Black Ice - Anne Stuart [97]
It was growing dark by the time she emerged from the hot tub, and she wrapped herself in a thick terry robe and wandered down into the kitchen. The security panel was blinking, the green lights telling her all was safe and secure, and she realized for the first time in months she was hungry. Probably because her mother wasn’t there nagging her to eat. She opened the massive refrigerator that was always kept overstocked, found herself some leftover apple pie. She pulled it out, closing the door behind her, only to look directly into Bastien Toussaint’s dark, merciless eyes.
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She dropped the pie. It was in a Pyrex dish that shattered at her bare feet, but she didn’t move, looking up at him in shock.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Chloe,” he said, his voice that familiar, mesmerizing sound. “Surely you didn’t think I’d died?”
It took her a moment to find her voice. “I wondered,” she said. He looked different. Thinner, his face lined from pain or something else, and his hair was even longer, though streaked with sunlight that matched his tanned skin. Odd, because she never would have thought of him in the sunlight—only in darkness and shadows.
“It takes a lot to kill me,” he said. He was standing too close, and she started to step back, away from him, when he caught her arm in an iron grip. She fought back, instinctively, but he simply lifted her up, setting her down out of the way of the broken glass. She’d forgotten that her feet were bare.
“You might want to get dressed,” he said. “I’ll clean up the mess while I wait.”
“I don’t need to get dressed,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere, you are. You can leave, right now. I don’t know why you suddenly appeared out of nowhere, but I don’t want you here. Go away.”
“The necklace.”
“What?”
“I came for the diamond necklace,” he said in a calm voice. “You left Paris wearing it, remember? It has a certain value, and I came to get it.”
She stared at him in shock. “Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I was…incapacitated.”
“Why didn’t you just call me and ask me to send it to you?”
“It’s not something I would trust to the mails, or even to a courier. I’m sorry if my presence distresses you, but I had no choice but to come myself.”
She felt nothing, Chloe told herself. It was like prodding a wound, only to discover it had healed. She looked into his dark, unreadable eyes and was certain she felt nothing at all.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll go get it, and then you can leave. I really have nothing to say to you.”
“I didn’t expect you would,” he said, leaning back against the counter. “Just get me the necklace and I’ll be on my way.”
She stared at him for a moment longer. He didn’t belong in her mother’s kitchen. He didn’t belong a few feet away from her, while she was wearing nothing but a loosely tied terry robe. She didn’t feel a thing for him, not hatred or passion—she was totally numb, the blessed numbness that had protected her during those last few days in Paris. And she had to get him out of there, fast, before that numbness faded.
“Stay right there,” she ordered, moving past him, holding herself out of reach as she headed toward the kitchen stairs. He made no effort to touch her, and she felt stupid, but she couldn’t help herself. The closer she got to him the shakier she felt.
Most of her clothes were in the guest house, but there was some clean laundry in the dryer upstairs. While the selection didn’t provide her with much choice, she managed to find a pair of old gray sweatpants, a baggy gray T-shirt and a thick pair of wool socks. Her hair had begun to grow again,