Black Ice - Anne Stuart [48]
She considered ignoring him, then couldn’t resist answering him. “There’s no medicine in the world that can heal what Hakim did to me that quickly.”
“Maybe not. But the physical pain will be gone. It’s up to you whether you want to let it scar you emotionally.”
“Up to me?” She tried to sit up, but he pushed her back down on the bed, not gently.
“Up to you,” he repeated firmly. “You’re young, you’re strong and you’re smart, despite the mess you managed to walk into. If you have the sense I think you do you’ll put it behind you.”
“So sensitive,” she mocked him.
“Practical,” he said. “He cut you. He burned you. He didn’t rape you.”
“No, that was you.”
He swore then, words she shouldn’t know, even with her command of languages, but she did. “Whatever you want to tell yourself,” he said after a moment. “I must have had momentary deafness. I don’t seem to remember you ever saying no.”
She hadn’t, and they both knew it. She said nothing, and a moment later she felt him move from the bed. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath, half expecting him to touch her again, and she let it out as he moved away from her. “I’ll be back in a couple hours. Don’t answer the door, don’t answer the phone, don’t go near the windows. I don’t think anyone knows about this place, but you can’t be too certain, and a lot of people are going to be looking for you.”
She turned her head away, ignoring him. She just wanted him gone, out of there—if he said one more thing to her she’d scream.
She heard the sound of the front door closing, the click of the automatic lock, and she opened her eyes in the dimly lit apartment, to find herself alone. Finally. In his bed.
She sat up, slowly, wary of her wounds, but there was no pain. Whatever that green gunk was, it had managed to stop the pain, at least for now. She touched her arm, gingerly. The stuff had formed an almost waxlike coating over each stripe, sealing it, but it moved with her, and when she pushed the sheet off her body and stood up there wasn’t even a twinge, or a pinch.
It was probably some kind of radioactive poison—it had hurt enough when he’d painted it on her, and she didn’t trust him for even a moment. But she felt stronger, rather than weaker, so she could probably acquit him of that. Strong enough to get the hell out of there before he came back.
Her clothes were a shredded mess—there was no way she could walk out in public in them. She would have rather left stark naked than to put on his clothes, but she had at least an ounce of self-preservation left. If wearing Bastien Toussaint’s clothes meant she wouldn’t have to see him again, then so be it.
All his clothes were black. Of course—he was as dramatic as he was monstrous. It didn’t help that the only pair of trousers she could wear were a loose pair of silk pajama bottoms. Like most men, particularly the French, he had no hips, and she had at least her fair share.
Except that he wasn’t French. She wasn’t sure how she knew that—his accent was perfect, his manner, everything about him proclaimed him to be exactly what she’d discovered on the Internet. The son of an arms manufacturer from Marseilles—it was no wonder he’d gotten into the business of shipping them. It would have been a short move from legal armaments to illegal weaponry.
The married son of an arms manufacturer, she reminded herself, pulling his silk shirt over her arms, wincing in anticipation. The whisper-thin fabric barely touched her skin, and there was that inexplicable absence of pain. She moved to the window and peered outside. It was cold and rainy—it almost looked as if it might turn to flurries before long. It was a little too early for snow, but then, the world seemed to have turned sideways. She could no longer count on anything being normal.
There was no money—she searched the place thoroughly. She found a small cache of what was presumably cocaine or heroin—she didn’t give a damn which, but not cash. Not a cent to get her to the opposite side of Paris. It was easy enough to orient herself, with the Eiffel