Hot Ice

she’d seen before. She waited, breathlessly, for the man to turn so that she could be sure. When the hat disappeared into a doorway, she let out a frustrated breath. She was just jumpy. How could anyone have followed the zigzagging trail they’d taken to Diégo-Suarez? Doug better get back soon, she thought. She wanted to bathe, change, eat, and hop a plane.
    Paris, she thought and closed her eyes. A week of doing nothing but relaxing. Making love and drinking champagne. After what they’d been through, it was no less than what they both deserved. After Paris… She sighed and walked back to the bath. That was another question.
    She turned off the taps, straightened, and reached down to unbutton her blouse. As she did, her eyes met Remo’s in the mirror over the sink.
    “Ms. MacAllister.” He smiled, lightly touching the scar on his cheek. “It’s a pleasure.”

CHAPTER
14
    She thought about screaming. Fear bubbled in the back of her throat, hot and bitter. It closed in the pit of her stomach, hard and cold. But there was a look in Remo’s eyes, a calm, waiting look, that warned her he’d be only too happy to silence her. She didn’t scream.
    In the next instant, she thought about running— making a wild, heroic dash past him and out the door. There was always a possibility she’d make it. And a possibility she wouldn’t.
    She backed up, her hand still poised at the top button of her blouse. In the small bathroom, her fast, uneven breathing echoed back over her. The sound of it made Remo smile. Seeing this, Whitney struggled for control. She’d come so far, worked so hard, and now she was cornered. Her fingers closed over the porcelain of the sink. She wouldn’t whine. That she promised herself. And she wouldn’t beg.
    At the movement behind Remo, Whitney shifted her gaze and looked into Barns’s idiotic, amiable eyes. She learned fear could be primitive, mindless, like the terror a mouse feels when a cat begins to playfully bat it with its paws. Instinct told her there was a great deal more danger in him than in the tall, dark man who leveled a pistol at her. There was a time for heroics, a time for fear, and a time for rolling the dice. She forced her fingers to relax, and prayed.
    “Remo, I presume. You work fast.” And so did her mind, beginning to rapidly tick off angles and escape routes. Doug had been gone no more than twenty minutes. She was on her own.
    He’d hoped she’d scream or try to run so that he would have a reason to put a few bruises on her. His vanity still smarted from the scar on his cheek. Vanity aside, Remo feared Dimitri too much to put a mark on her without provocation. He knew Dimitri liked women brought to him unmarred, whatever condition they were in when he was done with them. Intimidation, however, was different. He put the barrel of the gun under her chin so that it pressed into the soft, vulnerable point of her throat. At her quiver, his smile spread.
    “Lord,” he said briefly. “Where is he?”
    She shrugged because she’d never been so frightened in her life. When she spoke her voice was deliberately even, deliberately cool. Every drop of moisture in her mouth had dried up. “I killed him.”
    The lie came so easily, so swiftly, it nearly surprised her. Because it had, and easy lies carried the ring of truth, Whitney went with it. Lifting a finger, she nudged the barrel away from her throat.
    Remo stared at her. His intellect rarely dipped below the surface to subtleties, so that he saw the insolence in her eyes without seeing the fear beneath. Grabbing her arm, he dragged her into the bedroom and shoved her roughly into a chair. “Where’s Lord?”
    Whitney straightened in the chair, then brushed at the already tattered sleeve of her blouse. She couldn’t let him notice her fingers were shaking. It was going to take every ounce of guile at her disposal to pull it off. “Really, Remo, I expected a bit more style from you than from a second-rate thief.”
    With a jerk of his head Remo signaled to Barns. Grinning still, he approached her with a small, ugly revolver. “Pretty,” he said and nearly drooled. “Soft and pretty.”
    “He likes to shoot people in places like kneecaps,” Remo told her. “Now where’s Lord?”
    Whitney forced herself to ignore the gun Barns aimed at her left knee. If she looked at it, if she even thought about it, she’d have collapsed in a puddle of pleading. “I killed him,” she repeated. “Do you have a