. He didn’t know her that well at all. In fact, she was desperately, impractically romantic.
She leaned back in her chair, stretching her long bare legs out in front of her. “So let’s sum this up,” she said in her best lawyerly voice. In truth, she’d spent very little time in court, and it had never been up to her to provide the summation, but she could wing it with the best of them. “I can’t leave the house because the doors and windows are electrified, but I can use the pool… What’s to keep me from taking off once I’m outside?”
“The pool area is surrounded by an electrified fence that would kill you.”
She swallowed. “All right. I manage to get past that, and then I have to deal with your sadistic cronies. I get past them and the waters are full of sharks. Which, by the way, I don’t believe.”
“I’d hate to see you end up as fish food,” he said mildly. “My mother took me to see Jaws when I was a kid, and it didn’t look like a pleasant way to die.”
“Are there pleasant ways to die? Don’t answer that—you’d probably know all too well. Anyway, I don’t think you had a mother. You were hatched from an egg like the snake you are.”
“Someone has to lay the eggs, Ms. Spenser,” he said mildly. “But trust me, my mother had a lot in common with a viper.” He turned away, dismissing her.
“That’s it?” she said. “You come in here to tell me all the ways I could die and then you just walk away?”
He paused by the door. “I’m warning you of all the ways you could die prematurely. You may as well fight it for as long as you can.”
“Why? Do you get turned on when your victims struggle?”
She’d gone too far, but then she’d been trying to goad him since he’d walked through her locked door. He moved so fast she had no warning—one moment he was standing by the door, in the next he was leaning over her as she sat, his hands on the arms of the chair, trapping her, his face dangerously close to hers, a blatant invasion as his legs straddled hers.
“You don’t want to know what turns me on, Ms. Spenser.” How could a voice be seductive and deadly at the same time? She looked up into his undeniably beautiful face, trying not to show any reaction at all. Was he even human, or simply a block of ice in the hot tropical sun?
But she’d forgotten his genius for reading her mind. “Or maybe you think you do,” he said in a soft, dangerous voice. And the softness was even more terrifying with everything else about him so hard and cold and merciless.
“No, I…”
He kissed her. Not the seductive caress before he rendered her unconscious, this was strange, different, angry. His mouth covered hers, and it had nothing to do with seduction. His kiss was full of anger and desperation and there was nothing she could do but let him. She clutched the arms of the chair, her fingers digging into the upholstery so that she wouldn’t lift them to touch him, as some crazy part of her so desperately wanted to. She let him kiss her, shocked at the feelings that went swirling through the pit of h
er stomach. She could stop herself from kissing him back, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from closing, and she couldn’t understand the hot sting of tears behind her eyelids. Was she crying for him? For her? What the hell was wrong with her?
And then it was over. He pulled back, and he looked down at her, his eyes flecked with chips of blue ice. He wasn’t even breathing hard.
She, on the other hand, couldn’t catch her breath. Her heart was slamming against her chest, and she blinked, trying to banish the illogical hot tears that had stung her eyes at his cold, empty kiss. “No,” he said softly. “You don’t want to know.” He stepped back, away from her, and it was like some kind of breath-sucking demon had departed.
And then the kiss might never have happened. “I’m going to get a few hours’ sleep,” he said. “You can wander around the place to your heart’s content, plan all the bloody revenges and daring escapes you can think of. Whatever makes you happy.”
She didn’t bother to dignify that with an answer. “Go away,” she said.
“Gone.” And he was.
She stayed sitting in the chair for a long time. It was no longer as comfortable as it had been before—he’d invaded it, as he’d invaded every part of her life. She’d learned to meditate after the attack, as well as defend herself, but recently the pills had been taking care of everything.
The pills were gone, and she had no place to turn for that calm inside her—it had vanished. She tried breathing, she tried conscious relaxation, starting at her toes and moving upward. It didn’t work, so she started with the crown of her head, trying to remember how she used to meditate, what she’d learned about chakras and the like.
She was shit out of luck. She could calm and control her limbs, but the feel of his mouth on hers came back with every deep measured breath. He’d gotten inside her, somehow, and she didn’t know how to exorcise him.
