AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She went on, undeterred. “You said there’ll be backup?”
“A whole team of operatives focused on keeping you alive.”
“Lovely,” she said. “Just so long as you aren’t one of them.”
He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was. “Why?”
“Because I want you to walk out of this room and I never want to see you again.” Her voice was steel, hard and unbendable, a voice he’d never heard before.
“I’d be happy to but I can’t. Not until backup arrives. Harry won’t have stopped looking for you, even though he’s hatched this plan, and I’m not leaving you alone until someone comes.”
“You can sit outside the door and keep watch. Or you can get back in the car and watch from there. I don’t care what you do,” she said in a cool, impersonal voice. “I just don’t want to have to see you.”
“I can do that,” he said. “If you keep the door locked.”
She nodded, as if she didn’t trust her voice. He picked up his cold coffee and headed for the door, but her voice stopped him as he opened it.
“Just one question,” she said. “Did you know about this last night? Did you decide to fuck me into compliance so I’ll do what you want?”
He could see her beginning to unravel, and he couldn’t have that. They couldn’t. She had to be strong, and angry, or she’d never survive. She needed rage, not pain. So he did the best thing he could for her. He lied.
“Yes,” he said.
She nodded, and he closed the door behind him, waiting long enough to hear her lock and latch it. He couldn’t sit outside the door—it would be too obvious, but he had a perfect vantage point from the car. No one could even approach that room without risking death.
He needed to toss the cold cup of coffee. He looked down, and the damn thing was shaking in his hand.He stilled it instantly, letting the icy wall form again. And he headed down the stairs to the car.
The television was unplugged, and someone had yanked the cable wire out of the back. Genevieve plugged it back in anyway, and was rewarded with one very grainy channel with nothing but infomercials. She lay on her stomach on the bed, his bed. Because he’d claimed hers, taken her on hers, and she wasn’t going near it. She lay on the rumpled sheets and watched people tell her how to make a fortune in real estate, how to whiten her teeth, how to use kitchen appliances that were strange and incomprehensible. She could clear her nonexistent acne, take ten years off her face, learn to apply makeup, cut her own hair, remove unwanted hair and make scrapbooks.
They just didn’t tell her how to go on when she was twisted and broken inside.
If she got out of this alive she’d make her own infomercial, something along the lines of Fifty Ways to Kill Your Lover. She started coming up with some, but with violence looming over her head the exercise lacked a certain pleasure. Pushing him in front of a train, feeding him to the sharks were both nice ideas, but once it came to guns and explosions she shied away. She’d be facing that soon enough.
She slept off and on, not because she was tired but because she didn’t want to be awake. Maybe she was depressed, she thought wryly. Didn’t people sleep too much when they were depressed? And she sure as hell had a good reason. The man she loved was sending her to her death.
At least she’d learned that much. He was wrong about her being too smart to fall in love with him. She was dumb as a brick, because even after his betrayal she still loved him. She wanted to kill him, but she didn’t want him dead. She wanted him out of there, safe, and that had been half the reason she’d sent him away.
The other half was that as long as he was around she ran the risk of bursting into tears and begging him. And she had much too much dignity for that.
Harry Van Dorn was resplendent in crisp white slacks, a navy blazer and blue oxford shirt made of the finest Egyptian cotton, which he ordered by the dozen from Paris. He always liked to look his best when he was being filmed. His tousled blond hair fell in perfect waves—he had gone through half a dozen stylists before someone got it right, and his warm, lazy grin flashed whitely in his tanned face. He shoved his feet into soft leather loafers—no socks, of course— checked his reflection one more time and walked out into the huge hallway.
The lights and camera were all set up, and the children had already arrived. They were a patheticlooking bunch, but then, he’d chosen this group for their abject misery. They were the useless and unwanted of this world—sick and dying, and a large amount of his donated money was spent on prolonging their wretched little lives. They were ugly, all of them, and he didn’t like ugliness. They were a variety of colors—every dark race in this convoluted country. There was one pale-skinned blonde, but she had the thin, hollow-eyed look of an AIDS victim, and he wouldn’t touch her, or any of them, with a ten-foot pole.
But he would kill them. If he didn’t get what he wanted.
“This is so very kind of you, Mr. Van Dorn,” the woman who’d accompanied them gushed. She was in her twenties, a little plump, and she had a crush on him. She was always fluttering around him when he made his mandatory visits to bestow gifts and smiles on the revolting little patients to further ensure the world knew Harry Van Dorn was a kindhearted philanthropist. She even had the temerity to suggest he might like to have a cup of coffee with her, to discuss the patients, of course. She was some kind of social worker, he remembered, though her name escaped him.
She was still nattering on. “These children get so few treats—I know they’ll love a visit to your estate at Lake Arrowhead for the carnival you’ve arranged. They don’t get out of the hospital, much less out of the city, and I know a day in the mountains will be wonderful for them.”
“The pleasure is mine, Miss…” He deliberately let the sentence hang, just so she’d know how little he’d noticed her. She was expendable goods. But then, in the end, so was everybody.
Her bright smile faltered a bit. “Miss White. Jennifer White.”
He didn’t like the name. Jennifer was too much like Genevieve, and it was hard to keep his charming smile in place when he thought about her.
“I consider it an honor to escort these little tykes around for the day. If things run to
o late I’ll have my staff see that they’re well taken care of and they’ll be back in the morning.”
