Spirit Bound - Christine Feehan [168]
Judith pressed a hand to her stomach. “You didn’t come here to retire as Thomas Vincent. You came here because you think Jean-Claude gave me the chip.” Her dark eyes went stormy. “Did you think I let him murder my brother rather than give it back to him?”
“Judith.” He took another step toward her, but she backed away again, this time putting the counter between them. “That’s not true. I shared his cell. The walls were covered in photographs of you. I believe he’s obsessed with you, but wasn’t certain why. I spent two months in that cell with nothing to do but look at those pictures of you.”
“Oh, God. You want me to believe you fell madly in love with me because of some pictures in a prison cell? Do you really think I’m that stupid?” She looked around her as if desperate for a way to escape. “What do you want, Thomas? Or is it Stefan I’m talking to now? Just tell me, and then go.”
“I don’t know when I fell in love with you, Judith. I wish I could tell you, but I realized that first day I met you, when you came toward me that my life was going to change.”
She shook her head, rejecting his admission. “Tell me about you and Jean-Claude and why you’re here. The real reason.”
“I knew, after meeting him, the only way to get the information we needed was to get him out of prison and take him to a place where we could interrogate him ourselves. That was the plan, and then Sorbacov stepped in. He ordered other agents to aid La Roux’s escape and sent me here. I knew it was a setup. I’m too valuable to babysit an ex-girlfriend on the off chance that La Roux would somehow manage to escape our agents. He had to be planning to use me as bait to bring Lev out into the open.” It was a measure of his distress that he called his brother by his given name.
“So you were really sent here to babysit me? And your government helped Jean-Claude escape? Wow, you found the perfect way to keep an eye on me. All those times you admitted you’d been trained in the art of seduction, you weren’t kidding, were you? And I was so easy. All you had to do was study my personality and I was easy pickings. You’re damned good at your job, Stefan.”
“You’re making it sound far worse than it was. I had no intention of babysitting you—or seducing you. I’m telling you, Judith, I’m in love with you. The rest of it wasn’t supposed to happen. La Roux had his men waiting. They killed the agents and he’s in the wind now.”
“How handy that you’re right here, in the exact place that he’s bound to come.”
“Judith,” Stefan began.
She shook her head and gathered up her paintings. “I don’t want to hear any more. I’m going to work. You can leave.”
“You know I’m not going to leave. We’ll work this out.”
She looked him up and down, a long, slow perusal of distaste. “There isn’t enough time in the world to work this out.” Abruptly she turned her back on him and went downstairs.
20
JUDITH refused to cry in front of Stefan. She just wouldn’t let him destroy her hard won poise. How could she have let him into her life—into her heart—so fast? She was so stupid. Tears blurred her vision as she hurried down the stairs carrying the paintings with her. It was growing dark and she flicked on the lights to better illuminate the canvases to see how much actual damage there was to the artwork while she stretched them. Unlike the happy chaos of her kaleidoscope studio, this room was where she earned money as a conservator of old paintings and she kept it immaculate.
Closing the door firmly she contemplated whether to bother locking it. A man like Stefan Prakenskii could get through a security system, he certainly would have no problem getting through a locked door. She stood there, in the middle of the room, wanting to throw a childish tantrum, to hurl the canvases around the room and scream out her anguish.
Instead, she stayed in perfect control, tears running down her face, as she placed each of the paintings on the table. She breathed in and out, pushing pain away.