Cold as Ice - Anne Stuart [99]
“You,” he said.
21
He expected her to fight back. To tell him to go fuck himself, that she wasn’t walking back into Harry’s sick world no matter what the cost—they could find some other way to get him. Wasn’t that what their job was? Saving the good guys, killing the bad?
But she didn’t. “And what did you tell them?” she asked, her voice deathly calm.
“I told them you’d do it. We’ll have a sniper there, and the moment he gets a shot he’ll take it. All you have to do is stay calm.”
“I’m very calm,” she said. “Just answer one question. Why were you so sure I’d do it? Because I’m in love with you?”
He flinched, the first real blow she’d ever managed to inflict on him, and she told herself at least she had that much.
“You aren’t in love with me,” he said flatly. “You’re much too smart for that. You know the difference between great sex and true love. Though maybe I’m wrong—you didn’t even know where your clitoris was.”
He was fighting back, but he couldn’t embarrass her. She was beyond that point. “Then why did you think I’d do it?”
“Because you’re a foolish, sentimental woman who thinks she can make a difference in the world. In fact, it’s for the same reason you made the mistake of thinking you might be in love with me—because you’re emotional and romantic and you think you need to be in love to have great sex.”
“At least we’ve graduated from ‘nothing special,’” she said coolly.
He ignored the comment. “You’ll do the right thing. Whether it kills you or not. That’s why you didn’t take the out I gave you back on the island and make for the bunker, but went back to try to save Harry Van Dorn’s sorry hide. And look at what it got you. The man wants to kill you, to get back his lost pride because we scuttled every plan he had.”
“And you’re going to let him.” It was a statement not a question.
It wasn’t enough to get a rise out of him. “No. There’ll be people all around you, even though you won’t see them. Someone will take Harry out before he gets within ten feet of you, and then you can live happily ever after in your fancy New York apartment.”
“Don’t you think Harry will have thought of that? Won’t he have snipers as well?”
He didn’t deny it. “We’re professionals. We do this for a living and we know what we’re up against. If I didn’t think we had a very good chance of getting you out alive I wouldn’t have told them you’d do it.”
“‘A very good chance?’” she echoed. “How touching. And when is this all going to happen?”
He shrugged. She was taking this about as well as he’d expected—maybe even better. She wasn’t crying, she wasn’t begging. She was accepting the inevitable. With the bonus that she now hated him for betraying her. “Tomorrow sometime. He’s made the initial contact, set the terms. He’ll let us know when and where it’ll go down.”
She looked smaller, sitting on the rumpled bed in the plain clothes he’d bought her. Smaller, more vulnerable, and he wanted to shout at her, tell her to say no. They couldn’t make her do it, they couldn’t make her do anything. It didn’t matter what he told them, in the end it was up to her and she knew it. All she had to do was say no.
“All right,” she said. “On one condition.”
“There are no conditions. Either you do it or you refuse.”
She went on, undeterred. “You said there’ll be backup?”
“A whole team of operatives focused on keeping you alive.”
“Lovely,” she said. “Just so long as you aren’t one of them.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. “Why?”
“Because I want you to walk out of this room and I never want to see you again.” Her voice was steel, hard and unbendable, a voice he’d never heard before.
“I’d be happy to but I can’t. Not until backup arrives. Harry won’t have stopped looking for you, even though he’s hatched this plan, and I’m not leaving you alone until someone comes.”
“You can sit outside the door and keep watch. Or you can get back in the car and watch from there. I don’t care what you do,” she said in a cool, impersonal voice. “I just don’t want to have to see you.”
“I can do that,” he