Читать книгу Black Ice - Anne Stuart - Страница 10

Chloe woke with a start, just as the car pulled up outside a small sidewalk café. She had no idea how long she’d slept, and she still couldn’t believe she’d been able to do so when trapped inside such a tiny space with Bastien Toussaint. Maybe it had been self-preservation.

“Here you go,” he said, making no effort to turn off the car. “This is the remarkably boring little town of St. André. There’s a small bookstore around the corner, and if you change your mind you can get yourself some lunch at the café. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

“You’ll be back? Where are you going?”

“I have some business to attend to. If you were counting on my company I’m sorry to disappoint you, but there are certain things that demand my attention…”

“I’m not disappointed,” she said, feeling oddly grumpy. She glanced through the windscreen. The sky was dark, overcast, and the town looked small and depressed. “Are you sure the bookstore will have what I need? The town is very small.”

“It doesn’t matter. Hakim doesn’t care about the books—he just wanted to get rid of you for a few hours. Me as well. I doubt he’ll even look at what you bring back.”

She stared at him. “I don’t understand.”

“What’s to understand? This way he kills two birds with one stone.” His hands were draped loosely over the steering wheel. Beautiful hands. Even with the plain gold band.

She opened the door and slid out of the low-slung car. The temperature had dropped, and the wind was picking up, sending leaves scudding across the narrow roadway. “Two hours?” she asked, looking at her watch.

“Probably.” And he pulled away the moment she’d closed the door, disappearing down the narrow road as fast as he could.

It was after one—given the speed he was driving they could be halfway to Marseilles by now. She should have brought an umbrella—the weather was looking more threatening by the moment.

It was just as well that he’d left. He made her unaccountably nervous, and she wasn’t used to that. Men were basically predictable creatures—what you saw was what you got. But Bastien was a different matter altogether. She wasn’t sure of one thing about him—his nationality, his business, even his on-again, off-again interest in her. The only thing she was sure of was that he drove too fast. And smelled too good.

She headed for the bookstore first. Among other things, she certainly couldn’t count on Hakim’s errand being spurious, and she was a conscientious employee, no matter what the circumstances. The place was hard to find—she had to ask directions from a sour-faced old woman who probably wouldn’t have answered her in English even if she understood it. Fortunately Chloe knew her accent was very good, the result of starting French in kindergarten at the private girls’ school her parents had sent her to. She sounded more like a Belgian than a Frenchwoman, but that was much more acceptable than a lowly American.

The bookstore was just the disaster she’d expected. It was filled with the discards from some professor’s old library, and some of the titles were so esoteric even she couldn’t translate them. All in French, of course, and not a dust jacket in sight. They’d probably all been published before the war.

She found a couple of novels and bought them anyway. If they wouldn’t do for Hakim’s French-speaking guests then she’d read them herself. And then she headed back toward the café. Maybe there’d be a newsstand around—glossy magazines would probably serve just as well for bored grocers in their off-hours.

But there was no newsstand, not even a newspaper to be had at the dingy little café. But at least there was food, and by that point Chloe was ravenous.

She had a baguette and brie for lunch, washed down with strong coffee instead of the wine she usually would have ordered. At that point she didn’t plan to go anywhere near alcohol for the duration of this peculiar little job Sylvia had conned her into. And the sooner she was done, and back in her tiny apartment with a fistful of euros, the happier she’d be.

She lingered as long as she could over her meal, checking her watch every now and then. It was almost two hours—surely Bastien would appear at any moment. Hopefully before the rain.

She paid her bill and went outside, peering down the street for some sign of the Porsche. The streets were empty, the wind was whipping her skirts against her legs, and when she turned back to the café the door was firmly closed, with Fermé displayed on a sign in the window.

At that moment the first fat raindrop hit her, followed by another. She considered going back to the café, banging on the door, but they’d probably ignore her. They hadn’t seemed too happy to have a customer in the first place, and they were probably long out of hearing range by now. Or they’d pretend to be.

She headed back toward the bookstore as quickly as she could, but that, too, was closed and locked. She ducked under the portico, shivering slightly, pulling her coat around her as the drops of rain began to turn into a light mist. The town was so small there were no other public buildings that she could see. The post office would close midday as well, and if there were other shops they were nowhere in sight.

What was in sight was the old church. Chloe stifled a pang of guilt—getting in out of the icy rain was a poor reason for finally setting foot in a church, but she had little choice. The church was on the corner of the main square—she could keep an eye out for Bastien more easily, and it would be warmer than standing outside.

She was halfway to the church when the rain let loose its full fury, soaking her to the skin. The too-tight high heels were making it slow going, and she paused long enough to pull them off before sprinting the rest of the way to the carved wooden doors of the old church.

They were locked as well. What the hell kind of town was this, where they locked the church? What if she were some poor sinner in need of absolution or a moment of meditation?

Well, she was a poor sinner by the church’s standards, though she hadn’t had the chance to sin nearly enough over the past few months. But clearly this small town didn’t have much call for daytime sanctity. She plastered herself against the door, trying to keep as much of her body out of the rain as she could, and watched the water beat down on the street, running in rivulets through the cobblestones that should have been charming but had nearly broken her ankle. The temperature was dropping, and she wrapped her arms around her body, shivering. And then she realized that somewhere along the way she’d lost the books she’d purchased.

“Son of a bitch,” she muttered, then stopped herself when she remembered where she was. It only needed this to make the day complete. Bastien had been gone for hours, and with her luck he wouldn’t return. She’d be stuck in this unfriendly, nameless town, die of pneumonia, and Sylvia would have to find a new roommate.

Headlights speared through the rain, illuminating her as she huddled in the doorway. The Porsche pulled up in front of her, and she stood unmoving as he rolled down the window. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, sounding not the least bit sorry. “I told you you should have brought an umbrella.”

“Fuck you,” she muttered, finally reaching her limit as she snatched up her discarded shoes and stepped out into the driving rain once more. She climbed into the passenger seat, and proceeded to shake her soaking hair in her best impression of a wet dog.

He didn’t complain, which would have been half the fun. “Sorry,” he said again. “Where are the books?”

“Lost them.”

“You’re a mess,” he said, eyeing her critically. “That outfit is ruined.”

The thin silk shirt was plastered to her chest, to the bra that was slightly too small for her, and she plucked it away from her skin. Sylvia had always loved that shirt—it would serve her right for getting Chloe into this mess in the first place.

“You’re cold,” he said.

Chloe thought of several responses, most of them along the lines of “duh,” but she resisted the temptation. “Yes, I’m cold,” she said, shivering as she reached for the seat belt. Her hands were shaking too much to fasten it, and eventually she gave up, sitting back in the leather seat and hoping she’d ruin that as well.

Bastien hadn’t put the car into gear—he was looking at her. Or at least she assumed he was. The interior of the car was very dark in the driving rain, and he hadn’t switched on a light. “Do you want to go to a hotel and get out of those wet clothes?” He might have been asking if she wanted an ice-cream cone, so casual was his voice.

“I think not,” she said in a caustic voice. “Just turn on the heat and I’ll be fine.”

He put the car in gear and started along the road at the same suicidal speed he’d driven before, but this time in the dark and the pouring rain, and she wasn’t wearing her seat belt. The Porsche might be a glorious car but its heating system left something to be desired, and a half hour later she was still cold, fumbling with the lap belt because if Bastien was going to overturn them in his Le Mans haste then she wanted a fighting chance at surviving.

It was pitch-black by now, not just from the rain but from the hour, and Chloe tried to huddle into her seat, hoping he’d forgotten about her presence, faintly annoyed that he had, when he suddenly pulled the car over, the tires skidding on the wet pavement until it came to a stop by a row of hedges.

It was too narrow a road to park on, but they hadn’t passed another car the entire time. Which actually added to her sense of insecurity, when she thought about it. She was alone on a dark road with a man she didn’t know, and she didn’t trust him.

This time he flicked on the dashboard light, and the shadows it cast in the tiny space were harsh and unforgiving. Bastien no longer looked so smooth and charming. He looked dangerous.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“Trying to fasten my seat belt.” Unfortunately her voice shook slightly with the cold. “You drive too fast.”

“Idiote,” he muttered under his breath, and reached for something behind the seat. His body brushed against hers as he did so, and she held her breath until he sat back again. He had a white shirt in his hand, and before she could figure out what he had in mind he’d caught her chin in one strong hand and began drying her face with the soft cloth.

“You look like a raccoon,” he said in a dispassionate voice. “Your makeup is all over your face.”

“Great,” she muttered. She reached for the shirt. “I can manage.”

He pulled it out of her reach. “Sit still,” he said, dabbing around her eyes with surprising care. The shirt smelled like him. Like the elusive scent he wore, like the cigarettes he shouldn’t be smoking, like the indefinable smell of his skin. And how would she already know what his skin smelled like?

He dropped the shirt in her lap but didn’t release her face. “There,” he said. “Much better. Now you simply look mysterious and smudged. They will think we spent the afternoon in bed. Which is probably what we should have been doing, if you weren’t so American.”

She tried to jerk her face away, but he was holding her with more force than she’d realized. “We didn’t.”

“Such a shame. Are you disappointed? We could take a little detour on our way back—Hakim won’t be expecting us until he sees us.”