Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [87]
Maybe he’d just left her for a little while, long enough to make sure they’d gotten away, and he’d be back. Or maybe he was simply calling in reinforcements, handing her off to someone who didn’t want to strangle her every other minute.
That would be the best possible scenario, she told herself. That Peter Whoever-He-Was had gone, and some sober bureaucrat was about to show up to take her to a nice cozy safe house until someone figured out how to stop Harry. A place with high thread-count sheets and lovely food and…
She was out of her mind. Harry’s sheets had been the best money could buy—she was better off with the scratchy white crap she’d wrapped herself in.
She wanted to go home. Back to her beautiful, sterile apartment, back to her designer clothes and her Chanel makeup and shoes that cost too much and hurt her feet. She may not have been happy there, but she’d been safe.
She lay back on the bed, wrapping her sheeted body in the quilted bedspread as well, curling up into a pathetic little ball of misery. She was tired, she was frightened, and yes, damn it, she was hungry again.
And she was alone.
She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t cry. Crying only made it worse, and it served no earthly purpose. There was nothing to cry for—she was away from Harry Van Dorn, who’d casually ordered her torture and death, and she was abandoned by Peter…Madsen, that was the name! Abandoned when he probably would have rather killed her as well.
Sooner or later someone would come and get her, someone safe and solid. All she had to do was wait. And not feel so bereft.
It would have been better if she hadn’t fallen asleep. It lowered her defenses, made her emotional and vulnerable. The sound of a key turning jarred her into wakefulness, and the moment Peter walked in the door she flung herself at him in relief.
Unfortunately, he didn’t know relief when it hit him upside the head, and he slammed her face down on the carpet, her arm twisted behind her back, his hand like a manacle on her twisted wrist.
Hong Kong was quarantined. Harry’s ship, filled with infected pigeons, had been detained twenty miles out at sea, with a Hazmat team covering every inch of it. His captain had just time enough to warn him before they burst into the engine room. But not time enough to free the pigeons.
Harry threw the phone across the room so that it crashed into a glass-fronted cabinet, and there was broken glass all around. He began to pick up and throw anything he could reach—a lamp, a pile of books, a heavy bronze award attesting to his humanitarian efforts in the third world, a cat.
The cat managed to land on four feet and scamper away to safety. Harry liked cats. He liked their “fuck you” attitude, their haughty style. The only drawback was they ran too fast when he wanted to get his frustration out on something. He hadn’t yet been able to kill a cat, and he’d been trying for years.
Everything else crashed with what should have been a satisfying violence. But Harry was beyond satisfaction.
The phone rang. Unfortunately the handset lay smashed against the marble floor, but he knew the number by heart. He pushed the speakerphone, barking his name.
It was his second in command in London. Some- how hearing the words spoken out loud instead of in the privacy of his ear made it even worse. He pulled the base of the telephone from the wall and threw it, and it shattered in a pile of plastic and wiring, with a disembodied voice still apologizing for fucking him over.
Harry walked across the room and kicked the phone into silence. It was all falling apart, everything he’d planned and dreamed and worked so hard for. The Rule of Seven lay shattered—there was still a faint hope he could carry off the nuclear accident in Russia but he suspected that had been aborted as well—the place was just too remote for him to have heard as yet. Or