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She didn’t answer. There was nothing she could say, when she knew he was right. Had been right about everything.
She pulled the sheet from the pile of covers and wrapped it around her. Peter didn’t move. He must have fallen asleep, a dubious sign that he might be human after all.
She didn’t care. She was lost, drained. There was nothing left of her but a bedraggled girl in a sheet, wandering through the darkened house at the very edge of dawn, knowing that today was a good day to die.
She dropped the sheet by the edge of the pool and stepped into the water, feeling it wrap around her like a mother’s arms.
And she went under, letting it close over her head.
The girl would be dead by now, Madame Lambert thought, picking at her egg sandwich, if Peter had decided to follow his orders. It had been an ugly decision, but in the end, necessary. One of those horrible choices a commander in chief had to make for the sake of the greater good. She’d never had to make one of those decisions before, and it haunted her, when little else did.
Maybe Peter never received her instructions. He hadn’t responded to the last transmission, though he might have been too busy. Or maybe he got the instructions and decided to disobey them. He’d never done that before—he took orders like a machine, with no sorrow or pleasure, his soul and his conscience frozen in a block of ice.
Oh, God, she hoped so. She hoped for once Peter went with his gut rather than his orders. Isobel had no choice but to make that order. If Peter delayed, or chose not to kill the girl, there might be enough time to prove she was harmless.
Time. They were running out of time. They had another clue to the Rule of Seven—Takashi O’Brien was in place at Harry’s main residence and managed to come up with a connection to a diamond mine in Africa that employed thousands of workers. Again, owned by Harry, and he’d made no effort to divest himself of it. If the planned explosion went through, the carnage would be hideous, and no one would think Harry had anything to do with it. He’d lose a bundle.
So why was he doing this, if it wasn’t for money? Lust, revenge, sheer boredom? It could be all of those things. Harry was a spoiled baby who liked shiny toys and big explosions.
And Isobel had finally found out for certain when some of those noisy explosions were scheduled to take place. April twentieth. And the knowledge chilled her to the bone.
11
Peter Jensen didn’t let himself sleep. That was an indulgence for the weak, something that could wait until the assignment was complete. In the meantime he could close his eyes and let the feeling of physical satisfaction drain through his body, shutting off his mind at the same time. He wasn’t the kind of man to let regrets and mistakes interfere with his life. Taking Genevieve Spenser to bed was most definitely a mistake. And he didn’t regret it for a moment.
She’d looked so stricken. From the admittedly hurried intel he’d received on her it was a pretty sure thing that he’d just given her the best ride of her life, and instead of purring she’d looked shattered.
He’d expected to fuck her to sleep so that he had a few hours to figure out what the hell he was going to do about her. And instead, he was the one lying in a postcoital daze, while she must be wide awake wherever she was.
She wasn’t the best he’d ever had, far from it. He’d had sex with women trained for just such high-level work, he’d had affairs with women who loved sex and their own bodies and knew how to make the most of both. He’d had sex with women madly, desperately in love with him, and he’d even had sex with women who hated him. He wondered if Genevieve fit in that category. Probably.
He’d even made love, long, long ago. Helena had been a frail, doe-eyed waif with the softest mouth, and he’d gotten her out of war-torn Sarajevo and fallen in love by the time they’d reached England. She’d been a sweet, generous lover and he would have died for her. And almost did.
He was younger then, of course. And in his thirty-eight years of hard living, that was the only time he’d ever let himself be vulnerable. He still had the knife scar from when she tried to gut him. The Committee had neglected to inform him that beneath that innocent exterior was a traitor and a killer, one whose skills matched his. Almost.
Genevieve Spenser had been angry, resentful and remarkably inexperienced, if he could trust his judgment, and he usually could. He’d planned how he was going to take her, and there were no surprises— she’d responded exactly as he meant her to. No, scratch that. There was one major surprise.
His own response.
He was adept at turning off any distracting thoughts, and he did so now. He couldn’t afford to be lying in bed, mooning over an uptight lawyer who was going to cease to exist for him in a few short hours.
And she’d been gone too long. His instincts came awake, full force, and he jumped out of bed, and he felt colder than he had in his entire life.
She was floating facedown in the pool, her long hair spread around her like a halo. A moment later he was in the pool with her, hauling her up, cursing as he pushed the hair out of her face.
She was limp, pale, and he was so angry he shook her, hard, as he continued to curse at her. “You idiot! You fucking stupid bitch! What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
She coughed, dumping water all over him, and her eyes blinked open. “Saving you the trouble,” s
he said.
He shook her again, harder. He didn’t care if he was hurting her, didn’t care if he left bruises. His red-hot fury blinded him to everything. “Why?” he said. “So we had sex—that’s no reason to go all Ophelia on me. For Christ’s sake, Genevieve, it was just a fuck.”
But she still had that broken look in her eyes. The eyes that had been glaring at him, defying him for the last forty-eight hours. The eyes that were now filled with tears.
“How could you do that to me?” she whispered. “You took everything. How could you?”
He really had no choice. He pulled her into his arms, holding her tight against his body. He’d broken her completely. It had been the smartest thing he could do, what he was best at. He should feel satisfaction. Mission accomplished. And instead, he felt as if he’d lost everything as well.
