Black Ice - Anne Stuart [68]
And how the hell was she going to do that with her passport back at the château? And someone must have found poor Sylvia by now. The police would have been called, they would have searched the place and found her belongings. Which meant the police would be looking for her as well.
Definitely a good thing. Even if they thought she’d somehow managed to kill Sylvia she’d rather take her chances in a French jail than running for her life, having to depend on one enigmatic man.
Everything had taken on a blessed haze of unreality. She’d seen him kill a man, and yet she could barely remember it. She’d been in such pain, and then the pain had stopped, and Hakim was lying on the floor.
He’d had sex with her. She would like to deny it, call it something else, but in truth it was sex, and he had come inside her. And to her everlasting shame, she had climaxed as well, powerfully.
But that didn’t feel real anymore. Even the stark horror of Sylvia’s body was beginning to fade. Maybe that would happen with everything, she thought, slowly relaxing her body against his. Maybe everything that had gone on in the last days she spent in France would wind up in a little bubble that never really touched her again. She wouldn’t have to remember it, wouldn’t have to deal with it. It would just be gone.
She didn’t know if that was how people usually managed to get through traumatic periods in their life. All this made nineteen hours in a pitch-black cave seem like a child’s prank in comparison. No one had died, no one had been hurt, no one had developed a kind of sick fascination for…
She didn’t like the way her mind was going. She tried to inch away from Bastien’s body, but his arm clamped around her waist, pulling her back. “Lie still,” he muttered sleepily in her ear.
She could feel him all along her back, the sensation of warmth and strength, bone and muscle and the unmistakable feel of him against her butt. It felt as if he had an erection, which surely couldn’t be true, since he had no real interest in her and she had all the interest in the world in him.
Stockholm Syndrome, didn’t they call it? When the hostage developed an unhealthy obsession with her captor. It was a normal reaction—they were in a life-or-death situation, and so far he’d managed to keep her alive. And to complicate matters, they’d had sex before she’d realized just how dangerous he was. And why couldn’t she stop thinking about the sex?
Because she was lying in the shelter of his strong body, she could feel his cock against her backside and she was scared. The only thing standing between her and a painful, hideous death was his body, and she wanted it.
But he didn’t want her, he’d simply been doing his job, and as he’d told her, he was very good at it. In the end his lack of interest was a very good thing. At least he wanted to keep her alive and safe and get her back home. Which was an even better thing.
Developing an unhealthy fascination for him was not unexpected. And once she was safely home everything would be back in perspective.
He was right, the bed was too small. There was no way she could move away from his body. She could turn her head just enough to see his face. He slept, which amazed her, and even her thrashing around hadn’t woken him. She could barely make him out in the darkness, and she gave up trying, laying her head back down on the threadbare mattress, listening to the sound of his heartbeat against her back.
At least he had a heart—something she’d wondered about. He was human, he was warm and strong and ready to kill to keep her safe.
What more could a girl want in a man?
16
She really was the most damnable woman, Bastien thought, as her body finally stilled, her pulse slowed and she sank back into a reluctant sleep. She argued about everything, and then she looked at him with those huge brown eyes and for the first time in years he felt