Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [18]
She smoothed her pale blond hair back from her perfect face. No one had any idea of her real age—in their line of work they used the best plastic surgeons—and she knew the image she presented to the outside world. A well-preserved beauty, anywhere between thirty-five and sixty, with the best face money could buy. If anyone saw her naked, her body would prove the lie, but no one ever did.
Right now she felt as if she were ninety years old, and as ugly as the turmoil inside her. She couldn’t go on like this. These decisions were part of her daily life; she couldn’t let them destroy her. Summer Hawthorne had to die—it was that simple.
Madame Isobel Lambert reached once more for her cigarettes, dry-eyed, practical, cool-headed. And if her hand shook slightly there was no one to see.
Summer never thought she would sleep, but she had, soundly. She had no idea what time it was when she woke up—her watch was somewhere back at her house and the darkened bedroom had no clock. Light was coming in from the clerestory windows overhead, muted, shadowy, and she didn’t know whether that had to do with the weather or the time of day. Her sense of reality was astonishing. It could be any time from five in the morning to five at night, and her body was giving her no signals whatsoever.
She pushed the sheets aside and climbed out of bed. She’d slept in her underwear, which in retrospect seemed ridiculous. She should have just stayed in her clothes—the baggy black T-shirt and jeans he’d brought from her house. At least he’d brought the fat jeans. She kept three sizes: fat jeans, which were miles too big for her, regular jeans and skinny ones. If he’d brought the skinny ones she would have been miserable; she needed to be ten pounds lighter to even begin to be comfortable in them. The fat jeans were way too loose, but right now she liked the extra folds of fabric around her, and she could have slept in them quite comfortably.
She didn’t remember when he’d left her in the room. Had he helped her get undressed? She didn’t think so; she’d remember if he put his hands on her. She wasn’t used to being touched by beautiful men. She wasn’t used to being touched at all, and she preferred it that way. She could remember almost nothing. At one point she’d been in his car, wrapped in her bedspread, in the next she was lying in her underwear in his bed.
She couldn’t say much for his taste in clothing, at least as far as she was concerned. While he was elegant bordering on fashion model, the clothes he’d brought her were baggy and too big, including the plain black granny panties and industrial bra circa the time she’d been on the pill and gone from a thirty-four C to a thirty-six D, thanks to hormones. He must have taken one look at her and decided she was a sloppy pudge. That shouldn’t bother her at all, given the circumstances. But it did.
A far more overriding concern was how absolutely famished she was. She hadn’t had time for dinner last night; she’d been too busy working on last-minute details for the museum reception. And during the party she’d been too caught up in circulating and trying to keep away from her mother’s slimy guru to eat. And of course, things had gone to hell in a handbasket right afterward, and she had sincerely thought she would never want to eat again.
Now she was starving.
She pulled on the baggy clothes, looking around for her shoes, then remembered she’d taken them off outside the bungalow. She needed those shoes.
The more Summer thought about it, the more she knew that getting away from her companion was as important as getting away from the Shirosama and his followers. She had no reason to doubt that it was His Plumpness who was after her, but she didn’t have any particular reason to trust her guardian angel, either. He might have snatched her from the jaws of death a couple of