by Anne Stuart
“Because then I wouldn’t have had any excuse to kiss you.”
She took the wine. He was right, it was almost good enough to die for. Almost. But while he was so busy with his flashing knife she should be scouting the place, looking for a way to escape.
“Don’t bother, Sister,” he said, not looking up from his work. “I’m a very thorough man. There’s no way you’re getting out of this place, unless I let you. Drink your wine and relax.”
“You think I’ll just give up without a fight?”
“No. But I’d rather not spend the next few hours chasing you around this place. There are no weaknesses in my defenses, Ms. Spenser.” The knife flashed with deadly precision. “The sooner you accept that fact, the better. Why don’t we just pretend we’re two normal people, stranded on a beautiful island for a couple of days.”
“I’m not into imaginary games.”
“Make an effort.” The knife flashed and his voice was sharp and cold.
“Or what? You’ll kill me?”
He pushed his long hair back from his angular face, glancing at her out of flinty eyes. “You really are foolhardy, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be trying to charm me instead of pissing me off?”
“Would it make any difference?”
“Probably not.”
“Then I may as well get my kicks where I can, and annoying you seems to be one of the few pleasures left to me.”
“Not necessarily.” He looked up at her, and he was close enough that she thought she could read the expression in his cool blue eyes.
That was something she didn’t even want to think about. “I want my purse back,” she said, changing the subject. “I either need my glasses or my spare contact lenses.”
“Trust me, you don’t want to see what’s coming.”
Something snapped inside her, and she put the wineglass down, hard. Unfortunately Harry’s villa came equipped with granite countertops and the glass shattered in her hand.
“I think I’ve lost my appetite,” she said. “I’m going back to my room. Call me when it’s time to die.”
He ignored her flippant comment. “You’re bleeding,” he said.
She glanced down at her hand. The broken crystal had sliced through her skin, and blood was welling up. “Sorry—did you want to be the one to spill it?”
He ignored her jibe, setting the knife down and moving toward her. His calm approach was unnerving and she started to back away, but he caught her arm, pulling her toward him, so that the fabric of her caftan brushed up against his legs in a strangely intimate movement.
There was no pulling away from him, a reminder of how strong he really was. “You should have stitches,” he said.
“Too bad there’s no emergency room nearby. Guess I’ll have to bleed to death, and save you the pleasure.”
His small smile should have been infuriating. It was, and yet she was far from impervious. “It’s not that bad, Genevieve. You’ll live to bitch at me another day.”
And that was about it. One more day. He’d never said her name before—he wrapped his voice around it in a way that was unbearably intimate.
“I prefer Ms. Spenser.”
“And of course your preferences are my top priority.” He pulled her from the kitchen, and she gave up trying to fight him. He’d wrapped a linen dish towel around her hand to keep the blood from dripping onto Harry’s floors. The floors that would be gone soon—why did he bother?
She balked when he brought her into a huge bedroom, but he pulled her past the bed as if it didn’t exist, and into a separate bathroom, half the size of her apartment. He pushed her down on the toilet seat and began to rummage through one of the many cabinets.
She regretted the loss of her wine more than the pain in her hand. She regretted that he touched her, held on to her so that she wouldn’t escape, more than anything at all.
She stopped thinking about it. She looked past him, out the screened window to the Caribbean night sky with its lopsided moon. It was a beautiful evening, the time and place for lovers, not death.
When she looked back at Peter he was almost finished bandaging her up. “Not as bad as it looked,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any permanent damage. The next time you slam a wineglass down on a granite countertop remember to let go of it faster.”
Next time. He’d released her hand finally, and she pulled away, looking up at him.
There was an unexpectedly gentle expression in his eyes. “Stop baiting me, Genny,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good, and it only upsets you.”
“And you’re so concerned about my well-being.” No one called her Genny anymore—that name belonged to someone younger, happier, more hopeful. Someone who thought she could make a difference in the world.
That girl was long gone, and there wasn’t much to be hopeful about in the current situation.
“Actually, I am,” he said, his voice light. “Now, come back with me and eat something, or I’ll carry you back, tie you up and force-feed you.”
He’d do just that, and probably enjoy it, she thought bitterly. And she wasn’t about to give him that satisfaction, or any other satisfaction at all.
She rose. She was almost five foot nine in her bare feet, but he was much taller, and even in the cavernous bathroom she felt crowded, alarmingly aware of his closeness.
“You win,” she said. “But then you always do, don’t you?”
“Not always,” he said. And his icy eyes were bleak.
He did what he had to do, Peter reminded himself, watching as the night breeze drifted in from the patio and stirred her long thick hair. He followed orders and seldom had reason to question them, even in the ruthless days of Harry Thomason’s reign. Madame Lambert was a more pragmatic soul, and if the hit was ordered he could trust that it was with the best of reasons. He was well trained, a veritable artist at his job, and he could make Genevieve Spenser’s eventual demise his masterwork.
Demise. Stupid word for an execution. Did you even call it that when it was a case of collateral damage? More like the fortunes of war, not execution. But Genny was no soldier, just someone in the way.
She didn’t eat much, picking at the food he’d prepared. A few more weeks of this and she’d lose the fifteen pounds that curved her body so nicely. Unfortunately she didn’t have a few more weeks.
He knew women’s bodies well enough to know exactly what she weighed and how much she considered to be unwanted extra. She wanted to be an anorexic clotheshorse like Harry’s recent taste in sexual partners. He’d be better off if she was. Maybe.
There was no question that her strong, curvy body was rapidly becoming an uncomfortable obsession. Seeing her in that poured-on bathing suit had only made things worse, and in his role as Harry’s majordomo he knew exactly what kind of clothes and underwear she would have found in that room. Was she wearing some enticing bits of lace and ribbon beneath that ridiculous, nunlike caftan? Or was she wearing nothing at all?
Neither thought was particularly comforting. She was doing her best to ignore him, and he was happy enough to let her get away with it. Because her undeniably luscious body wasn’t nearly as involving as her spirit.
She was a bundle of fascinating contradictions. She used her little pills to stuff down any unwanted emotion. She had very little physical fear—she’d fought Renaud and tried to take him on without a moment’s hesitation. He knew she was currently without a relationship, and hadn’t had one for a long time, which suggested she got her satisfaction from sublimating her desires in her career. And yet every time he touched her, kissed her, she reacted with breathless intensity.
He never should have kissed her. He’d let temptation overrun his better judgment, and he was paying the price for it now. Because he wanted to kiss her again with a need so strong it was almost a physical ache.
He wasn’t going to touch her. He hadn’t been reckless since he was a teenager at the tight-ass boarding school his mother had sent him to. All the Wimberley men had grac
ed its hallowed halls, up to and including his grandfather, Dr. Wilton Wimberley, MBE. He was the one who’d seen to it that young Peter had the best education, one befitting the solid uppermiddle-class values so dear to his mother.
She’d married beneath her, and a day never passed when she didn’t regret it, which she made abundantly clear to her small family. He never could figure out what attracted a prissy, uptight creature like his sainted mother to a sullen bully like Richard Madsen. At least his father had found a natural outlet for his violent tendencies; when he wasn’t beating on his carping wife or his rebellious son, he could beat up criminals. He was a London policeman, with no pretensions or aspirations to anything higher, and to his mother’s fury he’d turned down promotion after promotion, just to spite her.
Emily Wimberley Madsen had done her best by her only child. She’d taught him to speak in a proper posh accent, though he would slip into his father’s rougher street tones just to annoy her. She’d cadged enough money from her father to send him to the best schools, never realizing that children could spot an outsider with unerring cruelty. He’d had to fight his way through school, and by the time they sent him off to Kent Hall, over his father’s objections, he was a danger to anyone who crossed him.
Most of the other students picked up on that as well, and gave him a wide berth. His mother could never understand why he was never invited to the country homes of his mates—she never understood that a misfit like Peter Madsen would have no mates.
He never bothered wondering what might have happened if things had gone differently at school. Daniel Conley should have known better, but his father was a Member of Parliament with too much money, and his son had an army of sycophants who followed his orders like good little soldiers. Daniel had been a big boy—heavy boned, leaning toward fat, whereas Peter didn’t reach his full height until he was out of school. At the age of seventeen he was wiry, small for his age and far more dangerous than hulking Daniel Conley would ever guess.
Daniel had outweighed him by forty pounds, and with two other boys holding him down there wasn’t much Peter could do but endure the pain and humiliation of Daniel’s assault.
He’d spent a week in the infirmary. No one asked any questions—Daniel’s father was a major contributor to the school—and he hadn’t offered any complaints. And the next time Daniel Conley tried to corner him in the third-floor washroom, he’d broken the bastard’s neck.
He’d wanted to kill him, and he would have if his rage hadn’t gotten in the way, making him careless. To this day Daniel Conley lived the plushest life a paraplegic could lead, supported by his father’s limitless wealth.
They’d hauled Peter away, covered with the blood of Daniel and a dozen of his cronies. He had no idea where they were taking him, and by the time the blood-red haze had left him he’d grown cold and still as ice, knowing that the huge sober men were taking him someplace quiet to kill him. Upstarts didn’t try to kill the privileged sons of MPs and face normal consequences. They’d bury him in some bog, and his parents would never know what had become of him.
He was right about the last part, if about nothing else. He never saw Emily and Richard Madsen again— merely a side benefit of his early recruitment to the shadowy group known simply as the Committee.
The Committee had other names. Official ones to cover any slips, names that had nothing to do with their actual work. The powers that be recognized talent when they saw it, and young Peter Madsen had shown more than promise.
He’d been trained, groomed, educated and made over. He was a crack shot, and almost as effective with a dozen other weapons. He could speak five languages fluently, he could be straight, gay, American, Scandinavian, British or German. He could kill without compunction and live under deep cover for years until it was time to strike. They’d chosen wisely when they recognized his budding potential, and he’d served them well in their bloody, supposedly noble cause.
He’d even married, briefly, a futile stab at some kind of normalcy. And because Thomason thought it would make him a better agent if there was something that mattered to him. Thomason hadn’t realized that Peter was already one of the best there was, and that having a wife at home never entered his mind when he was on assignment.
He heard she remarried—a dentist maybe. She’d grown tired of being alone, and he couldn’t blame her. She hadn’t had enough imagination to realize he was anything other than the pharmaceutical representative he claimed to be. And he was certain she was much happier in her neat little house in Dorking. She was probably pregnant by now.
He could tell himself he missed her, but that would be a lie, and he was adept at lying to everyone but himself. He could barely remember her face.
But he missed the thought that someone was waiting for him in that tumbledown cottage in Wiltshire that sat on far too many acres. He never should have bought the place. He’d done it on a whim, because he had too much money and nothing to spend it on, because word had come down that everyone should have the cover of a stable life. He bought the house because it felt peaceful in a life devoid of peace. And he found a wife to put in it as soon as he could. It hadn’t taken much—he knew how to charm women into doing exactly what he wanted with insulting ease.
Except for Genevieve Spenser, who seemed maddeningly impervious.
But the wife had never belonged in Wiltshire. And now she was gone, the house closed up, and Harry Thomason was retired. So were many of his friends— retired or dead. Of the operatives he’d started out with, Peter was the only one remaining.
Maybe he could just disappear into the wilds of America, as his old friend Bastien had. Maybe he could just walk away from it as well.
But not with a job unfinished and a thousand unanswered questions hanging in the balance. Harry’s pretentious Rule of Seven hovered over them all, and what little they’d discovered was terrifying enough. If Harry’s hired thugs had managed to sabotage that dam in India hundreds of thousands of people would have died. And what could possibly be his reason for instituting such carnage?
The assault on the oil fields was equally impractical—he’d chosen some of the richest deposits, ones he himself owned a major part of, though he’d planned to divest himself of his interests before the planned conflagration. Why?
What else did he have planned? And would they be as easy to circumvent once they discovered them?
In fact, each of Harry’s plans was so delicately balanced that it hadn’t taken much to render them harmless. He wanted the control and the thrill even more than he seemed to want a guaranteed outcome. The trick was in discovering them in the first place, and with the Indian dam it had been sheer luck. If the destruction of the oil fields went through, the death toll wouldn’t be as catastrophic, but the ramifications in world financial markets would be global. Maybe that’s what he had in mind. Carefully orchestrated chaos, giving Harry Van Dorn the chance to step in, well armed with information, and make a financial killing.
He already had more money than God, and thorough searches of his financial records hadn’t turned up any recent losses. It hadn’t taken much to find the hidden sweatshops that the humanitarian institutions had no idea existed, much less the child prostitution mills in Southeast Asia. But such things were very lucrative, and Harry didn’t need more money.
But he wanted it. Peter already knew his appetites were perverse and insatiable. He just hadn’t realized it included his appetite for money.
The Committee was taking a gamble, terminating Harry before they knew the full extent of his plan. They were counting on his gigantic ego—he would delegate only the barest minimum, and nothing would go down without his immediate say-so. Or so they hoped.
In the meantime, Harry would die a tragic, accidental death. And any extraneous details would be cleaned up quickly and tidily.
Extraneous details like the woman sitting across from him with calm self-assurance. Maybe she thought he couldn’t go through with it. If so, then she wasn’t as smart as he thought s
he was. He could do just about anything if he had to. Killing Genevieve Spenser was part of a bloody day’s work. No more, no less.
“One would think you didn’t like my cooking,” he said.
“I don’t have much appetite.”
“And you haven’t touched the wine, when we both know how good it is.”
“Neither have you.”
“Do you think it’s drugged? Poisoned? I assure you it’s not. I’m simply not drinking because…”
“Because you’re on a job?” she suggested mockingly. “Far be it from me to distract you from your duty. In fact, poison would probably be a fine idea— I have faith in your promise it won’t hurt. And if you’re simply trying to render me unconscious I don’t mind that either—as you know from my tranquilizers, I have no objection to pharmaceutical aids.”
“Then why aren’t you drinking?”
She met his gaze, her own calm and steady. “Because I don’t want to do anything foolish that would give you the excuse to touch me, thank you very much.”
“You don’t like being touched?”
“Not by you.”
That was a lie. She knew it as well, because she turned her head, staring out into the night garden. But he wouldn’t call her on it—he was neither as smug nor as cruel to push it. In truth, he had little judgment when it came to how irresistible he was. He was always playing a part, whether it was the obsequious servant who either did or did not provide sexual favors or the blandly devoted husband, whose lovemaking was as straightforward and unimaginative as he could manage. He performed just well enough to get his ex-wife to climax, figuring that a boring middle-class drug salesman could do that much, but he wouldn’t let himself go past a simple, physical release. He never did, whether his partner was a shy housewife or a kinky sadist or anywhere in between. Control was everything.
He held up his hands. “No touching,” he said. “Not without a specific request.”
She stared at him in amazement. “Oh, please touch me,” she mocked him. “I’m all atremble with desire at the thought of you strangling me. I’ve known perverts who think that death is the ultimate turn-on, and murdering someone midorgasm makes it all the better. Ever tried that?”