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He didn’t bother denying it. Any fool could see that she was almost hypersensitive to his presence. He drained his wineglass and pushed away from the table. “My pleasure,” he said lazily.
And he strolled from the room, hands shoved in his pockets, entirely at ease with his task.
There was no sign of her in the upstairs library, but the computer was out of sleep mode, proving she’d just been there. She’d made an inadequate attempt at covering up her Internet snooping, but it didn’t take much to find her footprints. She’d been looking up Legolas, and she’d found the right site to tell her just how very dangerous and illegal those weapons were. She’d also looked up half the people in the room, including him.
He didn’t bother to check—he knew exactly what she would and wouldn’t discover in her clumsy tripping through the Internet, about the others and about him. Bastien Toussaint was thirty-four years old, married, no children, rumored connections with various terrorist organizations, never proven, suspected to be an international dealer in illegal weapons and drugs. Connected to the murder of three Interpol agents. Considered to be a very dangerous man.
She would have read that, but then, it should be nothing new to her if she’d been properly briefed. If it was news to her he was going to have a hard time getting any closer to her, to find out exactly who and what she was.
And he was going to find out just how hard to get she was. And exactly how good his performance, as Monique termed it, was. No more graceful little dance. The time had come to find out why she was really here.
And then to do something about it.
Chloe was scared shitless. Sitting in the middle of her elegant room, crying. Her freshly applied makeup would be running down her face, she thought, and she’d look like a raccoon all over again. And this time Bastien wouldn’t be there to mop up the mess with one of his soft, clean shirts. He wasn’t going to get anywhere near her.
She had to get out of here. How in God’s name had she managed to land in such a nest of vipers? She should have realized something odd was going on, but her parents had always told her she had an overactive imagination, and she’d decided they were right. An addiction to thrillers and fantasy novels probably hadn’t helped.
But this was no imaginary danger. These weren’t grocers, and why the hell she’d ever thought they were was a total mystery. Did Bastien Toussaint look like a chicken importer? Did Baroness Monique von Rutter buy her designer clothes and magnificent diamonds with the proceeds from soybeans?
“Idiote!” she said aloud. She needed to get the hell out of there, fast, before they decided she was a liability. She’d left the dining room
immediately, not even pausing when she heard her name in the midst of a German sentence. Getting to the Internet before anyone could catch her was too important. Baron von Rutter was a sweet old man—he wouldn’t allow them to harm her. Unless, of course, he was equally ignorant of what was actually going on here.
Her suitcase was in the bottom of the armoire. She dragged it out and began throwing Sylvia’s clothes into it, including the ruined silk blouse and shredded stockings. It was simple enough—she would tell Monsieur Hakim that she’d received an e-mail from her roommate informing her that her grandmother was desperately ill and she needed to fly home to her family immediately. She could even tell them her ticket on Air France was already booked, and she was due to fly out in less than twelve hours. Just enough time to get back to Paris, throw a few things in a bag and fly home. For the first time in her adult life she was actually frightened.
She was hardly set for travel. She’d picked the plainest dress Sylvia had sent—a clingy black wrap dress that showed too much cleavage, though she’d managed to pin it closed. Beneath it were black French lace underthings that belonged on a rich man’s mistress, and if she had to put another pair of too-small heels on she’d cry.
But she did have to, if she was going to get out of here alive. She could hide her panic—she’d never been a very good liar but the stakes had never been so high. Just think of it as an act, she told herself. Like Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire…No, someone more self-sufficient! She wasn’t going to find any strangers with kindness to rely on in her situation.
The suitcase was a jumbled mess, and she didn’t care. She went into the tiny bathroom, swept the toiletries in the embroidered satchel Sylvia used, and went back to toss it into the suitcase before she closed it.
“Going somewhere?” Bastien Toussaint drawled from the open doorway.
8
Chloe Underwood stared at him as if he was an axe murderer, Bastien thought lazily. She was in a panic—a tear-streaked, mindless panic, which seemed one more bit of evidence that she was a complete innocent who’d accidentally got caught up in this mess. Except that Bastien didn’t believe in accidents.
It was like looking into a hall of mirrors, he thought. You couldn’t tell where the original began, and what was merely a reflection of the real thing. Was she an innocent? An inept agent? A very good agent pretending to be an innocent? Pretending to be inept?
Time was running out, and there was only one way to get to the truth of the matter. Hurting her would get him nowhere—she’d be trained to withstand pain and she’d give up nothing she didn’t want to give up.
But there were other, much more pleasurable ways of finding out what he wanted to know. He kicked the door shut behind him, watched the alarm in her eyes grow.
He knew where the security cameras were—he’d scoped them out last night when he’d searched her room. They covered almost the entire room, including the bed and the bathroom, and he had little doubt that if they didn’t have an avid audience they were at least being taped for posterity. He was going to need to put on a good show—Hakim and company wouldn’t be easily fooled.
That didn’t mean he had to have an audience. There was a corner of the room that was mostly out of range of the cameras, a little foyer with a gilt Louis XV chest. Probably a genuine Louis XV. It would do.
She was standing in the middle of the room, unmoving, but when he came toward her she moved back nervously. She thought she knew who he was, what he was capable of. She didn’t know the half of it.
He opened the armoire, exposing a television set, and turned it on. Turned the sound up, loud, and then switched channels until he came to what he wanted. Hakim would have hard-core pornography running twenty-four/seven, and the moans of simulated pleasure filled the room.
“What are you doing?” Chloe demanded, aghast, averting her gaze from the low, wide television screen. Two men were servicing one woman, not his favorite fantasy, but the sound was enough to drown out most of their conversation.
He stood there, saying nothing as he stripped off his jacket, tossing it onto a chair. He was just out of range of the camera, and the sounds emanating from the television would muffle anything they said. “Come here,” he said.
He might as well have suggested she jump off a building. She shook her head stubbornly. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I want you to leave.”
“Come here.”
