Fire and Ice - Anne Stuart [75]
He could wait for Taka to come back. Nothing had ever been able to stop Taka when he set his mind to it, and Reno had no doubt that he’d eventually show up and save the day. It would be the smartest thing he could do; making a move on his own would endanger Jilly and force him to interact with her. If he just stayed stretched out on the cot, forgetting what had happened on there just a short while ago, he’d end up as free as a bird.
He glanced over at her, wondering if she was crying. She wasn’t. Her face had an almost eerie calm, an expression that was making him very uneasy. He wasn’t foolish enough to think she was taking his instant repudiation well. He was just hoping the silent treatment was her only way of making him pay.
But he had the gloomy feeling that she had something far worse in mind.
17
The floor was surprisingly comfortable. In fact, she might even have preferred a bed of nails, but none appeared to be handy. She could always beat her head against the wall until she was bloody and unconscious, but she’d developed a certain fondness for the silk clothing that rat bastard had brought her, and she didn’t want to ruin them. She was going to take them back to L.A. with her, have them professionally cleaned, and wear them without a second thought.
He’d known. The whole goddamn time he’d known that she had a crush on him. How could Summer have told him? For that matter, how could Summer have known? It had been embarrassing enough to admit it to herself—she was hardly going to confess her adolescent fantasy to her wise older sister. All she’d done was drop in the occasional question now and then—that shouldn’t have been enough to tip Summer off. And she had taken the photos off the disk in Summer’s digital camera last time she came to visit. Most of them were of Japan and California and her beautiful husband. But there were a few, just a few, of Reno. And what was the harm in uploading them into her computer, as well?
Why would they tell him? It wasn’t like she was going to be anywhere around him. And it was going to be over and done with as soon as she found a decent-enough lover to carry through with the job. All right, maybe she’d come running to Japan with the subconscious hope of seeing Reno once more, after that initial look two years ago. But really, it was just a remnant of her odd, old/young life.
So she’d walked right into it, with Reno knowing all the time that she had a sophomoric passion for him. He must have been laughing at her wasted attempts at pretending he annoyed her.
No, that wasn’t true. He really did annoy her. He was a smart-aleck pain in the butt, with the emotional availability of a soap dish. And if she had supernatural powers, she’d vaporize him as he lay stretched out on the cot, his long legs dangling over the edge.
So her ridiculous crush on him was gone, wasn’t it? Had vanished the first time he knocked her out. Or it was definitely gone when he pushed her out of the car on the snowy mountain. Maybe not till he tricked her into the capsule hotel and put his hands on her with insulting ease.
Or maybe she’d held out until she’d actually had sex with him. That was enough to get her over him, wasn’t it? His ice-cold rejection the next morning?
And yet she’d made love with him on that very cot, only a matter of hours ago, all the while knowing he was a son of a bitch.
Okay, but now she really hated him. No hesitation, no caveats, no doubts. There was no coming back from his final, insulting rejection.
She closed her eyes, envisioning a solid chunk of the ceiling suddenly coming loose and landing square on the cot, squashing him like a bug. It was a lovely thought. Or maybe running him down with a car, so that he stood there, watching her coming and knowing that there was no way he could escape her murderous wrath.
No, she just needed to let go. She’d been used, shamed, insulted,