Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [86]
A sheet had worked before, it would work again, and too damn bad if it made Peter think of the night they’d spent together. He’d already informed her it was nothing special; he would hardly be swept away by uncontrollable lust at the sight of a tangle-haired ghost in a bedsheet.
She opened the bathroom door a crack. “Could you hand me a sheet?”
No answer, the son of a bitch. He probably wanted to force her to come out in a towel, not for any prurient reason but just to humiliate her. Well, she wasn’t going to let that happen. Humiliation was a state of mind, and she’d already reached the pinnacle, or was it the nadir, an hour ago when she lost the entire contents of her stomach while he held her. Traipsing around in a towel was nothing compared to that.
Except that in such a cheap motel the towels were incredibly skimpy, and she was a tall woman. She’d been knocked out for God knows how long—weeks if what Harry said was true—long enough to lose the extra weight? She looked down at her body and it still looked the same—smooth and curvy. Clearly running for her life and almost dying hadn’t gotten rid of those fifteen pounds. The universe must want her that way.
Besides, it was the least of her worries. She wrapped the towel around her as best she could, opened the door again and announced, “I’m coming out.”
There was no snotty rejoinder. Because he wasn’t there. The room was empty.
She yanked the top sheet off one of the beds and wrapped it around her, refusing to think about Harry’s island, and went straight to the door. Locked, of course. He’d somehow managed to secure it from the outside, and no matter how she fiddled with the door it wouldn’t budge.
The room had one small window next to the door, and she pulled back the curtains, ready to pick up a chair and crash it through the glass. Unfortunately the Sleepy Time ’otel didn’t believe in chairs—apparently people came there to use the bed and not much else. The bedside table was fastened to the wall, and the TV was bolted in place. There was nothing to break the window with.
Except her fist. She’d seen it done in movies and on television, and it was simple enough. Just wrap your hand in a towel and punch it through the glass. She picked up one of her discarded towels, wrapped it around her fist and slammed it against the glass.
Unfortunately even the thin terry cloth absorbed the blow, and the windowpane didn’t even shake. She cursed beneath her breath, dropped the towel on the floor and stripped one of the pillowcases off, wrapping that around her hand. She made a fist, and tried to channel Jet Li or Sonny Chiba, punching straight into the center of the glass.
There was no way she could silence her screech of pain as the force of the blow jarred her entire body. Her hand and fingers were numb, her wrist aching, and the window remained solid.
The glass had to be reinforced, which only made sense, given the neighborhood and the obvious clientele. Her entire hand was throbbing, and shaking it only made it worse, so she cradled it against her stomach with a quiet little moan. But she wasn’t giving up.
She loved martial arts movies, even though she knew just how far-fetched most of them were from her training with Master Tenchi. She’d never been terribly good at kicks, and she was out of practice, but if Jet could take out a car window with his foot then she could certainly manage a reinforced household window.
She stuck her foot in the pillowcase, using her one good hand, but she couldn’t figure out how to keep it on. She certainly didn’t need her ankle going through shards of glass.
She finally gave up, dropping down on the bed in defeat. What if Peter wasn’t coming back? What if he’d dumped her there, locking her in so she’d starve to death? She looked around for a telephone to call for help, something she should have thought of sooner, but of course there wasn’t one. She had no idea whether the rooms were soundproofed or not, but she suspected that was one area where