Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [46]
Taka couldn’t help himself—he laughed. She was a resourceful woman, and it was a good thing he hadn’t followed orders, or right now they’d be up shit’s creek without a paddle, especially with the Shirosama in possession of Summer’s closest relative. To find the urn, they would cut her into little pieces if that were necessary.
He made himself a cup of coffee, using the grinder and the coffee press provided, as he considered the fake bowl. He decided to do as he’d been ordered, wrapping it as carefully as if it were the real thing. He needed to keep the Committee off his back for a few days, long enough to figure out what the hell he was going to do next. Long enough to get Summer Hawthorne to tell him where the true urn really was.
He’d always been able to compartmentalize his life and his work. Sex was an everyday part of his job, one he did with his usual skill. It was said he could seduce a seventy-year-old lesbian and make her like it, and he didn’t doubt it for one moment. Everyone had skills. Peter was a sniper, a born assassin. Bastien Toussaint could be anyone he wanted, and he was lethal with a knife.
Taka knew how to fuck. He could get what he wanted from any woman, no matter what age or sexual orientation. He had skills that would have made Casanova blush. His body was his best weapon—he killed by hand, seduced and destroyed with merciless determination.
Summer Hawthorne would be child’s play compared to some. He wasn’t going to have any choice, and he accepted that fact with equanimity. Betrayal was the name of the game—to get what he’d have to use every weapon in his arsenal. She hadn’t responded to threats, to last-minute rescues, to danger, and time was running out. He needed to find out where the goddamn urn was, and he’d let her get away with too many lies.
He could tell her the Shirosama had kidnapped her sister, but that would only send her into a panic, and women in a panic were unpredictable. On the other hand, Summer was already enough of an anomaly—she managed to keep her head in circumstances that would have most women weeping. He needed something failsafe.
Sex. He hadn’t used sex with her, and he didn’t know why he was so squeamish in this particular case. Why was he hesitating? He could picture her, pale and defiant, and thought about that plain black underwear beneath the baggy clothes. These would be duplicates from her closet, so clearly she never wore anything that showed her body—nothing fitted, nothing with any color, and he once again wondered why. She had a good body. He’d seen her naked in the tub, and his powers of observation were top-notch.
She had nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to cover her figure in wads of dark clothing. Her hips and butt were maybe too generous, and her flesh was soft, rather than the tightly muscled buffness so in vogue nowadays. She had a woman’s body—round, soft, comforting. The kind a man stayed with.
He’d seen that uneasy expression in her eyes when she thought he wouldn’t notice. She watched him, and she was fascinated. Frightened. Attracted. And she didn’t want to be. If Taka’s instincts were correct, it would take very little to get her on her back. Very little to get between her legs and find out what he needed to know.
He had hoped he could do it some other way. If he did end up having to hurt her it would be betrayal enough. He didn’t want to have to fuck the information out of her.
But he’d run out of options, and there was nowhere else to go. He thought about her, pale and defiant, and he released the tight hold he’d had over his body. Looked at her and began to get hard.
What would she respond to? Strength? Being mastered? Some women were turned on by that, and he had no doubt that part of her fascination with him was because he was like nothing else she’d ever known. Hell, he was like nothing else most people had ever known.
Or would she respond better to softness? Gentleness, even a touch of uncertainty to give her the illusion of control? He could make her think