Cold as Ice (12 page)

"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 her 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.

How many people got to look into the face of death? She had, twice. The first time she'd survived, just barely, and come through it a stronger person.

The odds weren't so good this time. She wasn't dealing with blind, bullying rage. This time, the danger was cold, calculating and fully as smart as she was. If she looked at the situation calmly, her chances weren't good.

That didn't mean she was going to give up. She'd be a fool not to believe Peter Jensen wouldn't do exactly as he said he would, and she'd never been a fool. Just because he had the face of an angel didn't mean his soul wasn't empty.

He'd been a gray ghost before, now he was a fallen angel. The man was a chameleon, capable of turning into anything he wanted, and he assured her those persona were lethal. And she believed him.

She pushed away from the chair, reaching out for the sliding door, then pulling her hand back at the last minute. The only safe doors were the ones leading out to the pool, he'd said.

He could have lied to her, to try to scare her. But she didn't think so. All she knew was if she stayed in his air-conditioned prison a moment longer she'd scream.

She wasn't naive enough to believe he was attracted to her. There'd been a reason behind his kisses, cool and calculating, trying to incapacitate her, disarm her, overwhelm her. He'd succeeded the first time because she'd never seen it coming. She was marginally better prepared today, but only marginally. He was an expert at weapons, he'd said, and sex was one of them. It was no wonder that last kiss had left her shaken and confused, just the way he wanted her. Trapped and seemingly helpless.

Which reminded her of Harry. Where were they keeping him? There was no way she could take off and leave him to his fate, even if it looked as if she might have a chance to escape. But he was a big man, and if he was comatose she had no idea how she'd manage to move him.

Or where they could go. They were on a private island, and while she had her doubts about the place being surrounded by trained sharks, she wasn't sure she was ready to disprove it. She'd seen Jaws as well when she was younger and she'd prefer a bullet through the head, thank you very much.

But it wasn't going to come to that. She was going to get out of there. They both were. And if she had to feed Peter Jensen to the sharks, then so be it.

She found the most enveloping bathing suit, one that was unfortunately strapless, and headed for the pool, letting the cool, clear water wash the last of the drugs out of her system, along with the slowly building panic. She could do this. She could fight back—she'd learned not to be a victim.

She swam to the shallow end of the pool and stood up, yanking the shrinking top of the bathing suit up to a more demure level.

"That's a shame," Peter Jensen's cool voice emerged from the shadows. "I was hoping gravity would win."

He was lying on the chaise, off to one side, beneath a leafy canopy that kept him out of the glare of the sun.

She stopped tugging at the bathing suit. "How long have you been there?" She didn't bother to keep the accusatory note out of her voice. "You said you were going to take a nap."

"And so I did, until you started all that thrashing about. I hadn't realized quite how energetic you could be."

She could feel his eyes on her. They were hidden by sunglasses, and there was no way she could even begin to guess what he was looking at, what he was thinking. She just had the sudden wish that she was covered from head to toe.

But she wasn't about to let him intimidate her. She met his mirrored gaze evenly. "I needed to clear my head," she said.

"Should I be worried?"

If there was one thing she wanted to do it was wipe the amusement from his voice. "Yes," she said flatly. "You should."

He didn't make the mistake of laughing at her this time, but she knew he wanted to. Score one for the good guys, she thought. Perhaps she was beginning to get a glimmer of how his mind worked behind his cool, impassive gaze. This mind-reading thing wasn't quite as one-sided as it had been.

He expected her to run away like a scared rabbit, covering up her exposed body. But in fact, there was nothing wrong with her body—she was just curvier than she wished. Those extra fifteen pounds went straight to her hips, and the wretched truth was that clothes hung better on narrow hips and flat chests. But then she wasn't wearing clothes at the moment, just a too-small bathing suit, and even if she felt a little exposed she wasn't about to run away. It gave him an unfair advantage.

So she sat across from him, crossing her bare legs, and pushed her long wet hair behind her shoulders. "So how long do I have to live?"

She didn't take him off guard, of course. She doubted anything could. "Feeling feisty, are we?"

"Just not particularly passive. What's your plan? I'd like some kind of timetable."

"Why? Do you need to make peace with your conscience?"

"I'd think that would be more your problem than mine," she said. "My conscience is clear. I've lived a relatively blameless life."

"I'm sorry to hear that. People tend to regret the things they don't do, rather than the things they do, and I hate to see you regretful."

"Kind of you to care," she said. "But the only thing I regret is coming to the Cayman Islands in the first place."

He looked at her for a long, thoughtful moment. "I expect that's my main regret as well," he said finally. "Harry will be dead, either way, and you could be happily stomping around the rain forest right now instead of having a conversation with a cold-blooded killer."

"And are you? A cold-blooded killer?"

"Veins like ice, Ms. Spenser."

She didn't doubt him. "Maybe it was supposed to happen this way. Maybe I'm supposed to stop you and save Harry."

He leaned back on the chaise, and she knew that even behind the mirrored sunglasses his eyes were closed with weary exasperation. "Believe what you want."

"So how much time do I have? Or are you afraid to tell me?"

His mouth curved in a slight smile, and she was sorry she'd noticed. He really did have a devastating mouth.

"I'm not afraid of anything," he said in the most gentle voice. "It would be better if I were."

"How much time?"

He sighed. "The job will be finished by tomorrow night. Does it make you feel better to learn that? Most people are better off not knowing when they're going to die."

"Then you shouldn't have told me you were going to kill me."

"I don't believe I said so in so many words."

"Your meaning was clear. Unless you've changed your mind."

"I'm afraid I don't have that luxury."

"So what are you waiting for? Why not get it over with?" That was just stupid on her part, she thought belatedly. The more time she had, the more likely she'd be able to figure out a way to escape. Though in fact, it wasn't looking likely at all.