Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [55]
He slapped his hand over her face to silence her, and she was gone, lost, as her body convulsed around him, an endless surge that kept moving, renewing, drowning. She couldn’t breathe, and she bit down on his hand, hard, as her body dissolved into electric sparks that vanished in the night air, until there was nothing left at all.
She couldn’t move. All she could do was lie there and breathe as she slowly began to drift back to this darkened bedroom, this rumpled bed, to the man on top of her, still inside her. Still hard. She blinked her eyes open, dazed.
He was looking down at her, his blue eyes cool and assessing, and he wasn’t even breathing deeply. “Would you mind letting go of my hand?” he asked in the most polite of voices.
Her teeth were still clenched tight on his hand. She released him, shocked that she hadn’t even realized what she was doing, shocked at the blood on his hand, the taste of his blood in her mouth.
He slid off her, lying on his side next to her, sweaty but seemingly unmoved. “I’m sorry, I didn’t use a condom,” he said. “I usually prefer not to leave a mess behind.”
“Given the circumstances I hardly think it matters.” Unfortunately it came out in a choked whisper, hardly the blasé tone she was searching for. That answered her question. She’d been so caught up in her own overpowering response that she wasn’t even sure he’d bothered to finish. The wetness between her legs told her that he had.
She turned to look at him, and she put her hand on his chest, where his heart was supposed to be. Nothing but a calm, steady heartbeat. Her eyes met his, and he shrugged, and his slight smile was almost apologetic. “I warned you,” he said.
“You did,” she agreed, staring at him. The eyes were a window to the soul, they said, but in his case no one was home.
She managed to sit up, though she felt weak, shaky. She had to get away from him, even if it meant crawling across the floor. He’d climaxed, there was no question, but he was still hard. He hadn’t let go completely, of course he hadn’t. He’d proved his point magnificently—he could make her come and have only the mildest physical response.
She just didn’t want him to prove it again.
“I’m going to the bathroom,” she said. He couldn’t very well object to that.
“You can’t wash me away, Genny,” he said in a soft voice, closing his eyes. “You’ll never be able to, no matter how hard you try.”
She didn’t answer. There was nothing she could say, when she knew he was right. Had been right about everything.
She pulled the sheet from the pile of covers and wrapped it around her. Peter didn’t move. He must have fallen asleep, a dubious sign that he might be human after all.
She didn’t care. She was lost, drained. There was nothing left of her but a bedraggled girl in a sheet, wandering through the darkened house at the very edge of dawn, knowing that today was a good day to die.
She dropped the sheet by the edge of the pool and stepped into the water, feeling it wrap around her like a mother’s arms.
And she went under, letting it close over her head.
The girl would be dead by now, Madame Lambert thought, picking at her egg sandwich, if Peter had decided to follow his orders. It had been an ugly decision, but in the end, necessary. One of those horrible choices a commander in chief had to make for the sake of the greater good. She’d never had to make one of those decisions before, and it haunted her, when little else did.
Maybe Peter never received her instructions. He hadn’t responded to the last transmission, though he might have been too busy. Or maybe he got the instructions and decided to disobey them. He’d never done that before—he took orders like a machine, with no sorrow or pleasure, his soul and his conscience frozen in a block of ice.
Oh, God, she hoped so. She hoped for once Peter went with his gut rather than his orders. Isobel had no choice but to make that order. If Peter delayed, or chose not to kill the girl, there might