Hot Ice Read online

  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.

  There was a lot of rottweiler in this guy.

  She let her eyes shift to the door as she leaned slightly in that direction, as if ready to make a break to the right. His grip tightened on her left arm. Oh, please, as if—

  With a quick jerky movement she broke free and dashed left. Straight for the slider.

  “Bloody hell, woman.”

  Two seconds, and the door slid open the full nine inches. She slipped through as quickly as a greased eel and onto the foot-deep false balcony. Safety was seconds away. He couldn’t possibly fit through the slider to come after her. Triumphant, heart pounding with exhilaration, Taylor threw a leg over the wrought-iron railing—

  Only to be unceremoniously jerked backward. Hard fingers gripped her upper arm and yanked her back through the opening. He couldn’t squeeze his large body after her, but he had long arms. The whole thing had taken all of five seconds!

  Damn.

  “Jesus Christ, woman. Do you have a death wish?” He hauled her into the center of the room, not releasing his merciless grip on her arm. Taylor’s fingers went numb. He jerked her around to face him. They were close enough for her to see the unadulterated fury in his steel gray eyes. Yeah? Well that made two of them.

  “Why? Because I tried to jump?” she demanded, heart still doing the adrenaline gallop. “Or because you think I should be scared of you?” The slider was still open. The drape dancing in the breeze. She’d make it the next time.

  The shackle of his fingers slid down her arm to her wrist. “You should be a damn sight more afraid of me than of taking a header down nine stories.”

  “Is that so?” She struggled in his grasp, all pretense at serenity gone in a flash of red-hot temper. “Well, I’m not scared of either you or heights. I’m freaking pissed off. Who the hell do you think you are breaking in here and manhandling me like this?”

  Eleven

  Hunt wasn’t feeling sanguine himself. Anger, arousal, and admiration all vied for supremacy. Anger was the most appropriate. “I’m the guy who caught your ass. Again.”

  He tightened his fingers around her wrists until her hands went pale and bloodless. Satisfied that she’d stay put, he wrapped his hands around her slender, white neck, thumbs feeling the unsteady jump of her pulse at the base of her throat. If he so desired, he could snap her neck like a twig.

  She gave the ceiling a look, before staring right back at him. “What are you going to do? Kill me?”

  “I’m quite aggravated enough to do so, so don’t push it.” His voice hardened and became deadly. “No more games. I told you we could do this easy or do it hard. Either way suits me— Jesus fucking Christ! Are you crying?” He used his thumbs to tilt up her chin.

  Accusatory green eyes sparkled with welling tears. One spilled over, trickling down her cheek as she looked up at him pleadingly. “Y-You’re hurting me. Please. Let me go. I’m n-not who you think I am. I’m really n-not.”

  For a split second Hunt felt a sharp stab of guilt, but that was gone in a heartbeat. All it took was remembering that this woman was the one who’d left him unconscious and handcuffed to a bed. He slid his hands from her throat, over her smooth shoulders, and down her arms in a caress, seeing the subtle triumph in her shimmering eyes before she lowered those long silky lashes to hide from him. Oh, no you don’t, darling.

  He gripped her fragile wrists in the hard vise of his fingers and, using them as a fulcrum, twisted her onto the bed. She gave a startled cry as he followed her down, covering her slender body with the weight of his own.

  A few more crystalline tears dribbled down her temples, her lower lip trembled, but she lay passively beneath him. Hunt transferred her left wrist to his other hand, then used his thumb to wipe away a tear. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that, lady?”

  The tears were still coming, but behind those fake, tear-filled green eyes was a mind going a mile a minute. If he hadn’t been looking at her so closely he might have missed the shift from pitiful victim to seductress.

  Her tongue came out briefly to wet her bottom lip. Darker lip liner inside her natural lip line made her lush lips look thinner, but they were the same lying lips he’d felt against his skin in South America.

  “P-Please.” Her voice held a plaintive wobble. “Please don’t hurt me. I’ll do anything you want. Just don’t h—”

  Hunt had two choices. Listen to the latest script she was constructing—or create his own diversionary tactic.

  No contest.

  He dropped his head down to crush his mouth over hers.

  Oh, for . . . An aching warmth spread through Taylor’s body as his hardness pressed her into the mattress. It was pretty damn hard to think when she had a ton of rock-solid male on top of her. It was even harder to concentrate when said male kissed her in a blatantly aggressive move that shut off her brain for those critical few seconds she might’ve used to escape.

  She prided herself on thinking on her feet. The fact that she was usually mentally several steps ahead of anyone trying to catch her had saved her butt a time or three. But she wasn’t on her feet at the moment.

  What was with this guy and beds?


  Instead, she lay there being tasted as if she were Huntington St. John’s last meal. This was no tentative exploration. No getting to know the shape and feel of lips and tongues. No slow buildup, no leisurely investigation.

  This was deep, hard-core French kissing. Raw. Carnal. Possessive. They hadn’t kissed in San Cristóbal, yet the taste and texture of his mouth was shockingly . . . familiar.

  Helplessly, she clutched his shoulders as lightninglike bolts of pure, white heat zipped from her lips directly down to the juncture of her thighs. The sensation vibrated there like the hum of a tuning fork. She wanted to curl her legs around his hips, but she couldn’t move. Her world narrowed until she became pure sensation.

  His lips. His teeth—God—his tongue. His agile, clever, devilishly clever tongue. When he slid it over hers, Taylor swirled her own in response. The flavor of him made her breath come faster, and echoed in her ears with the rapid pounding of her heart. She wanted to touch him, but he controlled both her wrists over her head with one hand.

  Every thought, every bit of sense in her brain, dissipated like mist on a bright, sunny day. Well, hell . . . Her last intelligent thought before she sank beneath the deep sensual waters of the kiss was escape . . . later.

  He cupped her cheek, his hand cool on her hot skin as he turned her face a little, slanting that clever mouth down her throat. Taylor sucked in a shaky draft of air as he found the spot behind her ear guaranteed to have her arch beneath him.

  He murmured against the delicate skin there as her hips moved restlessly, and the echoes of his sexy murmurs sent more shock waves through her. He pressed his hips hard against her, and she thought, God, yes. More. Harder.

  He took small bites along the tendons in her neck, then laved her sizzling skin with a slick, damp tongue. Taylor about shot off the bed as every nerve, every tendon, every muscle, every cell in her body did the happy dance.

  She tried again to free her hands. He wasn’t holding her that tightly, but she couldn’t break free. She was double-jointed. She could squeeze free of anything. Usually. But no matter what she tried, she couldn’t get free of him. Damn him. She attempted to rub her aching nipples against the hard plane of his chest. But he was too heavy to allow even that small movement.

  His lips brushed her ear. Taylor’s fingers curled and her nails dug into her palms. She had to touch him—

  “Where are the disks, Taylor?” he asked through a trail of sweet-hot kisses. Faint stubble from his beard scraped against her throat as he lazily nuzzled and nibbled his way up to her ear.

  If he’d only release her hands . . . She frowned, then opened her eyes. He’d called her by name. Her real name. Oh. My. Lord. He knew her name! How? “Wh-What?”

  “Disks?” he repeated shortly, not sounding in the least bit loverlike despite the weight of his body pressing intimately in the cradle of her thighs, and his breath whispered across her ear making her shudder. “What. Did. You. Do. With. The. Disks?”

  Taylor struggled to bring the room and the man back into focus. His question made her feel like hot tea being poured over ice. The chill was sudden and effective. She scrambled to regroup mentally, while her body parts wept in disappointment.

  She blinked up at him while her heart thudded and galloped in her chest and their breath mingled intimately. She could read absolutely nothing in his enigmatic face. He might have been made of stone as he looked down at her, apparently unmoved. He was intently, wholly, focused on her. And not in a good way. She felt uncomfortably as though he could read her mind.

  “You seem awfully damn determined to butt into my business,” she said, breath unsteady. She struggled to sound as emotionless as he, while battling equally hard to ignore her body’s still clamoring response to his close proximity. Damn and double damn.

  Unlike herself, more fool her, he clearly hadn’t been engaged in this activity one iota. She had to hand it to him. It was pretty damn effective. He’d actually conned her into believing he’d been caught up in the passion as intensely as she’d been. She could take lessons from this guy.

  She’d been outconned.

  He lifted his head to look down at her. His body, his long, lean, heavy body, stayed put. His eyes frosted from storm gray to sleet. “I want everything. Papers—documents of any kind. And those disks. Keep the jewelry.”

  “Keep . . . ? Good of you to allow that.”

  “Damn good of me. Considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Considering that you lied to me about the location of the disks, knocked me unconscious, and left me handcuffed to a bed.”

  Oh, yeah. She could see that indignity stung. Poor baby. “Okay, I give you those. I can see how they must’ve looked to your friends. I felt really, really bad about that,” Taylor assured him sincerely.

  How much did he weigh, for God’s sake? A ton? She couldn’t move. Don’t freak, she told herself, trying for a few deep cleansing breaths. Unfortunately all that did was press her nipples against his chest and revive her awareness.

  Uneasy under such close scrutiny, Taylor shifted. The slight friction between her dress and his shirt against her breasts was enough to cause her nipples to tingle. The hard ridge of his impressive erection, exactly where she wanted it, proved he wasn’t as immune as he appeared.

  Good Lord. The man was, to her, like Kryptonite to Superman! He made her itch from the inside out.

  Her confused emotions—fear, sexual awareness, and intrigue—were dangerous. All three emotions gave her a rush. And God only knew, in her line of work she thrived on that adrenaline rush like a junkie. But it had never manifested itself like this. And the sexual awareness. That was a new sensation. She’d never desired any man quite so intensely. And the fact that he intrigued and fascinated her clanged all of her self-preservation alarms.

  She had to get out of his force field PDQ. “Look,” she said reasonably. “Let’s get up, maybe call room service for a snack, and talk about it. I’m sure we can make some sort of equitable deal.”

  He didn’t move. “I don’t trust you.”

  Well, ditto, pal. “Excuse me? You’re the one who broke into my room. I get to be the one not trusting.”

  If he’d get off her, give her the five seconds it would take to get to the slider and another four seconds to scale the balcony—she’d be gone like the wind. Everything next door was ready for a lightning-fast getaway. A minute and a half—tops—and she’d be a memory.

  “I can understand your annoyance,” Taylor assured him with utmost sincerity. “Nobody likes to be put in a compromising position. But quite frankly, your request is unreasonable. And might I point out—it’s downright lazy of you to think you can simply ask, and I’ll hand over my take just because I did something you couldn’t do, and it’s easier for you.”

  “Has it occurred to you,” he asked dangerously, “that I might be a good guy?”

  The look he was giving her right now, from very close range, was that of a man contemplating dismemberment, and the stuffing of a body—her body—into a convenient viaduct. “Not really. No.”

  Taylor turned to look at the door as a loud knock sounded. “Who—” In trooped four men in dark suits. Hunt didn’t seem surprised to see them. Well, she was. And not in a good way.

  “This is how you interrogate the prisoner?” the man from the elevator asked dryly. He waited until the others were inside, then closed the door and leaned against it, hands in his pockets. So much for thinking he looked like a nice guy earlier, Taylor thought as her heart picked up speed and her brain riffled through escape possibilities.

  Jesus, she was a piece of work. Hunt could practically hear the cogs turning in that quick brain of hers. “Kept her from running,” he told his men. “Draw your weapons before I release her.”

  Her fake green eyes widened, and a little color leached out of her cheeks as all four men reached beneath their jackets for their guns. Her eyes came back to Hunt’s. “Isn’t this overkill?” she said.

  “I d
idn’t tell them to shoot you,” he told her flatly, as if that order was an option at any time. Still holding her wrists, he levered himself off her, pulling her to her feet with him as he stood.

  “Anything?” Aries asked, bending to pick up the wig and silicone pads from the floor. He shot Hunt an amused glance as he tossed them onto the rumpled bed. “You have an interesting interrogation technique.”

  “Expediency is my middle name.” Hunt nudged Taylor Lindsay Kincaid toward a straight-backed chair and reluctantly let go of her wrists. She rubbed her skin with her fingertips, and he winced inwardly as he saw the red marks he’d left on her fair skin. He got over that little ping of guilt in a hurry by reminding himself exactly how slippery she was.

  “Sit,” he told her firmly. She was like a coiled spring. He didn’t see how she could even imagine she was going to make a break for it with five armed men in the room. But he was damned sure she was trying to come up with a way. This time he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Bishop, Aries, Hallowell, and Tate spread themselves about the room. Hunt took the chair across the small table from her.

  She gave him a stony glare. “What’s next?” she asked tightly. “Rubber hoses? Water torture?”

  “You do have an overactive imagination, don’t you?”

  “I’m not imagining this.” She looked around. Her gaze resting briefly on each gun before coming back to Hunt. “Who are your friends? Feds?”

  “We work for a counterterrorist organization called T-FLAC.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “If you were a terrorist, you would have.”

  “Really?” She glanced at each man in turn, up and down, tie to shoes, and back again. “Geez, the government must be paying really well these days. Three-thousand-dollar suits and six-hundred-dollar shoes?” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She wiggled her fingers. “Let’s see some ID, guys.”