Ice Storm - Anne Stuart [67]
A final shudder racked her body, and she squeezed her legs together, arching her hips, and shame swept through her. The knife, she thought, letting her eyes drift closed once more. The knife…
He hadn’t climaxed. He lay beside her, listening to her as her murderous little soul relaxed into an exhausted sleep, and considered his rebellious body. It was pitch-dark in the room—she wouldn’t have been able to see he was still painfully erect, practically vibrating with need. But something had made him pull out at the last moment. Something had stopped him, and he wasn’t sure what.
He considered finishing then and there, lying beside her in the darkness, breathing in the rich scent of her arousal. He could probably do it without touching himself, but he wasn’t going to. He could head into the bathroom, into the tiny shower, and take care of it, but he wouldn’t do that, either. He was going to lie in the torn-up bed next to his worst enemy, and think about how he wanted to be inside her again. And again. And again.
He should have gotten rid of Mahmoud days ago. Another man, the man he used to be, would have. The man he used to be would have fucked Madame Lambert into a compliant stupor by now, or he might not have touched her at all. But Killian wasn’t the man he used to be. And he didn’t even know who that man was anymore.
He wanted to turn and wrap his arms around her, pull her close. She was asleep—he could tell by her breathing—and she wouldn’t fight him, at least not for long. And he could put his head in the crook of her neck, taste her skin, and erase all the deadly years that had come between them.
But he wasn’t going to. He was going to spend the rest of his goddamned life with a hard-on, but he wasn’t going to touch her again. She was bad for him, and always had been. Crazy and bad, making him think things he couldn’t afford to think, making him a little crazy, too. He’d watched her from afar the last eighteen years, always knowing where she was, waiting, listening. He’d squandered his employers’ money and intel-gathering resources keeping track of her. Not that it mattered—his employers had money to spare, and he surely wasn’t getting as rich as he deserved for all his hard work.
He was hoping he’d be able to leech some money away from this current job before it was over. Shutting down the Committee was a complicated business, but he was well on his way to success. He’d already broken the acting head, and after Toussaint’s defection and Madsen’s injury, they were sadly understaffed. It wouldn’t take that much to finish them off.
Frigid. He let out a silent snort of laughter. What exactly had she been doing with herself during the intervening years that she’d managed to convince herself of such an absurdity? She would have had training in sexual techniques as part of her initiation into the Committee. No undercover operative could afford to be squeamish about such an effective weapon. And Stephan Lambert would have been certain to have given her a workout. While he was openly gay, he was also broad-minded, and could count any number of beautiful women among his former lovers.
So what had turned Isobel off so completely that she’d shut down all her physical responses? The logical answer, absurd though it was, was that she’d been waiting for him.
He wasn’t sure how he was going to use that knowledge. It was a useful weapon, but for the time being he’d keep it in reserve. He’d done what he needed to do, thrown her so off balance that her effectiveness would be compromised. His first step to taking down the Committee. It was enough for now.
He got out of the bed, heading for the shower. She stirred in her sleep, making a soft, protesting noise, and it took all his determination not to finish what he started. The feel of her, the taste of her, hadn’t changed. The way he wanted her hadn’t changed.
His self-control hadn’t changed. She was still the means to an end. And he couldn’t afford to forget it.
Isobel was alone when she woke up. She pulled herself into a sitting position, looking at her hand. It was shaking.