Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [24]
She wasn’t in the mood to believe him. For a moment she thought he was going to put her back on the bed, but instead he half dragged her across the room to where he’d been sitting and dropped her down on the small sofa. She reached up and clawed at the gag again, and he made a long-suffering noise. “You won’t like it if I take it off,” he said. “It’s going to hurt.”
She kept pulling. So he pushed her bound hands down, into her lap, reached for the duct tape and yanked.
She thought her scream would have filled the cabin and even woken her drugged client, but the only sound that came out was a choked gasp as the duct tape was ripped from her face, taking a few strands of loose hair with it.
He tossed it in her lap. “Sorry,” he said, sitting across from her and picking up his book.
“Sorry?” she echoed in a hoarse voice. “Sorry for what? For kidnapping me, for drugging me, for wrapping me in duct tape, you son of a bitch!”
“I have another roll of tape and I’m not afraid to use it,” he said lightly. “Behave yourself, Ms. Spenser.”
“You think this is funny?” Her voice was getting stronger now. “You have a pretty sick sense of humor.”
His faint smile wasn’t reassuring. “So I’ve been told. I’ll leave the gag off if you sit there and be quiet. I have work to do.”
“You’re an idiot.”
That got his attention, though it failed to ruffle him. In the dim light his eyes looked very dark, almost empty, but she’d managed to catch his attention, and he put the book down. “I am?”
Her brain was going very fast. “I know you didn’t expect to have me on board when you carried out your nasty little scheme—you tried hard enough to get rid of me. But now that I’m here, don’t you think you ought to make use of me?”
He leaned back against the chair, watching her. “And how would I do that? Are you offering to join our merry band?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Any fool can see what your plan is.”
“Enlighten me.”
“You’ve kidnapped one of the world’s richest men. Clearly you did it for the money—you don’t have the look of a wild-eyed terrorist. Therefore you need to negotiate the terms of the ransom, and I’m your woman.”
“Are you, indeed?” he murmured. “And why don’t you think I’m a wild-eyed terrorist bent on some bloody political crusade?”
“You dress too well.”
He laughed. It seemed to surprise him as much as it surprised her. He sounded as if he didn’t laugh very often, which was no surprise. She wouldn’t have expected extortionists to be a humorous bunch.
“So whose side are you going to be on, Ms. Spenser? Mine or Harry’s?”
“You want money, I want Harry safe. I imagine I can find a solution that will work for both of you. Now, why don’t you take the rest of this duct tape off me and we can negotiate. You already know I’m no physical threat to you.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he drawled, but he rose anyway, reaching in his pocket and pulling out a small knife. He leaned down to cut through the tape around her ankles, and she brought her bound hands down hard on the top of his head.
Or at least she tried to. He caught her wrists in one hand while he slit the tape at her ankles, not even bothering to look up. He ripped the tape off her ankles and then his cold blue eyes met hers. “It’s a waste of time, Ms. Spenser,” he said, “and it will only annoy me. It’s a boat—there’s no place to go but over the side, and I’ve heard there are sharks in this area.”
“I think I’d be safer with them,” she muttered. He cut the tape at her wrists, and she realized he was using the Swiss Army knife she’d tucked in her bra. She wasn’t going to think about how he’d found it, she was going to concentrate on how his grip on her wrists hurt, and decided if anyone was going to be shark bait it was going to be Peter Jensen.
“Is Jensen really your name?” she asked when he sat down again, closing the knife and tucking it back into his pocket.
“Does it matter? I’ve used any number of names. Jensen, Davidson, Wilson, Madsen.”
“In other words your mother didn’t know who your father was.”
The moment the words here out of her mouth she could have