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“Strike three, you’re out,” she muttered.
“And you don’t look nearly as contrary as you are.”
“I’m not contrary, I’m accurate.”
“As I was saying . . .” He grinned down at her. “You look like a cream puff. An angelic, ladylike cream puff. So any guy who grabs you isn’t going to be expecting you to do anything except maybe cry.”
Deciding she’d bedeviled him enough for now, she shrugged her shoulders back and forth, loosening them. “Okay, so teach me how to make him cry.”
“I’ll be satisfied with just teaching you how to get away.”
Courtesy of the rape-prevention class she’d taken, she already knew some of the basic stuff. John refreshed her on many of the moves: how to break the hold of someone who grabbed you from the front—you brought your arms up hard and fast inside your assailant’s. A quick, stiff-arm jab of the palm up and into someone’s nose might not kill him, though it could if done hard enough, but it would certainly cause him pain. So would slapping your cupped palms over his ears, a move designed to rupture the ear drums. A jab of stiffened fingers into the eyes or throat was disabling.
He showed her the most vulnerable place on the throat for crushing the trachea. Without immediate help, someone with a crushed trachea would die. Even if she couldn’t manage crushing power, the blow, done properly, would disable.
They moved around on the mat, into different positions and scenarios. By necessity, the drill was close contact. Niema forced herself to ignore the sensations generated by having John’s tall, hard-muscled body against hers, his arms wrapped around her in various holds as he patiently instructed her on how to break those holds.
They both worked up a sweat, and he kept at it until she was panting for breath.
“Would it help if I cried uncle?” she finally asked.
“We can stop any time you want,” he said, surprised.
“Great. Now you tell me.”
“I don’t want to make you sore. We need to train every day, to build up your strength and stamina, and we can’t if your muscles are too sore to work.”
He actually looked worried, so Niema said, “No, I don’t think I’ll be sore, but I’m still ready for a break.”
“There’s some water in the fridge over there. I’m going to work with the weights while you rest.”
She fetched a bottle of cold water from the rusty refrigerator standing in the corner and settled down on the mat to watch. He stripped off his T-shirt and tossed it aside. Quickly she looked away and drank more water. Seeing a man without his shirt was nothing out of the ordinary, but still . . . this was John Medina, and he wasn’t ordinary.
She stretched out on the mat and closed her eyes, so she wouldn’t give in to the temptation to stare at him. There couldn’t be anything between them except the job. He was black ops, she was nine-to-five, two totally opposite lifestyles. Still, for a dizzying moment she thought of indulging in a brief affair with him.
What would it be like? She had enjoyed being with him today, even when he annoyed her. He challenged her, just by being himself. She was tired, but she could feel life coursing through her veins in a way it hadn’t done in a long, long time. Had he done that, or was it the prospect of being back in action? Or was he irrevocably bound up in that action, so that she couldn’t separate the two?
Her entire body felt sensitized after that workout with him. His forearms had brushed her nipples several times. His hands had been on her legs, her hips. His body had slid against hers, and several times, while they grappled, one of his legs had been between hers.
She rolled over onto her stomach and cradled her head on her arms. John Medina had “Danger Zone” written all over him, and for her own sake she should pay attention to the sign. She was already risking more than she could afford to lose.
“Time to get back to work, cream puff,” he called from where he was doing bench presses.
“Cream puff, my ass,” she snapped, and rolled to her feet.
CHAPTER
NINE
Villa de Ronsard, the South of France
Louis Ronsard trusted in nothing he couldn’t see, and very little that he could. Trust, in his experience, was a commodity with too high a price.
Even when he trusted, there were degrees: He trusted his sister, Mariette, to never deliberately do anything to hurt him, but she could sometimes be as foolish as she was lovely, so he trusted her with nothing that concerned his business. By necessity, he trusted a select few of his employees with some details cf the business, but he made frequent checks on their financial and personal lives to detect any weakness that might pose a danger to him. His employees were forbidden to use drugs, for example, but Ronsard was under no delusion that just because he said it, it was so. So . . . drug tests for all the employees, from the lowest to the highest.
He was aware that he walked a knife edge of danger. The people with whom he dealt on a daily basis were not upstanding citizens. In his opinion, they were either fanatic or psychotic, or both. He had yet to be able to tell which was the most unstable.
There was only one way one could deal with such people: very cautiously.
