Ice Blue - Anne Stuart [54]
She was dressed in baggy black jeans and a loose black T-shirt—the same kind of clothes he’d always seen her in. Who would think such a soft, responsive body hid beneath all those layers? Assuming she made it through the next few days alive, she needed to find someone who could take proper care of her. Someone to put her into better clothes and give her the kind of sex she needed.
Sex was no longer an issue, and he had to push it out of his mind. He had no doubt given her the first real orgasm—hell, the first two or three orgasms she’d had in her life. She might hate him for it, but at least now she knew that she could.
She waited until he moved out of the way, then opened the refrigerator and reappeared with one of her pink cans of soda and a tub of yogurt. He thought he’d have to make her eat, but she seemed perfectly calm and collected, finding a spoon and eating the yogurt as she stood in the kitchen as far away from him as she could.
Summer was practical—that was a good thing. She wasn’t going to weep and wail. She wasn’t going to acknowledge what had just happened between them at all. Women everywhere were good at the silent treatment, and it made it easier for him to concentrate on how he was going to get the two of them to Bainbridge Island as fast as he could.
Preferably before the Shirosama broke Summer Hawthorne’s teenage sister into a thousand little pieces that no one could ever put back together again.
So far they’d left her alone. Jilly sat on the narrow cot in her cell, perfectly comfortable despite her overwhelming craving for junk food.
As it was, they kept bringing her cloudy water that she didn’t want to drink, and piping the Shirosama’s creepy voice into the small room through invisible speakers. Invisible, because if she’d found them she would have smashed them.
She didn’t know what they expected from her. The droning voice went on in half a dozen languages, none of which she understood. She was relatively conversational in Spanish, but with the Shirosama’s accent the words were almost impossible to decipher, and if they were anything like the English version she didn’t want to know what he was saying. Just a bunch of New Age gobbledygook that made her long for the predictability and safety of science. She was pursuing a double major at the university—chemistry and physics—and the kind of pseudo-science mumbo jumbo he was spewing through the tiny speakers was grating on her nerves.
She stretched out on the cot, considering her options. They’d dressed her in the white pajamas that reminded her of a kung-fu mental hospital, given her a handful of granola bars, which she despised, and told her to await the Shirosama’s attention. She’d await it, all right. The old gasbag wasn’t going to get a thing out of her, and if he thought her parents would sit still for anything happening to their favorite daughter he was in for a rude awakening.
It wasn’t fair that she was the favorite, but then, as Summer pointed out to her, life wasn’t fair. Ditzy Lianne could get away with a lot in her pursuit of a higher consciousness, but when it came to her second born she could pull her head out of the clouds long enough to be a tigress. And no one should ever want to mess with Ralph Lovitz—he could terrorize the Mafia. One puffed-up, self-deluded cult leader would be child’s play for him.
Really, there was nothing to be nervous about. The True Realization brethren were far too interested in where Summer was, but since Jilly could honestly say she had no idea, it shouldn’t matter. Though when they started going on about some Japanese urn, her kidnappers lost her completely.
They’d told her this was a retreat, a safe haven for her, and she couldn’t dispute that the mysterious Petersens seemed to have been holding her as a drugged hostage. Not a whole hell of a lot different than being trapped in the Shirosama’s pajamas, without the benefit of chocolate.
She