Hot Ice (12 page)

Woman alone. Strange man in her room. She would be both startled and afraid. Neither was hard to fake. She sure as hell was startled to see him. And one look at the tundra in his eyes and she knew she had cause to be scared.

He gave her a look of undisguised hostility from pale, chilly eyes. His lean, muscled body looked poised for… attack? Poised to block her? Poised for—something. He had a dangerous stillness about him, lethal power ruthlessly harnessed. Despite his relaxed pose, she strongly suspected he was pissed off and ready to detonate.

She hadn't been able to get a good look at him back in South America. But her vision was 20/20 now, and for a second Taylor's pulse accelerated with a purely feminine response. He
looked
even better than he'd felt. And that was saying something. He wasn't so much good-looking as he was arresting. His dark hair, combed straight back off his face, had grown a little too long out of an expensive cut, but still looked immaculate. His tanned face was lean, almost severe, with slashes of black brows over glittering storm-colored eyes. His tall, powerful body was clothed in dark pants and an open-necked, crisply ironed, pale blue dress shirt. He had the look of wealth; suave and elegant. He also had the look of a guy with a very long, very slow fuse. She had a sinking feeling she was about to see it blow.

He sure as hell is persistent
, she thought as her elemental awareness of him gave way to anger mingled with a large dose of fear.
What does he really want from me? Surely he's not still after those stupid computer disks
?

She'd considered returning to Switzerland to look in the box and see what the fuss was about. But she'd had better things to do. Now she was sorry she hadn't taken the time. She was really curious. Curious, but getting more nervous by the second.

Any normal person would jump to fill in the thick silence.
She
didn't dare until she knew just what his game was, and
he
didn't seem to be bothered by it at all. He'd make a good chess player. Or an excellent cat waiting at a mouse hole.

What he was, she thought with an inward shiver, was a predator.

After what seemed like several days, his sensual mouth curved into a small smile. It was a benign smile, but the hair on the back of her nape rose. "Hello, darling," he said with soft menace, the upper-crust British accent a little more pronounced than she remembered it. "Have a profitable evening?"

Wary, every sense alert, she felt behind her for the door handle. It refused to turn. Fine. She'd bullshit her way out of this. Play the affronted hotel guest. Lord. How had he found her again? Until two months ago,
nobody
had
ever
caught her. First that woman had come to her hotel in San Cristóbal. Then he'd shown up. And he'd done it twice. She pushed back panic and concentrated on righteous annoyance.

"Who the hell are you, and what are you doing in my room?" she demanded, keeping her attention on him while her mind raced with options.

The door behind her clearly wasn't going to open. He'd disabled the locking mechanism. She dropped her hand to her side. Given a few uninterrupted seconds, she could easily undo whatever he'd done to the lock. Unfortunately, she didn't have that luxury.

The sliding door on the far wall opened no more than nine inches and led out to a narrow faux balcony. She already knew slipping through that opening was possible. Knowing she had a way out was reassuring.

"No. Never mind introducing yourself. Just get out," she said furiously. It wasn't acting. She
was
the indignant woman returning from a fun party to find a strange, threatening male in her room. She couldn't explain it—she simply
became
someone else when she needed to
be
someone else.

She could huff and puff as much as she liked, apparently; he wasn't going anywhere. The man looked like he'd taken root.

His mouth twitched as he followed her line of sight to the drape-covered doors and back again. He gave her a benign look from steel-gray eyes. Taylor wasn't used to a man looking at her with such complete dispassion. And being the perverse creature that she was, she found herself intrigued. She shoved the ridiculous notion out of her head as he said gently, "The slider's been disabled as well."

She opened her eyes wide. "Good Lord. Surely you don't think I'd climb out of a window nine stories above the street?" She'd rehearsed doing exactly that, three times, yesterday. She knew, to the second, how long it took.

Despite being on the ragged end of furious with her, Hunt could still admire her
cojones
for putting on such a bloody good show. "If it would save your ass, yes, I do," he told her.

Her expression and tone would have done a Broadway actress proud. It was only the telltale hammering of her pulse at the base of her pale throat that gave her away.

She kept her back to the door, but he saw every taut muscle in her body ready to spring into action any second.

"What do you want?" Not a flicker of recognition in her eyes. Green contacts tonight, he noticed. The lady was one cool customer. There was a faint, almost imperceptible tightening at the corners of her eyes, but her expression showed only annoyance mixed with curiosity. She gave no indication that coming back to her hotel room in the early hours of the morning—alone—to find a large, pissed-off male sprawled on her bed was anything more than a mild annoyance.

Well, he'd give her
annoyance
.

Hunt took in the short, spiky, silvery blonde hair and clingy red dress—what there was of it—and hunger flickered dangerously to life in his body. With all that bare skin, the short black lace gloves covering her hands shot his lust level higher.

"You're late," he told her, not moving from his prone position as he did a lazy inspection of a body that he remembered only too well. The lady was built for speed, with sleek lines and elegant curves. She had a little more cleavage than he remembered, but he hadn't forgotten her pale pink nipples, or the feel of her creamy skin beneath his hand.

They locked gazes, and the flicker inside him became a flame. Hunt tamped it down with ruthless control. She was everything he fancied. Sophisticated, sexy, available.

And God only knew, everything he bloody well despised. A liar. A thief. An outstanding con woman. She should have been completely forgettable. So why the hell, when he hadn't had anything that passed for a relationship in the last—however many years—had he thought about this particular woman for two months and three days, 24/7?

Because she had something he wanted. That was why. She'd stalled an important op, leaving them precious little time. He'd forget about her the second she handed over those codes.

He dragged his mind firmly back to business.

The sapphires weren't in that tiny purse she held, and she sure as hell didn't have them anywhere on her. The red silk fit her body like a good paint job. "That was quite a chase you led us on tonight," he observed. "I must say, I'm impressed by your ingenuity."

She frowned, as though he were speaking Farsi.

"Scaling the outside wall of the museum like Spider-Man—no, that would be
Spider-woman
—impressive. Running behind that industrial park and emerging dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and a sweatshirt… You're a regular little Girl Guide, aren't you?"

"Let's see—next you took a cab across town to the Hyatt. Another change of clothes there. That was the brown business suit and mouse brown hair, right? The cab ride to the airport led us by the nose for a good ninety minutes. Yet another change of clothes,
this
change of clothes, and another cab ride back into town to the party on Franklin. Enjoyed the party, did you? You hung around for two hours, eight minutes, called yet another cab, and here you are."

She'd led his people on a merry chase. He grudgingly admired her ingenuity and thoroughness. She'd almost lost them several times. And that was a hell of a thing to have to admit.

She stalked across the room, picked up the phone on the dresser, then punched a long red nail at the zero. "That's a fascinating story." She kept an eye on him as she waited for the hotel operator to come on the line. "But you clearly have me confused with someone who gives a damn."

Hunt heard the dial tone from the bed. She glared at him, then glared at the phone. Punched Operator again. Same dial tone.

"Disabled," he told her.

She put the phone down with admirable restraint, considering that her heart was beating fast enough for him to see the throb of it at the base of her long slender throat. Fear or anger? She tapped her fingernail on the back of the receiver, the delicate
click, click, click
sounding out in the room like another heartbeat.

She gave him a hot glare. "I'm too damn tired to play games." Her hands curled into fists at her sides as she stood her ground. "Get out of my room before I do something violent."

"Like what?" Hunt asked politely. "Hit me over the head with a table lamp and handcuff me to the bed?"

"Some woman beat you up?" she asked, amused. "Poor baby. Did you forget to eat your Wheaties that morning?"

He swung his feet over the side of the mattress and stood. He gave her points. She didn't back up. "Think you're going to get another shot at me?" he asked, threading menace through the silk.

Big green eyes widened. "Who, me? Beat
you
up? Are you kidding? I'd break a nail."

Oh, well done
, he thought furiously. The angle of her head, the widened eyes, the mocking tone all indicated a woman not smart enough to fear him. She should be bloody terrified at this point. He was ready to—Bloody hell. "No violence." Hunt let his tone convey that
that
card wasn't completely off the table. "Give me the disks and no one will get hurt."

"If you've been in here for more than five seconds," she said, cool as a cucumber, "you know I don't have a computer, let alone disks. I have nothing worth stealing."

Her expression didn't waver. She kept those expressive eyes fixed on his face as she surreptitiously opened the small clutch purse at her side with two fingers of her right hand. He remembered the feel of those dexterous fingers, and gritted his teeth with annoyance. Hunt grabbed her arm.

Her wrist felt slender and fragile in his grip as he jerked it up and plucked the small beaded job out of her nerveless fingers. "What have you got in here?" he demanded with lethal softness. "A gun?"

She shot him an incredulous look. "A
lipstick
you—Hey!"

He kept a firm lock on her wrist as he dumped the contents of her bag onto the rumpled spread. Several hundred dollars in tens and twenties unfurled, a credit card, driver's license… "And what's this?" He tsked. "Mace?"

She shrugged creamy shoulders. "A girl can't be too careful."

Hunt realized that she'd done something to the bones in her wrist. Compressed them, contorted them or something, because her entire arm felt thinner, less substantial. He tightened his fingers until she stopped whatever the hell it was she'd been doing. "We can make this easy," he told her. "Or we can make it hard. I only want one thing from you. Hand it over and you can go back to your life of crime unimpeded."

He was close enough to see the faint rim of the contact lenses she wore covering her blue eyes. Close enough to smell her sultry perfume drifting up from the deep expanse of her velvety cleavage. Close enough to see a suggestion of nerves in her expression.

Good. I want you scared. This isn't a game.

She met his gaze straight on, then muttered, "
Debil
." Moron in Polish. "You obviously have me confused with someone else."

"You think?" He leaned over and picked up the driver's license from the bed. He shot her an amused glance. "Sharron Stone? The extra R's a nice touch, but it doesn't sound Polish to me."

"I'm only a quarter Polish," she informed him icily. "I
told
you I wasn't who you think I am."

Her current appearance matched the license. He scrutinized her face as though he was starting to doubt himself. "Her hair was dark of course." He put a hand to her crown and whipped off the blonde wig. Shiny black-coffee-colored hair tumbled to her shoulders. He reached out and touched a strand. It clung to his fingers. He quickly untangled the filaments as though he'd been burned. "Dark hair suits you better."

Her jaw clenched. "There's no law against a woman wearing a wig."

"Hmm, true. The woman I'm looking for was less… well endowed than you are…" He ran his gaze down her décolletage. Creamy white breasts plumped over the low-cut neckline. "I'd say she was more a B than a D."

Hunt slid his hand between the thin red silk of her barely there dress and the smooth silkiness of her breast.

Taylor's outrage was so great words failed her, a fact that didn't bother her visitor one iota.

"Very nice," he murmured, and she yelped in shock as he pulled out first one, then the other, silicone pad supporting her naked breasts. "But totally unnecessary. You have perfectly lovely breasts that need no padding." Her Anna Nicole bustline immediately went down to a respectable B cup.

The sensation of his callused fingers against her naked breast shocked Taylor into action. She swung up her left hand to slap him. He grabbed her wrist and blocked her lightning-fast knee to his groin, then held her away from him.

His English accent was far more pronounced now as he bit out, "You are
the
most provoking woman."

"And
you
are
the
most insufferable man." Heart racing, she matched him glare for glare.

One of the ways she'd used to deal with the instability of her life when she was a kid was to accept any challenge, any dare that came her way. Wasn't every job she'd ever taken as an adult merely a continuation of that dare? As a kid she quickly learned which walls were scalable and which fences were barbed. She still had the scars where she'd ripped her side open on a fence after accepting the dare to feed the Anderson's rottweiler. Rowdy had wanted to eat nine-year-old Taylor for lunch.