Black Ice - Anne Stuart [45]
“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