Hot Ice

Whitney took a stroll around the suite until she thought her temper might hold. “Let me explain something to you. I don’t know how you worked before, and it isn’t important. This time”—she turned back to face him— “this time, you’ve got a partner. Whatever little plans you have in your head are half mine.”
    “You don’t like the way I work, you can back out right now.”
    “You owe me.” When he started to object, she took a step closer, drawing her book from her purse as she moved. “Should I read off the list?”
    “Screw your list. I’ve got gorillas on my ass. I can’t worry about accounting.”
    “You’d better worry about it.” Still calm, she dropped the book back into her purse. “Without me you’ll go treasure hunting with empty pockets.”
    “Sugar, a couple hours in this hotel and I’d have enough money to take me anywhere I wanted to go.”
    She didn’t doubt it, but her gaze remained level with his. “But you don’t have time to play cat burglar and we both know it. Partners, Douglas, or you fly to Madagascar with eleven dollars in your pocket.”
    Damn her for knowing what he had, almost to the penny. He crushed out his cigarette, then picked up his own bag. “We’ve got a plane to catch. Partner.”
    Her smile came slowly, and with such a gleam of satisfaction he was tempted to laugh. Whitney slipped on her shoes and picked up a tote bag. “Get that case, will you?” Before he could swear at her, she was moving to the door. “I only wish I’d had time for a bath.”
    Because of the ease with which they rode the service elevator down and walked out of the hotel, Whitney imagined he’d used that escape route before. She decided she could drop a letter to Georges in a few days and ask him to store her things until she could pick them up. She hadn’t even had a chance to wear that blouse yet. And the color was very flattering.
    All in all it seemed like a waste of time to her, but she was willing to humor Doug, for the moment. Besides, in the mood he was in they were better off in a plane than sharing a suite. And she wanted some time to think. If the papers he had, or some of them at any rate, were in French, then it was obvious he couldn’t read them. She could. A smile touched her lips. He wanted to ditch her, she wasn’t fool enough to think otherwise, but she’d just made herself even more useful. All she had to do now was persuade him to let her do some translating.
    Still, she wasn’t in the best of moods herself when they pulled up at the airport. The thought of going through customs again, of boarding another plane, was enough to make her snarl.
    “It seems we could’ve checked into a second-class hotel and had a few hours.” Sweeping back her hair, she thought of the bath again. Hot, steamy, fragrant. “I’m beginning to think you’re paranoid about this Dimitri. You treat him as though he’s omnipotent.”
    “They say he is.”
    Whitney stopped and turned. It was the way he said it, as though he half believed it, that made her flesh crawl. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
    “Cautious.” He scanned the terminal as they walked. “You’re better off walking around a ladder than under it.”
    “The way you talk about him, you’d think he wasn’t human.”
    “He’s flesh and blood,” Doug murmured, “but that doesn’t make him human.”
    The shiver skimmed along her skin again. Turning toward Doug, she jolted into someone and dropped her bag. With an impatient mutter, she bent to pick it up. “Look, Doug, no one could possibly have caught up with us already.”
    “Shit.” Grabbing her arm, he yanked her into a gift shop. With another shove, she was up to her eyes in T-shirts.
    “If you wanted a souvenir—”
    “Just look, sweetheart. You can apologize later.” With a hand on the back of her neck, he steered her head to the left. After a moment, Whitney recognized the tall, dark man who’d chased them in Washington. The moustache, the little white bandage on his cheek. She didn’t need to be told that the two men with him belonged to Dimitri. And where was Dimitri himself? She caught herself sliding down lower and swallowing.
    “Is that—”
    “Remo.” Doug mumbled the word. “They’re faster than I thought they’d be.” He rubbed a hand over his mouth and swore. He didn’t like the feeling that the web was widening at Dimitri’s leisure. If he and Whitney had strolled another ten yards, they’d have walked into