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“I don’t have a bathing suit.”
“Harry had a succession of women here over the years. If you look I’m sure you’ll find something that fits. Or do without one entirely.”
“Oh, yes, there’s nothing I’d like better than prancing around naked,” she said, just managing to keep the growl out of her voice.
“Don’t you think you’re safe around me?”
“Oh, of course I do. You were only planning to kill me, not rape me.” She pushed her hair back from her face. She was close enough that she could see his expression without her contact lenses. But as usual he gave nothing away. “Unless, of course, I could seduce you into letting me go.”
For a careful man he could make a dangerous mistake. He laughed at the notion.
“You don’t think I could do it?” she demanded, incensed.
“Seduce me? You could certainly do that…and we have two days to kill, if you’ll pardon the expression. Would it make any difference? No. And the question is, would you really be able to go through with it?”
She let her eyes sweep over him in a leisurely, insulting manner that failed to elicit any sort of reaction. “Why not?” she said. “You know perfectly well that you’re passably good-looking. When you’re not acting like the gray ghost.”
“Passably good-looking?” Now she’d really amused him. “I think you’d hold out for something better than that.”
He was flat-out gorgeous, with his long black hair curling at the back of his neck, his icy blue eyes, his long, lean body. “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said blithely.
“Don’t waste your time on me, Ms. Spenser. I’m an expert in all kinds of weapons, including sex. I have no emotions—I can fuck as efficiently as I can kill, and neither mean a thing to me.”
“I’d never thought of sex as a weapon.”
“You’re either lying or you’re hopelessly naive. And you don’t strike me as a hopeless romantic.”
Score one for her, Genevieve thought. He didn’t know her that well at all. In fact, she was desperately, impractically romantic.
She leaned back in her chair, stretching her long bare legs out in front of her. “So let’s sum this up,” she said in her best lawyerly voice. In truth, she’d spent very little time in court, and it had never been up to her to provide the summation, but she could wing it with the best of them. “I can’t leave the house because the doors and windows are electrified, but I can use the pool… What’s to keep me from taking off once I’m outside?”
“The pool area is surrounded by an electrified fence that would kill you.”
She swallowed. “All right. I manage to get past that, and then I have to deal with your sadistic cronies. I get past them and the waters are full of sharks. Which, by the way, I don’t believe.”
“I’d hate to see you end up as fish food,” he said mildly. “My mother took me to see Jaws when I was a kid, and it didn’t look like a pleasant way to die.”
“Are there pleasant ways to die? Don’t answer that—you’d probably know all too well. Anyway, I don’t think you had a mother. You were hatched from an egg like the snake you are.”
“Someone has to lay the eggs, Ms. Spenser,” he said mildly. “But trust me, my mother had a lot in common with a viper.” He turned away, dismissing her.
“That’s it?” she said. “You come in here to tell me all the ways I could die and then you just walk away?”
He paused by the door. “I’m warning you of all the ways you could die prematurely. You may as well fight it for as long as you can.”
“Why? Do you get turned on when your victims struggle?”
She’d gone too far, but then she’d been trying to goad him since he’d walked through her locked door. He moved so fast she had no warning—one moment he was standing by the door, in the next he was leaning over her as she sat, his hands on the arms of the chair, trapping her, his face dangerously close to hers, a blatant invasion as his legs straddled hers.
“You don’t want to know what turns me on, Ms. Spenser.” How could a voice be seductive and deadly at the same time? She looked up into his undeniably beautiful face, trying not to show any reaction at all. Was he even human, or simply a block of ice in the hot tropical sun?
But she’d forgotten his genius for reading her mind. “Or maybe you think you do,” he said in a soft, dangerous voice. And the softness was even more terrifying with everything else about him so hard and cold and merciless.
“No, I…”
He kissed her. Not the seductive caress before he rendered her unconscious, this was strange, different, angry. His mouth covered hers, and it had nothing to do with seduction. His kiss was full of anger and desperation and there was nothing she could do but let him. She clutched the arms of the chair, her fingers digging into the upholstery so that she wouldn’t lift them to touch him, as some crazy part of her so desperately wanted to. She let him kiss her, shocked at the feelings that went swirling through the pit of h
er stomach. She could stop herself from kissing him back, but she couldn’t keep her eyes from closing, and she couldn’t understand the hot sting of tears behind her eyelids. Was she crying for him? For her? What the hell was wrong with her?
