Black Ice - Anne Stuart [27]
Bastien hadn’t put the car into gear—he was looking at her. Or at least she assumed he was. The interior of the car was very dark in the driving rain, and he hadn’t switched on a light. “Do you want to go to a hotel and get out of those wet clothes?” He might have been asking if she wanted an ice-cream cone, so casual was his voice.
“I think not,” she said in a caustic voice. “Just turn on the heat and I’ll be fine.”
He put the car in gear and started along the road at the same suicidal speed he’d driven before, but this time in the dark and the pouring rain, and she wasn’t wearing her seat belt. The Porsche might be a glorious car but its heating system left something to be desired, and a half hour later she was still cold, fumbling with the lap belt because if Bastien was going to overturn them in his Le Mans haste then she wanted a fighting chance at surviving.
It was pitch-black by now, not just from the rain but from the hour, and Chloe tried to huddle into her seat, hoping he’d forgotten about her presence, faintly annoyed that he had, when he suddenly pulled the car over, the tires skidding on the wet pavement until it came to a stop by a row of hedges.
It was too narrow a road to park on, but they hadn’t passed another car the entire time. Which actually added to her sense of insecurity, when she thought about it. She was alone on a dark road with a man she didn’t know, and she didn’t trust him.
This time he flicked on the dashboard light, and the shadows it cast in the tiny space were harsh and unforgiving. Bastien no longer looked so smooth and charming. He looked dangerous.
“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.
“Trying to fasten my seat belt.” Unfortunately her voice shook slightly with the cold. “You drive too fast.”
“Idiote,” he muttered under his breath, and reached for something behind the seat. His body brushed against hers as he did so, and she held her breath until he sat back again. He had a white shirt in his hand, and before she could figure out what he had in mind he’d caught her chin in one strong hand and began drying her face with the soft cloth.
“You look like a raccoon,” he said in a dispassionate voice. “Your makeup is all over your face.”
“Great,” she muttered. She reached for the shirt. “I can manage.”
He pulled it out of her reach. “Sit still,” he said, dabbing around her eyes with surprising care. The shirt smelled like him. Like the elusive scent he wore, like the cigarettes he shouldn’t be smoking, like the indefinable smell of his skin. And how would she already know what his skin smelled like?
He dropped the shirt in her lap but didn’t release her face. “There,” he said. “Much better. Now you simply look mysterious and smudged. They will think we spent the afternoon in bed. Which is probably what we should have been doing, if you weren’t so American.”
She tried to jerk her face away, but he was holding her with more force than she’d realized. “We didn’t.”
“Such a shame. Are you disappointed? We could take a little detour on our way back—Hakim won’t be expecting us until he sees us.”
“No, thank you,” she said, as polite as she’d been bred to be.
He didn’t move. Didn’t release her chin, and his dark, almost black eyes looked into hers, an almost speculative expression in the blank depths. She could see nothing in his eyes, and yet her breath suddenly caught, and she knew what was going to happen.
“This is a mistake,” he said quietly.
And before she could ask what, he kissed her, his long fingers holding her face still as he covered her mouth with his.
They didn’t call it French kissing for nothing, Chloe thought in her last coherent moment. He was an absolute master at it, starting with just a featherlight brush against her lips, followed by his tongue, just touching them gently. She knew she should push him away, but she opened her mouth anyway, knowing she was being beyond foolish.
But what harm would a kiss do? Especially from someone as gifted as Bastien. There wasn’t much more they could accomplish in the tiny cockpit