Cold as Ice

by Anne Stuart

  But she had no sense. She was bone weary, in the best possible way, she was starving, she was on the run for her life. But she was safe with Peter—he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her—and she was in love with him. Just for now, she promised herself. Just for a few, short, indulgent days, she’d accept it and even enjoy it. Enjoy the heady rush of feelings, the way her body tightened when she thought of him. She was much too smart to let it last, but for the time being she’d enjoy the illusion, just because she wanted to.

  She was alone in the bed, and there was no sign of Peter anywhere, but this time she wasn’t worried. He was coming back. He was going to take care of her. He’d gotten her away from Harry Van Dorn, charming, monstrous, good ol’ Harry, and there was no way he’d let her be in harm’s way again.

  She didn’t even want to consider his feelings for her. He’d told her he had no emotions, and she had no reason to doubt him. He’d come halfway across the world for her, and he still hadn’t told her why, but she could guess. He was a man who didn’t like to accept failure. If he’d completed his assignment she never would have ended up locked in Harry’s oceanside fortress.

  Then again, if he’d followed orders she’d be dead. He must have some kind of logical reason for coming to get her. But if she couldn’t even figure out her own feelings, she could hardly get a handle on his. She’d simply have to accept things as they were and go from there.

  Normally that would have been anathema to her. She protected herself with the world of ideas and thoughts and arguments. Not with raw emotion and simple trust.

  But the bottom line was, she trusted him. Completely. And maybe that was even more powerful than thinking she was in love with him.

  There was no clock in the room, the television didn’t work, but she guessed it was sometime in the early afternoon. She’d fallen into a deep, heavy sleep in his arms, and she realized with shock that she still wanted him. Again. And again. And he’d gone somewhere and left her alone, and the more she remembered about last night the hotter, the needier she grew. She was going to take a shower, and the moment he walked through the door she was going to jump him.

  No, cancel that. He’d probably slam her down on the floor again, and while she appreciated his tensile strength, she didn’t like it being used against her. She’d wait for him to come to her. Which he would. Because he wanted her as much as she wanted him. It made no sense, but she knew it to be true, and she sang as she used up the last of the little sliver of soap.

  She considered wearing nothing but the sheet, but then she’d really enjoyed the way he’d taken off her clothes, and she was perfectly willing to experience that again. She pulled her damp hair back and looked at her reflection in the mirror, and laughed. Last night she’d looked like a pale, drowned rat. Today she looked vibrant, alive. And happy.

  How could a man like Peter Madsen make her happy? It made no sense. But it was true.

  She strolled out of the steamy bathroom and stopped short. Peter had returned—there were two cardboard mugs of coffee on top of the television. Starbucks. She knew she loved that man.

  Except that she didn’t know what to say. He didn’t even glance at her—he was busy with something that looked like a space age BlackBerry, and she knew his gorgeous body well enough to see the tension radiating through him. Wasn’t she the one who was supposed to have postcoital regrets?

  “Which of these is mine?” she asked when he still didn’t lift his head.

  “The one on the left. It has soy milk instead of cream in it,” he said, staring down at the machine.

  “Soy milk?”

  He looked up at that. “You’re lactose intolerant,” he said. “I figured you couldn’t handle real milk but you needed some extra sustenance.”

  How could he have remembered such a tiny detail? “Thank you,” she said, reaching for the cup. In fact, she hated soy milk—she preferred her coffee black if she couldn’t find lactose-free milk—but she drank it anyway, testing the taste against her tongue. There were all sorts of new things she was getting used to, she thought.

  She wanted to sit down on the bed next to him. Hell, she wanted to take the BlackBerry out of his hand, fling it across the room and push him down on the bed. She’d been thinking about that ever since she got in the shower. It no longer seemed like such a good idea.

  She sat down on her own rumpled bed, trying to shove the images out of her mind of the two of them, moving, entwined, breathing, kissing…

  “So when do we leave for Canada?” she asked brightly.

  He didn’t answer for a moment. Then he closed the machine and turned to look at her, his ice-blue eyes hooded and unreadable. “There’s been a change in plans.”

  “What do you mean?” Genevieve said. She’d finished the coffee, choking on the soy milk, and it was hitting her stomach like a bomb. “We aren’t going to Canada?”

  He rose. “Harry knows you’re alive.”

  She’d already thrown up in front of him once, she wasn’t about to do it again. Besides, except for a few crackers there wasn’t anything in her stomach to throw up. By the time she made it home those fifteen pounds would be well and truly gone. If she made it home.

  And then the ramifications hit. “What about Takashi?”

  She’d managed to surprise him by her question, enough so that he looked at her. The mask was in place, last night might never have happened. She let go of it, because she had no other choice.

  “We assume he’s dead. No one’s found a body yet, but Harry’s good at covering his tracks.” His voice was totally without expression.

  Another man dead, this time one of the good guys. All for her sake. “Are you sure?” Her voice was rough with grief and guilt.

  “We’re not sure of anything. Except that Harry has got us over a barrel. He wants something bad enough and he knows how to put the screws to us. Problem is, the Committee doesn’t negotiate.”

  “And?”

  “We’ll give him what he wants, but there’ll be backup. He won’t get away with it.”

  She knew what was coming. The ice-cold veil settled down around her, freezing the blood in her veins, freezing her heart and soul. Ice everywhere.

  But she had to hear the words. “What are you going to give him?”

  She thought he wouldn’t meet her gaze, that he’d be too ashamed. But his cold blue eyes met hers, totally devoid of any feeling at all.

  “You,” he said.

  21

  He expected her to fight back. To tell him to go fuck himself, that she wasn’t walking back into Harry’s sick world no matter what the cost—they could find some other way to get him. Wasn’t that what their job was? Saving the good guys, killing the bad?

  But she didn’t. “And what did you tell them?” she asked, her voice deathly calm.

  “I told them you’d do it. We’ll have a sniper there, and the moment he gets a shot he’ll take it. All you have to do is stay calm.”

  “I’m very calm,” she said. “Just answer one question. Why were you so sure I’d do it? Because I’m in love with you?”

  He flinched, the first real blow she’d ever managed to inflict on him, and she told herself at least she had that much.

  “You aren’t in love with me,” he said flatly. “You’re much too smart for that. You know the difference between great sex and true love. Though maybe I’m wrong—you didn’t even know where your clitoris was.”

  He was fighting back, but he couldn’t embarrass her. She was beyond that point. “Then why did you think I’d do it?”

  “Because you’re a foolish, sentimental woman who thinks she can make a difference in the world. In fact, it’s for the same reason you made the mistake of thinking you might be in love with me—because you’re emotional and romantic and you think you need to be in love to have great sex.”

  “At least we’ve graduated from ‘nothing special,’” she said coolly.

  He ignored the comment. “You’ll do the right thing. Whether it
kills you or not. That’s why you didn’t take the out I gave you back on the island and make for the bunker, but went back to try to save Harry Van Dorn’s sorry hide. And look at what it got you. The man wants to kill you, to get back his lost pride because we scuttled every plan he had.”

  “And you’re going to let him.” It was a statement not a question.

  It wasn’t enough to get a rise out of him. “No. There’ll be people all around you, even though you won’t see them. Someone will take Harry out before he gets within ten feet of you, and then you can live happily ever after in your fancy New York apartment.”

  “Don’t you think Harry will have thought of that? Won’t he have snipers as well?”

  He didn’t deny it. “We’re professionals. We do this for a living and we know what we’re up against. If I didn’t think we had a very good chance of getting you out alive I wouldn’t have told them you’d do it.”

  “‘A very good chance?’” she echoed. “How touching. And when is this all going to happen?”

  He shrugged. She was taking this about as well as he’d expected—maybe even better. She wasn’t crying, she wasn’t begging. She was accepting the inevitable. With the bonus that she now hated him for betraying her. “Tomorrow sometime. He’s made the initial contact, set the terms. He’ll let us know when and where it’ll go down.”

  She looked smaller, sitting on the rumpled bed in the plain clothes he’d bought her. Smaller, more vulnerable, and he wanted to shout at her, tell her to say no. They couldn’t make her do it, they couldn’t make her do anything. It didn’t matter what he told them, in the end it was up to her and she knew it. All she had to do was say no.

  “All right,” she said. “On one condition.”

  “There are no conditions. Either you do it or you refuse.”

  She went on, undeterred. “You said there’ll be backup?”

  “A whole team of operatives focused on keeping you alive.”

  “Lovely,” she said. “Just so long as you aren’t one of them.”

  He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. “Why?”

  “Because I want you to walk out of this room and I never want to see you again.” Her voice was steel, hard and unbendable, a voice he’d never heard before.

  “I’d be happy to but I can’t. Not until backup arrives. Harry won’t have stopped looking for you, even though he’s hatched this plan, and I’m not leaving you alone until someone comes.”

  “You can sit outside the door and keep watch. Or you can get back in the car and watch from there. I don’t care what you do,” she said in a cool, impersonal voice. “I just don’t want to have to see you.”

  “I can do that,” he said. “If you keep the door locked.”

  She nodded, as if she didn’t trust her voice. He picked up his cold coffee and headed for the door, but her voice stopped him as he opened it.

  “Just one question,” she said. “Did you know about this last night? Did you decide to fuck me into compliance so I’ll do what you want?”

  He could see her beginning to unravel, and he couldn’t have that. They couldn’t. She had to be strong, and angry, or she’d never survive. She needed rage, not pain. So he did the best thing he could for her. He lied.

  “Yes,” he said.

  She nodded, and he closed the door behind him, waiting long enough to hear her lock and latch it. He couldn’t sit outside the door—it would be too obvious, but he had a perfect vantage point from the car. No one could even approach that room without risking death.

  He needed to toss the cold cup of coffee. He looked down, and the damn thing was shaking in his hand.He stilled it instantly, letting the icy wall form again. And he headed down the stairs to the car.

  The television was unplugged, and someone had yanked the cable wire out of the back. Genevieve plugged it back in anyway, and was rewarded with one very grainy channel with nothing but infomercials. She lay on her stomach on the bed, his bed. Because he’d claimed hers, taken her on hers, and she wasn’t going near it. She lay on the rumpled sheets and watched people tell her how to make a fortune in real estate, how to whiten her teeth, how to use kitchen appliances that were strange and incomprehensible. She could clear her nonexistent acne, take ten years off her face, learn to apply makeup, cut her own hair, remove unwanted hair and make scrapbooks.

  They just didn’t tell her how to go on when she was twisted and broken inside.

  If she got out of this alive she’d make her own infomercial, something along the lines of Fifty Ways to Kill Your Lover. She started coming up with some, but with violence looming over her head the exercise lacked a certain pleasure. Pushing him in front of a train, feeding him to the sharks were both nice ideas, but once it came to guns and explosions she shied away. She’d be facing that soon enough.

  She slept off and on, not because she was tired but because she didn’t want to be awake. Maybe she was depressed, she thought wryly. Didn’t people sleep too much when they were depressed? And she sure as hell had a good reason. The man she loved was sending her to her death.

  At least she’d learned that much. He was wrong about her being too smart to fall in love with him. She was dumb as a brick, because even after his betrayal she still loved him. She wanted to kill him, but she didn’t want him dead. She wanted him out of there, safe, and that had been half the reason she’d sent him away.

  The other half was that as long as he was around she ran the risk of bursting into tears and begging him. And she had much too much dignity for that.

  Harry Van Dorn was resplendent in crisp white slacks, a navy blazer and blue oxford shirt made of the finest Egyptian cotton, which he ordered by the dozen from Paris. He always liked to look his best when he was being filmed. His tousled blond hair fell in perfect waves—he had gone through half a dozen stylists before someone got it right, and his warm, lazy grin flashed whitely in his tanned face. He shoved his feet into soft leather loafers—no socks, of course— checked his reflection one more time and walked out into the huge hallway.

  The lights and camera were all set up, and the children had already arrived. They were a patheticlooking bunch, but then, he’d chosen this group for their abject misery. They were the useless and unwanted of this world—sick and dying, and a large amount of his donated money was spent on prolonging their wretched little lives. They were ugly, all of them, and he didn’t like ugliness. They were a variety of colors—every dark race in this convoluted country. There was one pale-skinned blonde, but she had the thin, hollow-eyed look of an AIDS victim, and he wouldn’t touch her, or any of them, with a ten-foot pole.

  But he would kill them. If he didn’t get what he wanted.

  “This is so very kind of you, Mr. Van Dorn,” the woman who’d accompanied them gushed. She was in her twenties, a little plump, and she had a crush on him. She was always fluttering around him when he made his mandatory visits to bestow gifts and smiles on the revolting little patients to further ensure the world knew Harry Van Dorn was a kindhearted philanthropist. She even had the temerity to suggest he might like to have a cup of coffee with her, to discuss the patients, of course. She was some kind of social worker, he remembered, though her name escaped him.

  She was still nattering on. “These children get so few treats—I know they’ll love a visit to your estate at Lake Arrowhead for the carnival you’ve arranged. They don’t get out of the hospital, much less out of the city, and I know a day in the mountains will be wonderful for them.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Miss…” He deliberately let the sentence hang, just so she’d know how little he’d noticed her. She was expendable goods. But then, in the end, so was everybody.

  Her bright smile faltered a bit. “Miss White. Jennifer White.”

  He didn’t like the name. Jennifer was too much like Genevieve, and it was hard to keep his charming smile in place when he thought about her.

  “I consider it an honor to escort these little tykes around for the day. If things run to
o late I’ll have my staff see that they’re well taken care of and they’ll be back in the morning.”

  Jennifer White’s face creased in sudden worry. “But I thought we were talking about the afternoon only, Mr. Van Dorn?”

  “Hell, it takes an hour to get up into the San Bernardino Mountains from here. You needn’t worry about them, Miss White. I have a fully qualified staff to look after them.”

  “But I’m coming with—” she said.

  “I’m afraid not. You’ve got orders to report back to the hospital—some kind of crisis.” It hadn’t taken much to ensure that. St. Catherine’s Children’s Hospital received a very large sum of money from him, and in the past couple of years they weren’t even forced to turn a blind eye to the damaged children he’d eventually given up to them. His tastes had changed, but one could never tell when he’d want to enjoy a bit of childhood innocence, and he always kept his resources in place.

  “Then perhaps I should take the children back and we could do this another day,” she suggested nervously.

  “Miss White, do you seriously believe these poor little munchkins aren’t completely safe with me and my fully trained staff?” He used his best aw-shucks grin, and she melted, the silly cow.

  “Oh, of course not. I just thought…I mean, it’s too much of an imposition…”

  “Not an imposition at all,” he said grandly. “One of my drivers will get you right back to the hospital so you can take care of things, as I know you’re so capable of doing. In the meantime, these poor kids will have the treat of their life up at my place by the lake.”

  She was still protesting as one of his men hustled her out the door, and he waited until the sound of her voice died away before turning to the children.

  He clicked his fingers to his film crew, and they began rolling. In Los Angeles you could find anything for a price, and the one for having a live-in film crew who could record anything he wanted to preserve and relive, no matter how nasty, was surprisingly cheap. Drugs and whores and elegant surroundings kept them pretty well satisfied, and when that began to pall it was easy enough to dispose of one and replace him. It tended to keep the others more compliant.