by Anne Stuart
“I can get out of this damned thing myself,” she said in a steely voice.
“I have no doubt you can. From one damned thing to another.” He scooped her up anyway, clamping her tight enough against him that he kept her elbow from slamming into his ribs, and deposited her in the chair. He knelt down in front of her, arranging her supposedly useless feet on the rests, and he knew how very much she wanted to kick him. He looked up at her from between her legs, and he didn’t have to say a word, just simply put his hands on the armrests. She could read his thoughts, and she inadvertently tightened her thighs, a movement so subtle it wouldn’t be picked up by the camera. He kept his Malcolm Gunnison face on, impassive. Rising, he leaned forward and unlatched the brakes, his head close to hers as he did so. He shouldn’t. A smart man wouldn’t. And he knew damned well he was going to.
“We need to talk,” he said on a breath of sound.
She wanted to curse at him, he could feel it. She wanted to tell him to get the hell away from her. She even wanted him between her legs. Poor little girl, she’d landed herself in a big mess and she didn’t know how to get out of it. And then she tilted her head back, so that their mouths were dangerously close, and smiled up at him, a steely challenge in her eyes. “Coffee is an excellent idea,” she said. “You can push me.”
Bastard, bastard, bastard, Sophie fumed as he rolled her into the kitchen. There was no longer any question in her mind—she was going to kill him too, once she’d finished with Archer. It didn’t matter that he was Committee—he was probably just as much a danger to her as Archer was, and it would be self-defense. Justifiable homicide. A well-deserved execution.
The kitchen was deserted. “Penny for your thoughts,” Malcolm said as he planted her in the middle of the big room, too far from any surface to find a weapon like a butcher knife or a heavy frying pan.
“I was thinking of ways to kill you,” she said in a low voice.
He gave a surreptitious glance around him. “No surveillance in here?”
She wasn’t going to help him. “You figure it out.”
His half grin made her want to smack him. But, then, she already wanted to kill him—that was nothing new. “Two cameras, one trained on the door to the dining room, the other on the door to outside. Bugs in the same places—there’d be too much noise going on in here to have something ultrasensitive. So we’re relatively unwatched. Where do you think Elena is?”
She stifled her irritation. Of course he would have checked the place out—he was Committee, after all. In another lifetime she might have admired how efficient he was. “She’ll probably walk back in at any time.”
“She’s probably having a nice long siesta. Archer went to a lot of trouble to get rid of everybody—I’m sure he told her not to bother with lunch today.”
“You willing to take a chance on that?” she challenged him.
“Yes.” He took the kettle, poured out the water and refilled it, then set it on the stove to heat.
“There’s a coffeemaker and an espresso machine.”
“There’s also a French press, and I’m a purist.”
“Oh, God help me,” she muttered.
“He hasn’t so far.” He reached for the tightly sealed container of oily black beans. “If you’re in a hurry, I can make you one of those infernal pods.”
She didn’t want to accept anything from him, but the lure of French press coffee was irresistible. Too much about him was. She needed to learn how to resist. “I can wait,” she said in a grumpy voice.
She could see the brief flash of amusement in his eyes. “I’m sure you can.” He took out the coffee grinder, and she realized he’d already made a complete surveillance of the kitchen—he even knew where all the implements were. She unfastened the wheel locks and slid back, out of his way, farther out of the way of the cameras, and watched as he went about the ritual of coffee making in a charged silence. She needed to watch him, observe him, see if she could pick up anything about him that might help her, just as she’d been trained to do, but she wished she didn’t have to. He moved so elegantly, with an economy of grace that belied the sheer power in his deceptively lean body. She’d felt that strength, the intractable nature of his hold, and the memory sent her stomach churning with mixed emotions. There was nothing wasted in his movements—it was all quick efficiency. She already knew he was too strong for her in straightforward combat, even with dirty infighting. Her only chance would be to take him by surprise.
“Stop thinking about it,” he said as he poured the boiling water into the French press. “You aren’t going to be able to get the better of me no matter how hard you try. Any devious, underhanded trick you can think of is something I’ve thought of already. I’m as ruthless as they come, and I’ve been honing my skills while you’ve been reading War and Peace and sitting on your backside.”
“Sitting on my backside wasn’t exactly my choice in the matter,” she shot back.
He gave her a smile that was absolutely seraphic. “Poor little cripple,” he said in a slightly raised voice. “Is that what your husband calls you?”
She shuddered. “Stop reminding me.”
“Of what? The wheelchair? Or your husband?”
She just looked at him. The wheelchair wasn’t real—the husband was. She didn’t even like to think of Archer that way—he was the enemy, the one she had to destroy before he destroyed her.
But Mal was the enemy as well, a different kind of enemy. She’d been infatuated with Archer, charmed out of her once-formidable intellect, so in love, if she could call it that, that her brains had melted and her instincts had deserted her, at least in the beginning.
Mal was a different matter altogether. He wasn’t trying to charm her—his enmity was up front and clear. She couldn’t trust him any farther than she could throw him, and she’d learned the night before that she couldn’t throw him at all. But she was becoming just as obsessed with him, in a different way. She could see something, feel something beneath that implacable exterior, something that drew her more powerfully than anything she could remember. It was nothing like what she’d felt for Archer, but she didn’t trust herself any more than she trusted Mal. Whatever it was that called to her was probably nothing but her imagination, trying to justify her normal, sexual reaction to an undeniably hot male. Whether she liked it or not, she knew that her body reacted to his. To his words as well—taunting, tempting.
He moved over to her, holding out a cup of coffee, and she stared at it in surprise. He hadn’t grabbed one of the hand-thrown pottery mugs—instead he’d taken an antique Limoges cup and saucer from the set she’d bought on eBay when she was first married. It had been obscenely expensive, and so delicate and beautiful that she’d loved it. She’d assumed that Archer had smashed every piece in a fit of pique, but he must have forgotten all about it.
There was one dark sugar cube on the saucer and a tiny silver spoon. She’d bought those spoons when she’d been in her early twenties, when she’d first moved to England. How the hell did he know she liked a small cube of turbinado sugar with really strong coffee?
She looked up at him without taking it, shaken. “How do you know so much?” she said in a hushed voice.
For a moment he said nothing, his eyes slowly running over her, from top to bottom, and it felt like a physical touch. Then he shrugged. “It’s a combination of instinct and guesswork. I also picked what I would have chosen.”
She glanced behind him, to the second cup on the wooden work top, the same china, the same tiny spoon. He’d added milk to his already, and the coffee was a dark, creamy color. “Why didn’t you give me milk?” Her voice was uncomfortably breathless.
“You’re lactose intolerant.”
She wanted to give up in that moment. She had no idea how he knew, and she didn’t care. In her entire life no one had ever remembered, no matter how many times she told them, that she couldn’t touch milk. And now this man said it casually, as if it were simply a given.
; She reached out and took the cup, her hand brushing his, but she kept hers steady, with not even a shimmer marring the serene surface of the inky black coffee. Persephone and Hades, she thought. She was about to eat six pomegranate seeds and be doomed to spend half her days with the Prince of Darkness. She dropped the cube of sugar into the brew and stirred it, the sound of the silver tapping against the fine bone china the only sound in the room.
“We’re going to have to work together, you know,” Malcolm said, moving back to collect his own coffee, the moment vanishing. “You may as well learn to trust me.”
“Not in this lifetime.”
He laughed, actually laughed, at her terse words. “You will,” he said. “In the meantime, is there someplace nearby we can go that’s out of range?”
She managed a noncommittal shrug, taking a sip of the coffee and then closing her eyes to savor it. This had to be the best cup of coffee she’d had in her entire life. A man who could make coffee like this couldn’t be all bad. She said nothing, taking her time with it, stretching out the sensuous pleasure of it. He was leaning against the kitchen workbench, watching her as he drank his own, and it was a strange sort of communion, a silent time shared between the two of them. Like some stupid commercial, she thought in disgust, but she couldn’t fight the betraying warmth that was low in her belly. When she reluctantly finished the last drop, she met his eyes, and the cup rattled in her hand.
She couldn’t read his expression—there was something hidden, indecipherable in his green eyes. She pulled herself together. The enemy, she reminded herself. “And just what were you thinking?”
“Not about how I want to kill you,” he said lightly, taking the cup from her and moving to the sink. To her surprise he washed everything, quickly and efficiently, and put things back where he found them. He turned back, and that hidden expression was gone. “Let’s go.” He scooped her up in his arms, leaving the wheelchair behind, and she wanted to scream in annoyance.
“Don’t,” she said in a tight voice as he carried her out the back door into the sun-warmed courtyard.
“Don’t what? We’re going to look for a private place to talk, and your chair isn’t an all-terrain vehicle. If you don’t like me touching you, you’re going to have to put up with it. Just pretend I’m Joe.”
“That’s a little difficult,” she muttered, then wanted to bite her tongue.
But he said nothing, moving down the carefully landscaped walkways. The small bungalows that housed the staff were on the right—he headed toward the left, down a narrower path. “You know there are cameras out here,” she said.
“No shit. But the bugs are like those in the kitchen—they can function only when things are relatively quiet, and this island is filled with noise, from the birds to the wind to the sound of the waves. If they used regular bugs, everything would sound like a whooshing noise, and Archer isn’t as cutting edge as he’d like to be. The Committee in New Orleans has developed the most amazing listening devices, ones that can be trained to pick up a specific voice even in a roomful of people. You have to have a sample of the voice first, but they’re very effective.”
For a moment she was distracted—she’d always had a techie streak that had gotten little liberation recently. “How did they do that?”
“If you get back to New Orleans, I’ll have them show you,” he said, moving farther into the shrubbery.
She tried to ignore the sudden longing inside her. She wanted to get back to New Orleans—she wanted to play with new inventions, live a sensible life, eat what she wanted, sleep when she wanted, fuck whom she wanted. Though at that point she didn’t want to fuck anything, she reminded herself. Danger, Will Robinson.
“I’ll hold you to it,” she said, keeping her eyes trained on the path in front of them. It might have been her imagination, but it almost felt as if he tightened his arms around her for just a moment. If he had, the gesture would have been oddly comforting. But of course he hadn’t. She had to stop looking for things that weren’t there.
She should have known where they were going. The old boathouse loomed into sight, far enough away from the surveillance equipment that no one would hear her if she screamed. The ancient building perched out over the water, on the opposite side of the island from the brand-new building Archer had constructed to house his small armada. This place had once sheltered small boats during the hurricane season or when the previous owner returned to the mainland for long months at a time back in the middle of the previous century. It was amazing it had stood up to so many storms—part of the roof had fallen in, though the walls were at least vertical, and the windows were long gone.
There was a heavy padlock keeping the wide doors closed, but she didn’t expect Mal would have any trouble picking it. She just didn’t expect him to do so while he was still carrying her, but he managed quite handily, nudging open the door with his foot and then kicking it closed behind them.
And then they were alone in the huge, cavernous interior, the sun blazing through the holes in the roof. It felt safe, quiet, when nothing had felt that way in longer than she could remember, and she couldn’t rid herself of the feeling that this dangerous, dangerous man had the uncanny ability to make her feel protected. She cleared her throat. “What makes you think this place isn’t bugged as well?”
“I went over everything a couple of days ago.”
She controlled her instinctive doubt. “He could have had them done since you were here.”
He shook his head. “I’m wearing something that alerts me to bugs.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Really?”
“On my hip. If we run across something, trust me, you’ll know.”
She refused to think about his hips. “Great,” she grumbled. “Are you just going to stand there holding me while we talk?”
“Nope.” He released her suddenly, dropping her feet to the ground, and she was so startled she almost stumbled. He caught her upper arms to steady her, and they were too close, looking at each other, wary, suspicious, aroused.
“Oh, hell,” he muttered, and before she realized what he was doing, he’d pulled her into his arms, placing his mouth on hers.
Chapter Thirteen
It had been a long time since kissing had been anything but a macabre form of punishment, and for a moment Sophie let herself dissolve into it, the heat and hunger of his mouth on hers, the raw desire that shot through her, unwanted, and she was sliding her arms around his neck, pulling him closer, when sanity reared its ugly head.
She shut off her brain and moved, and a moment later he was on the ground, the rotting floor cracking beneath his weight where he’d landed. She had only a moment to congratulate herself before he surged back to his feet, and she was poised, alert, ready for his attack.
Instead, he looked at her across the shadow-dappled boathouse with nothing more than amusement. “Not bad for someone who’s been on her back for two years,” he drawled. “You want to see if you can do it when I’m paying attention?”
She took a step back, even though he was making no move to approach her. “If I were you, I wouldn’t drop my guard,” she said, her heart hammering, though whether with adrenaline or in reaction to his kiss she wasn’t quite sure. “I don’t like you, and I’m going to take you down any chance I get.” Why did that feel like a lie? It was exactly the way she should feel.
“So I gather,” he said, unperturbed. “So why did you start to kiss me back if we’re such dire enemies?”
“Why did you kiss me?”
“Because I wanted to see what you’d do,” he said, moving toward the far wall and sliding down so that he was sitting on the dusty floor. “You’ve been cut off for years now—Archer assures me that he’s no longer interested in his conjugal rights, and I wanted to see how desperate you are.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“Calm down,” he said mildly. “You passed with flying colors.”
“It was a test?” Her voice rose a little, and she
bit her lips, ignoring the conflict inside her.
He shrugged. “If we’re going to work together, I needed to test your reactions.”
“We aren’t going to work together,” she said furiously. “When the Committee abandoned me here, they lost any claim to my loyalty . . .”
“Oh, come on! You surely didn’t expect the Committee to bother with you after your betrayal? You know as well as I do that if I were abandoned here in the same situation, no one would come after me either. We had an operative spend three years as a prisoner in the South American jungles and no one bothered to rescue him. Once you start your mission, you’re pretty much on your own. They’ll help if they can, but in your circumstances no one was going to stick his or her neck out. You’re an idiot if you ever thought someone would.”
Why hadn’t she brought the gun with her? She’d done a thorough breakdown and cleaning, making sure everything was intact, checked it and loaded it, but of course there’d been no chance to try it out. She could think of a perfect target to practice on at that moment, but the handgun was up in her room, hidden in the mattress with her stash of pills.
“I never thought anyone would,” she said. “So it’s a good thing I gave up on the Committee as well.”
He shrugged again. “A good thing for you, maybe, but not so good for the rest of Archer’s victims, and he’s been amassing a lot of them in the past few years.”
“So you’ve come here to save the world since I screwed it up,” she said, ignoring her flash of guilt. She’d made peace with her mistake after all this time, or as much peace as she could. She didn’t need to be reminded of the harm her foolishness had caused. “What a hero!”
He was unmoved by her sarcasm. “It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it,” he drawled.
She dropped to the floor on the opposite side of the building, listening to the ominous creak. She could see the shimmer of the water beneath the floorboards, sending patterns up to what remained of the roof. “Did they tell you to kill me?” She managed to modulate her voice so that the question sounded like nothing more than idle curiosity.