Ice Storm - Anne Stuart [64]
“Not me.”
“Bullshit,” she replied. “You’ve screwed up on just about every mission you’ve been involved in. It’s no wonder half the world wants you dead. The other half wants to kill for the things you didn’t fuck up.”
“I’m not going to argue with you,” he said lazily. “You see mistakes, I see alternative opportunities. And I don’t have any particular weakness.”
“Not even me?”
“Damn, woman, you’re getting feisty on me,” he said lightly. “Are you sure you want to go there?”
She didn’t. She didn’t want to go anywhere near the question of why he’d kept track of her over the years. Except that answer made perfect sense. “I assume you want revenge. A stupid, innocent girl got the drop on you and almost killed you. That must have hurt your pride, even worse when you found I’d survived, and spent my life doing a damn good job of interfering with monsters like you. I think you want to humiliate me, torture me and then kill me.”
He looked thoughtful. “You don’t seem to be troubled by any of those possibilities.”
“I said it was what you wanted to do. Not what you were going to do. You need me, you need my resources, and by the time I’m no longer necessary I’ll be well out of your way.”
“I could always hire someone.”
“You could have done that anytime in the last eighteen years.”
“Maybe I wanted to see your face when you found out I was still alive.”
“Well, you missed that particular treat. I was alone in my office when I realized the lousy footage of a war criminal was someone I thought I’d killed long ago.”
“And how did you feel, Mary Isobel?” His voice was silky.
“Redeemed. Justified. Saddened that I hadn’t done a better job. You were someone who should have been killed—I just wasn’t good enough at the time.”
“You are now. And you can’t do it, because you need me as much as I need you. That must be incredibly annoying.”
“Incredibly.”
“So why couldn’t you have the kind of relationship James Reddy wanted?”
She thought she’d distracted him from that line of questioning. The more she resisted, the more he’d dig, so she swiveled around on the banquette, drawing her legs up under her. “He was in love with me. Hearts, flowers, all that bullshit. And I don’t believe in love.”
“So why didn’t you just screw him and keep him happy? Most men will settle without going all emo on you. Most men would prefer it that way.”
“James was a romantic. An idealist. He came into the business trying to save the world, trying to do the right thing. He died because of it.”
“And because he wanted to prove himself to you. What would he have to do to make you love him?”
She answered him, because she knew he’d badger her until she did. “I did love him. Just not the way he wanted.”
“Not sexually.” It wasn’t a question.
“I’m not discussing my sex life with you,” she said.
His smile was cool and deadly. “We don’t need to talk about your sex life, since it appears to be nonexistent after James Reddy. Maybe even before.”
Isobel said nothing, trying to shut him out, that soft, insinuating voice other women would have found so seductive. Not her, of course. But other women.
He rose from the bed, and she braced herself for God knew what. He stood over her, too close, and she made herself look up at him, trying to judge him dispassionately. He’d been good-looking eighteen years ago. He was flat-out gorgeous now; she could admit it without emotion. His endless legs encased in faded jeans, the khaki shirt that was worn but clean, the face that somehow only looked better with age. Gray-blue eyes she’d thought were green, warmer than the eyes of a butcher should be. When he was in his twenties she’d been passionately, devotedly besotted, thinking he was so impossibly handsome he’d never look twice at her.
He had, but for his own reasons. And now, impossible as it was, he was even better looking, with a lean, weathered, world-weary grace