by Anne Stuart
“Whose orgasm, mine or yours?” he murmured.
He’d called her bluff—there was a faint stain of color on her cheekbones. She had freckles. How could he be obsessed by a woman with freckles? No, he wasn’t obsessed, just…distracted. “You spend a fair amount of time around perverts?” he added, since she didn’t seem about to answer his first question.
“I didn’t always work for a Park Avenue law firm,” she said in a steady voice. “I started out wanting to save the world, working in the public defender’s office as well as the district attorney’s in upstate New York.”
“Now, that wouldn’t even begin to keep you in Armani and Blahnik,” he drawled. “Unless you come from old money.”
She looked surprised.
“The old money has been gone for generations,” she said. “And when I was younger I was much too idealistic to care about material things.”
“You don’t strike me as particularly old and jaded at the moment. Even if you were willing to whore yourself out to Harry as part of your job. You wouldn’t have liked it—Harry’s got some peculiar tastes you’re better off not knowing about.” It would have served her right if Harry had gotten his hands on her, and it was only for her sake Peter was glad he hadn’t.
And that was so much bullshit. He hadn’t wanted Harry to have her, even as he stood in the shadows as the gray ghost, serving her her bloody Tab.
Hell, he should have just thrown her overboard that first night, to let her sink or swim. At least she would have had a fighting chance of surviving. Whereas right now, if he followed orders, she had no chance at all.
She lifted her gaze to his. “I wasn’t going to sleep with Harry,” she said mildly enough. “I keep my sexual activities to times when I’m off duty.”
“Are you off duty now?” The question came from nowhere, reminding him just how dangerous Genelvieve Spenser could be. The only blessing was that she didn’t realize it.
“If by any miracle Harry and I survive this kidnapping, then I’ll be billing him an extraordinary amount of hours.”
“I’m sure you will.” He couldn’t keep the amusement from his voice. “But the chances of Harry getting out alive are nil. But hell, if you get away, you should certainly bill his estate. I’d even pad it if I were you.”
Her eyes narrowed. They were prettier without the contact lenses—a deep, warm brown.
He liked her better without makeup as well. She had beautiful, creamy skin, and the smattering of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose was ridiculously erotic.
“What about you?” she said.
He’d forgotten what they were talking about, still uncharacteristically distracted by her freckles. “I beg your pardon?”
“So polite,” she said, with only a trace of bitterness. “Do you whore yourself out on the job?”
“I’ve already told you I use sex as a weapon. What does that tell you?” he countered.
“I would think most of the people you target were men. Doesn’t that put a crimp in your style?”
He didn’t want to answer her implied question. “You’re sexist, Ms. Spenser. Women can be just as lethal as men.”
“Have you ever killed a woman?”
Thank God she’d gotten off the other subject. “Yes,” he said.
“And how was it for you?” she purred.
“A job.”
“Do you fuck them before you kill them?” She was playing a dangerous game, and she wouldn’t like the consequences. But they were trapped together in this billionaire’s prison, and the night was growing late, and he was feeling almost as reckless as she was.
“Sometimes,” he said. “If I have to.”
“And the men?”
“Sometimes,” he said again. “If I have to.”
She was good at hiding her reaction—he had to grant her that. She’d wanted to know.
“Did you sleep with Harry Van Dorn?”
“Not his type, fortunately.”
She was silent for a moment, and he had no earthly idea what she was thinking.
“I don’t understand you,” she said after a moment. “I don’t know why I’m trying. Bisexual assassins aren’t my usual acquaintances.”
“I’m not bisexual. I just do what needs to be done.”
“Do you come? When you’re fucking on the job?”
He almost smiled. She couldn’t say the word fuck quite as casually as she wanted to. Or maybe he just upset her with his frank answers.
“Of course,” he said. “Sex is simply a programmed physical response. I can make my body do anything I want without it interfering with my emotions.”
“You said you had no emotions.”
“Did I? Well, that’s true enough. Let’s just say that using sex as a tool is no more intimate than using a fake name and learning to respond to it. It’s a skill, a weapon. Something I use when the occasion calls for it.”
“I don’t believe it’s possible,” she said. Foolish girl. Didn’t she know he was looking for an excuse, any excuse to put his hands on her?
“It’s possible. Shall I demonstrate?” He almost wanted to laugh at her expression. Almost.
She bolted out of her chair. “I’m going to bed.”
Let her go, he told himself. Keep your bloody mouth shut and let her go.
“Aren’t you curious?” he found himself saying. “I thought you weren’t going to give up without a fight. Prove me wrong. Melt my icy heart with the warmth of your tender love.”
“Fuck you,” she said, furious.
“That was what I was suggesting.”
She should’ve run while she still had the chance. For a smart woman she was being astonishingly stupid. Either that, or she liked playing with fire. “You’re joking,” she said in a flat voice.
But they both knew he wasn’t joking. He didn’t know why he was doing it. He wanted her, that was a given, but he’d wanted other women and having a hard dick didn’t mean he had to do anything about it.
Maybe he wanted to play with fire as well. Maybe he thought it would make things easier if he just fucked her and got it over with. Or maybe he was looking for a reason to save her.
But even if he wanted to, he couldn’t. Run away, he thought.
“Come here,” he said.
10
Genevieve stood frozen in the middle of the room, her bare feet planted on the cool tile. The night was still and quiet around them, and somewhere out there a helpless man was bound and drugged and awaiting certain death at the hands of the man sitting so casually in the leather chair. Peter Jensen’s face was all planes and angles, eerily beautiful in the twilit room, and she couldn’t forget what that full, mobile mouth tasted like. Even his cold blue eyes seemed warmer, more like a still lake than an Arctic sea.
Oh, yes, he was beautiful—there was no denying that. And she’d never realized how sick she could be, to want him, to want an excuse to let him put his hands on her.
“How stupid do you think I am?” she said, barely keeping the fury from her voice.
He leaned back in the chair, his long, linen-clad legs stretched out in front of him. He was barefoot as well, and she couldn’t help but notice he had long, beautiful feet. What else was beautiful?
“We both know you’re a very smart woman,” he said. He began unbuttoning his loose white linen shirt, his hands tanned and graceful and deadly. “You won’t miss an opportunity to gain some sort of advantage over me, either emotionally or physically, and you’d never accept the fact that it was hopeless. Since I have no emotions, that leaves the physical.”
“And you’ve assured me that your body is simply a well-trained machine, able to function regardless of the circumstances. How would that help me?”
“Don’t be so unimaginative, Genevieve. Do you really think everything I tell you is the truth? Lying is one of the three things I’m best at. And you know the other two.”
She looked down at her uneaten meal. “Cooking?” she said hopefully.
“Killing. And sex.”
“But if you’re such a good liar, how do I know it’s true?”
“You aren’t going to know about the killing part until it’s too late, and I’m hoping you won’t even be aware of what’s going on. As for the sex…” He stretched out his hands. “That’s up to you.”
“I’m going to bed. Without you.” But she didn’t, couldn’t move.
“That’s what you said before, and you’re still here. I don’t think that’s what you want. If you can’t soften my heart, you could always try to overpower me when my attention is otherwise engaged. I might even fall asleep afterward—don’t men often do that?”
“Not my men,” she said loftily.
He smiled. “You don’t have a man, Genevieve. And you haven’t in more than three years, not since you moved to New York. Do you think I don’t have complete files on you? I know where you went to school, how you lost your virginity, what you eat for breakfast. I know you have a weakness for Hong Kong action movies, and French rock ’n’ roll. You graduated third in your class at Harvard Law and it drove you crazy that you weren’t first. I know you like it missionary style, don’t want to go down on anyone, and you seldom come. And you’re lactose intolerant. Come on, Ms. Spenser. I bet I can make you scream with pleasure.”
She felt hot and cold at the same time. His intimate knowledge of her was horrifying and inexplicable. His resources extended past the simple procurement of a rare soda pop on a Caribbean island. If he’d already committed that much about her to memory, was there anything left to hide?
“No, you can’t,” she said, her voice shaky.
He rose, a mistake on his part. When he lounged in a chair he might almost look harmless, but when he rose to his full height she knew just how little she had to fight him with.
“You can always take that butcher knife you hid under your mattress and stab me midorgasm. Then you could find out for yourself how arousing it is.”
“Killing you wouldn’t be very arousing,” she said. “Satisfying, maybe, but arousing…no.” He knew about the knife, even where she hid it. Was there nothing he didn’t know?
“If you’d rather use my bedroom I’ll get another knife for you,” he offered. “I’m trying my best to be helpful here.”
He came up to her, and she told herself it was too late. Maybe it had been too late from the moment she saw him. He put his hands on her shoulders, sliding them behind her thick hair to meet at the back of the caftan.
“Come on, Ms. Spenser,” he whispered, mocking. “I can give you the best orgasm you’ve ever had. Prove me wrong.”
She lifted her face to kiss him because she knew it was going to happen. This was to save her life, she told herself, closing her eyes. This was her only chance to save herself and Harry. Virgin sacrifice to the god of death.
But she was no virgin, and this was no sacrifice. She felt his hands catch the back of the caftan and rip, and she heard a shower of tiny buttons scatter over the tile floor as the fabric parted, exposing her back to the cool night air.
His hands covered her shoulders, pushing the caftan down her arms, so that she stood there, dressed only in the tiny scraps of lingerie she’d been forced to choose.
His blue eyes swept down her body, and his wicked mouth curved in a smile. “I was hoping you chose those,” he murmured. “Much more fun than nothing at all.”
He wasn’t even breathing deeply. She reached out and put her hand against his chest, where, if he had a heart, she would feel it beating. Her own was racing. His was slow and steady, like a machine. If machines had hearts.
“Yes, I have a heart,” he said, his hand covering hers and moving it inside the unbuttoned linen shirt, so that she could feel his smooth skin against her palm, her fingertips. She half expected him to feel cool to the touch, but he was warm, almost hot.
“You have a heart,” she agreed.
He put his hand on her breast, and she flinched, holding still. “But yours is racing. Why, Genevieve? Are you afraid of me?”
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“Yes. But that’s not why your heart is racing.” “You think I’m all aflutter with desire?” she said, fighting. “I’m not that easy.”
“You’re child’s play,” he whispered against her mouth, a feather-soft touch that wasn’t quite a kiss. “All I have to do is touch you and you melt.”
She wondered whether she could kick him, but he’d already warned her that it tended to piss him off. Besides, she couldn’t seem to summon up the energy past her initial outrage.
“You drugged me,” she accused him as he kissed the side of her neck, and she could feel his teeth against her jugular. And beneath her palm, the beat of his heart was smooth and steady.
“I’m drugging you right now,” he whispered. “There’s more than one way to wipe out a woman’s defenses.” He pushed the thin ribbon strap of her bra aside to kiss her shoulder, and her own heart lurched.
“Enough,” she said, stumbling back, away from him. “I believe you. You can turn me on against my better judgment without getting excited yourself. I’m impressed. Maybe you could even give me a thousand orgasms, though I sincerely doubt it, but I’m not interested in trying. Now let me go.”
But he caught her wrist, pulling her back toward him, and before she knew what he’d intended he slid her hand down the front of his linen trousers, to the shockingly hard evidence that he was far from unmoved. “Who says I’m not aroused?” he murmured. “I just know how to control my body. My cock may want you but the rest of me isn’t quite as desperate.”
She tried to pull her hand away, but he was too strong, his long fingers like a manacle on her wrist, holding her there, even as he pushed against her, slowly, rocking.
“Stop it,” she said. “You’re a sick bastard.”
“I can be,” he agreed. “Why don’t you try to find my weak points?”
“You don’t have any,” she said in a strangled voice.
“You never know,” he said, and kissed her, with her hand trapped between their bodies, and he grew harder still.
It wasn’t the kind of kiss she’d expected—something masterful and overpowering. Instead, it was a slow, almost curious kind of kiss, hypnotic, as he tasted her lips, her tongue, her skin. He put his other arm around her and drew her up against him, her almost nude body against the loose white linen, the caftan puddled at her feet between them. She could feel his heart against hers, the steady beat an ironic counterpoint to her own racing pulse, as he kissed her, a slow, deep, intoxicating kiss that proved what he said—he was drugging her right now, and he didn’t need to use chemicals.
But she’d never been one to seek forgetfulness or release in sex. It always brought a brand-new set of problems, sometimes worse than the first, and he was right, for the last three years she’d been better off without.
Not that things could get much worse at this point. He was going to kill her—he’d made that more than clear, and there was no way out of it that she could see.
And the shameful, inescapable truth was that she was going to have sex with him. She might try to talk him out of it, talk herself out of it, but it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. She was going to make love with the man who was going to kill her. How sick was that?
But it wouldn’t be making love. He would fuck her, and she would let him, just to prove a point. Not that he could make love to her and remain unmoved and uninvolved. Any man could do that.
But it would prove he wasn’t as all-powerful as he thought. He used sex as a weapon, he’d said, but she was impervious. Even with a gentle, tender man who loved her, she seldom reached anything beyond a mild stirring of pleasure. She certainly wasn’t about to start with her murderer, no matter how good he thought he was.
He pulled back, and she realized he was still rocking against her trapped hand, so slightly that she hadn’t noticed, an imperceptible rhythm that thrummed through his body. And hers.
“You think I c
an’t do it?” he whispered with the ghost of a laugh.
She’d forgotten he could read her so well, and her anger only fueled the cold fire in her belly.
“Can’t do what? Seduce me? I don’t think I have much say in the matter. You’ll do what you want, with or without my cooperation. You just can’t make me enjoy it.”
“Yes,” he said, “I can. Anyplace, anytime. We’ll use your room.”
She was too startled to react. The calm decision in his voice as he took her hand, the one that he’d held pressed against him, was unnerving as he drew her through the shadowy villa. She didn’t resist, stepping out of the discarded caftan and following him. In the end, what would it matter? Things had been spiraling out of control for days now, and she kept fighting back. At least this was one battle she was sure to win.
He released her when they reached her darkened room. He turned on the bathroom light, closing the door most of the way so that only a sliver illuminated the room. He stripped off his shirt and threw it over the small statue of the ballet dancer.
“I don’t like cameras,” he said, turning to her.
Somewhere she found her voice. “There’s a camera in that thing? I guess it’s not Degas after all.”
“It probably is. Harry had no qualms about destroying irreplaceable works of art for his own use. There are cameras everywhere. Harry liked to know what was going on around him, and he never minded an audience himself.”
“Why are you using the past tense? He’s not already dead, is he?”
“Not as far as I know. I doubt Renaud would disobey my orders when it comes to something like that. Get on the bed.”
He was as beautiful as she’d been afraid he was. Most Englishmen tended to be pale and skinny. Peter had tanned, golden skin and subtly defined muscles, and she already knew the feel of his warm, strong flesh.
“I can see why you use sex when other weapons fail you,” she said. “You’re very pretty—I would think women would have a hard time resisting you. And men,” she added.
“It’s not a last resort, Genevieve,” he said. “Get on the bed,” he repeated.