by Anne Stuart
He looked at her feet as well. The simple black flats seemed to fit well enough, and the shredded cloth of her trousers flapped around her calves. Her hair smell liked burnt wool, and she was bleeding through the long, loose sleeves of his white shirt.
“Merde.” The elevator stopped short of his floor, the doors opening to let someone else on. He moved quickly, backing her into the corner, shielding her with his larger body, tucking her face against his shoulder. She tried to jerk away, but he tightened his hand around her wrist, causing just enough pain to make her behave without crying out. “Pretend we’re lovers,” he whispered in her ear, in German.
As he expected, she understood him perfectly, an anomaly that still needed explaining, but now was not the time. The middle-aged businessman who’d gotten onto the elevator averted his eyes with polite discretion, and Bastien moved closer to Chloe, pressing his hips up against hers like a passionate lover not yet satisfied.
She jerked her eyes upward, looking at him in shock. She must have felt his erection, and known what a sick son of a bitch he was. The thought was mildly amusing.
He was tempted to kiss her, just because she would have been so disgusted, but he was smart enough not to push it. Not when there were witnesses.
The man got off, and even before the doors had closed again she’d pushed him away, shuddering visibly. “Don’t touch me again,” she said in a low voice.
“Don’t be childish,” he replied. “I’m trying to save your life, though I haven’t quite figured out why. Just be quiet, do as I say and follow my lead. If I need to fuck you standing up in the middle of Notre Dame with half of Paris watching you’ll do it without objection. Understand?”
“Over my dead body.”
“Exactly.” They’d reached the top floor, and the hallway was empty. He’d considered cutting the throat of the man who’d seen them, but with any luck he’d be long gone from the hotel by the time his enemies showed up. And disposing of the body would have caused more problems than simply letting him go. Besides, Chloe would have probably started screaming. Very impractical, these Americans.
“We’re down at the end,” he said, waiting for her to precede him out of the elevator. It wasn’t courtesy—if he went first she might refuse to follow, and he didn’t want to get into a tussle with her. She raised her head and looked at him, and in the full light of day he could see her quite clearly. See pain and fear in her rich brown eyes. See hatred aimed straight at him.
Good. It would help to keep her alive. He’d found that hatred was a very useful commodity, and igniting hers would do no harm. He had nothing to fear from her—she couldn’t surprise him, hurt him, run from him. But her anger would keep her going after her body and her heart wanted to give up.
He followed her down the hallway, an anonymous corridor that could have been in a thousand different hotels all over the world. She balked when he unlocked the door, and he gave her a little nudge over the threshold. The look she gave him would have paralyzed a lesser man.
“Go into the bedroom and take off your clothes,” he said.
“Go fuck yourself.”
He laughed. “You’ve got cuts and burns all over your arms and legs, Chloe. You need them tended to, and you need to rest. Trust me, I have no interest in touching you beyond getting you in shape to leave tonight.”
She didn’t look like she believed him. “Leave?”
“I’ll get you on a plane out of Paris, back to the States. Where are you from?”
“North Carolina.”
“Is that anywhere near New York?”
“No.”
“Then you’ll have to figure out the rest of the way home. As long as you’re out of France you’ll be safe enough, but right now there are going to be any number of very talented people out to kill you.”
“I would think they’d want to kill you, not me.”
“Oh, they want to kill me, too. Most everyone who meets me eventually ends up wanting to kill me,” he said.
“I can understand why,” she said in a faint voice.
He didn’t bother arguing. “Are you going to take off those ruined clothes, or would you like my help?”
“I can manage,” she said stiffly. “Where’s the bedroom?”
He pointed to the double doors behind him. “In there. I’ll be in in a minute.”
“I’m not going to sleep with you again,” she said. He could see her vulnerability was lessening as her outrage grew. That would help her to survive as well.
“Again? I wasn’t aware that what we did before had anything to do with sleeping.”
She could blush. He watched with fascination as the color stained her face—he would have thought she’d be well past such an innocent reaction. He took pity on her. “Never mind, Chloe,” he said gently. “I won’t do anything but provide a little first aid. The rest of you can stay inviolate.”
He could tell his frank, matter-of-fact approach was only making it worse, but at that point it was the least of his problems. She needed to be patched up, fed, dressed and sent on her way, and he didn’t have any time to waste. He’d be insanely lucky if they didn’t find him by nightfall—his smartest plan was to keep moving. As soon as he was sure his unexpected companion was able to.
She was sitting on the bed, the sheet wrapped around her like she was at a gynecologist’s office, and she was still wearing her underwear. He sat beside her on the bed, and she tried to move away. “Don’t be childish, Chloe,” he said.
She was looking at the dark brown bottle he held in one hand, the cotton swabs he planned to use. “What is that?” she demanded. “You didn’t get that from any drugstore.”
“A good thing, too. This is very expensive, very high-tech, worth more than its weight in gold. It speeds up healing. In a couple days most of this should disappear. I doubt there will even be much scarring.”
“Where did it come from?”
“Trade secret,” he said, putting a generous amount of the thick, translucent green stuff on a swab. “There’s only one drawback.” He picked up her left arm, the one Hakim had concentrated on.
“What’s that?”
“It hurts like hell.” And he wiped the cream against the first cut.
She jerked, and he half expected her to scream. He’d chosen this hotel for a number of reasons, one of them being its exquisite soundproofing, and he had no fears that anyone would hear her cry out, but apart from a strangled little sound at the back of her throat she said nothing, holding herself rigid to fight the pain.
He knew from experience that this was probably going to hurt worse than Hakim’s ministrations. With Hakim she’d been partially numb from shock and fear, and the full effect of his handiwork wouldn’t take effect until later. If she lived that long.
She was biting her lips to keep from making any sound, and her mouth was bleeding again. He kept going, trying to ignore the vibrations in her body as she fought it.
“There are better ways to deal with pain,” he said calmly as he continued to paint the stripes on her arm. “The more you fight it, the more it fights back. If you let go, relax into it, you’ll find it becomes almost an altered state, as if someone else is hurting. It’s much better that way.”
“You have that much experience with pain?” She barely managed to spit out the words.
“Enough,” he said. “Breathe. You know, like they do in childbirth. Deep, regular breathing, and try to relax.”
“I can’t,” she said in a strangled voice. He could feel her heart racing against the pain.
“I could always distract you.”
That got her attention. “Don’t—”
“I know, don’t touch you.” He put one arm down and picked up the other. “Then talk to me. Tell me what you were doing at Hakim’s.”
“I told you! I was taking my roommate’s place while she went off with her new boyfriend. I had no idea what kind of place it was, or what kind of sick creatures I was working for.”
“And no
w you know. Which is what makes you a liability. How do you happen to understand so many languages? Most American girls can barely manage to speak English.”
She shot him an angry look. She was so predictable, so easy to play. All he had to do was make a sweeping, disparaging remark about American women and she forgot all about her misery. He tended to like sophisticated, unpredictable women. But for some reason he liked her.
For a moment he thought she wouldn’t answer. “I have a natural talent for it,” she said, her voice strained as she tried to deal with the pain. “My parents sent me to a series of expensive private schools, and I started learning French in kindergarten.”
“That explains why your accent is so good. Where did the others come in?”
“School. I majored in modern languages at Mount Holyoke, and my parents traveled a lot. I can even converse in Latin.”
“Not a modern language. Lie back so I can work on your legs.”
She was putting too much energy into dealing with the pain—there was none left over to fight him. She lay back, pulling the sheet up over her. The legs weren’t as bad as the arms—Hakim had been working himself up to a proper climax and he hadn’t gotten there yet.
Bastien had been between her thighs not that long ago. She had long, beautifully shaped legs—he’d been too busy to appreciate them in her suite.
“I told you, I’m good at languages. I like all of them.”
“Then why do you have a shit job at a small-time publisher? Talents like yours could come in useful at any number of organizations.”
“I like my life. I’d rather translate children’s books than covert arms deals.”
He’d finished his ministrations, and he set the bottle and swab down on the floor, then moved onto the bed beside her, crouching over her. “And that’s exactly the thing you’re not supposed to say, my angel. You need to forget everything you saw during the past two days. These are dangerous people we’re dealing with, and you could identify most of them. You’re a smart woman, despite your stupid behavior, and if you set your mind to it you could probably decipher just what we were talking about in the meetings, now that you realize it’s not chickens and grain.”
She didn’t like him so close, leaning over her, she didn’t like looking up at him, even though he wasn’t touching her—he could see it very clearly. He didn’t care. “Forget everything, Chloe,” he said softly. “Or you might not live to regret it.”
11
Chloe stared up at him. She was lying flat on her back on his bed, wearing her underwear and a sheet, and she’d had sex with him less than twenty-four hours before. Hell, maybe less than twelve—she had no idea what time it was right then.
She also couldn’t bring herself to move, to reach up and shove him away. His dark, unreadable eyes were half-closed as he leaned over her, and for an insane moment she thought he was going to kiss her again.
But he didn’t. He levered himself up, away from her, seemingly finished with her. “I’m going to take a shower, then I’ll see what I can do about a passport for you.”
“I don’t need a new passport.”
He shook his head. “If you travel under your own name you’ll never make it home. I know what I’m doing, Chloe. Just do as I say and you might come out of this mess alive.”
She stared at him. “Who the hell are you?” she said. “What the hell are you?”
His faint smile revealed nothing. “I don’t think you need to know. Just try to sleep. You’re going to need your strength to heal properly.”
Doing what he said didn’t exactly appeal to her, but she was too worn out to fight him. The pain had subsided to a dull throb, encompassing every inch of her body, and at that moment sleep sounded much more important than the truth.
“All right,” she said grudgingly.
“What? You’re actually agreeing to something? I don’t believe it.”
“Go to hell,” she said, her voice barely audible.
“That’s more like it,” he murmured. “Try to sleep. You can insult me all over again when you wake up.”
She would have thought sleep would come immediately, but it was frustratingly resistant. It was cloudy outside—if she tried to reconstruct the last few hours she might be able to guess what time it was, but going back in time was the last thing she wanted to do. She didn’t want to think about anything that had happened yesterday, from the moment she’d gotten in the car with him. She didn’t want to remember those rough, powerful moments in her room, she didn’t want to relive the pain and terror and, most of all, she didn’t want to remember Gilles Hakim on top of her, his body a deadweight. Literally.
He’d been hurting her, planning to kill her, and she’d wanted him dead. She’d thought she was a pacifist, willing to die rather than hurt someone else, but when it came to a matter of her own life or death, all her noble sentiments were shot to shit. If she’d had a gun she would have killed Hakim herself, and enjoyed doing it.
Maybe. At this point she didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t. She could hear the sound of the shower running, smell the soap and shaving cream and the faint, teasing scent of the cologne he wore. She hadn’t been able to identify the components—they were subtle, nagging, almost…erotic. She didn’t like men who wore scent.
The shower stopped, and a moment later the door opened. She looked up to see Bastien walk into the room without any clothes, not even a towel wrapped around his waist. She jerked her head to the side, closing her eyes, and heard him laugh.
“Do men’s bodies make you uncomfortable, Chloe?” he said. She ignored him, keeping her eyes tightly shut as she listened to the rustle of clothing, the sound of drawers and doors being opened. She was almost asleep, miraculously enough, when she felt the bed sag beside her, and despite herself her eyes shot open.
He wasn’t wearing much, but at least he was decent. He’d put on a pair of trousers, and his shirt was open around his chest. Odd. She’d had sex with him before she even knew whether he had hair on his chest.
He didn’t—his skin was smooth, golden, and she closed her eyes again, trying to shut him out.
He tucked the sheet around her. “Sleep, Chloe. You need to keep that stuff on for another four hours and then you can wash it off, but in the meantime you need to just lie there and let the medicine do its job.”
She considered ignoring him, then couldn’t resist answering him. “There’s no medicine in the world that can heal what Hakim did to me that quickly.”
“Maybe not. But the physical pain will be gone. It’s up to you whether you want to let it scar you emotionally.”
“Up to me?” She tried to sit up, but he pushed her back down on the bed, not gently.
“Up to you,” he repeated firmly. “You’re young, you’re strong and you’re smart, despite the mess you managed to walk into. If you have the sense I think you do you’ll put it behind you.”
“So sensitive,” she mocked him.
“Practical,” he said. “He cut you. He burned you. He didn’t rape you.”
“No, that was you.”
He swore then, words she shouldn’t know, even with her command of languages, but she did. “Whatever you want to tell yourself,” he said after a moment. “I must have had momentary deafness. I don’t seem to remember you ever saying no.”
She hadn’t, and they both knew it. She said nothing, and a moment later she felt him move from the bed. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath, half expecting him to touch her again, and she let it out as he moved away from her. “I’ll be back in a couple hours. Don’t answer the door, don’t answer the phone, don’t go near the windows. I don’t think anyone knows about this place, but you can’t be too certain, and a lot of people are going to be looking for you.”
She turned her head away, ignoring him. She just wanted him gone, out of there—if he said one more thing to her she’d scream.
She heard the sound of the front door closing, the click of the automatic lock,
and she opened her eyes in the dimly lit apartment, to find herself alone. Finally. In his bed.
She sat up, slowly, wary of her wounds, but there was no pain. Whatever that green gunk was, it had managed to stop the pain, at least for now. She touched her arm, gingerly. The stuff had formed an almost waxlike coating over each stripe, sealing it, but it moved with her, and when she pushed the sheet off her body and stood up there wasn’t even a twinge, or a pinch.
It was probably some kind of radioactive poison—it had hurt enough when he’d painted it on her, and she didn’t trust him for even a moment. But she felt stronger, rather than weaker, so she could probably acquit him of that. Strong enough to get the hell out of there before he came back.
Her clothes were a shredded mess—there was no way she could walk out in public in them. She would have rather left stark naked than to put on his clothes, but she had at least an ounce of self-preservation left. If wearing Bastien Toussaint’s clothes meant she wouldn’t have to see him again, then so be it.
All his clothes were black. Of course—he was as dramatic as he was monstrous. It didn’t help that the only pair of trousers she could wear were a loose pair of silk pajama bottoms. Like most men, particularly the French, he had no hips, and she had at least her fair share.
Except that he wasn’t French. She wasn’t sure how she knew that—his accent was perfect, his manner, everything about him proclaimed him to be exactly what she’d discovered on the Internet. The son of an arms manufacturer from Marseilles—it was no wonder he’d gotten into the business of shipping them. It would have been a short move from legal armaments to illegal weaponry.
The married son of an arms manufacturer, she reminded herself, pulling his silk shirt over her arms, wincing in anticipation. The whisper-thin fabric barely touched her skin, and there was that inexplicable absence of pain. She moved to the window and peered outside. It was cold and rainy—it almost looked as if it might turn to flurries before long. It was a little too early for snow, but then, the world seemed to have turned sideways. She could no longer count on anything being normal.