Chapter 9 #2
No, that wouldn’t work. American women couldn’t live with something as simple as an affair. Not that he was planning an affair with her—just the occasional fuck when he needed it.
He kept very still in the bed, wanting her to believe he was asleep. He still needed to fuck—it had been a long, dry spell. He would take his time in the morning, do his best to wipe out her guilt and change her allegiance. Women had a difficult time discounting great sex, and he was very talented.
Maddelena would kill him, but he wasn’t going to worry about that now. His job was simple—he was going to kill Mary LeMieux, known as LaDonna to all her followers, who saw her as a second Mother Teresa, and Chloe was going to help him. The rest would take care of itself.
She woke up when he reached for her, startled out of a troubled sleep.
It was light outside, and he pulled her over to the middle of the bed, moving on top of her with his big strong body.
He pushed inside her and she let him, unresisting.
Words wouldn’t stop him, nothing would stop him, but she couldn’t betray Bastien again.
She slammed down her immediate response, forcing her body to lie still.
He could take everything from her, but he couldn’t take this.
“Put your arms around me,” he said in a low, sensual growl, and she did so, listlessly.
He tried to kiss her, but she turned her head away from him, refusing to meet his thrusts, refusing to respond no matter how much her body screamed for it.
She could sense his frustration and she gloried in it—this was one thing she could almost control, even if it killed her.
“You want to play it this way, do you?” he said. “All right.” And he reached down between them to touch her, and she jerked against his hand, heat rushing through her determinedly cold body.
She tried to stop, to think of pickup trucks and baseball players and anything that would halt her powerful reaction, but he was inexorable, and so damned clever.
“You’re going to come, chérie, whether you like it or not,” he growled in her ear, and a moment later, she did, a short, sharp orgasm that poured over her.
It was his cue. He sped up and then held still as he reached his own release. A moment later, he rolled off her, leaving her cold and empty. “I hate you,” she said in a low voice.
“I’m sure you do,” he replied, sitting up on the side of the bed.
At least this time she didn’t cry. She stared at his back, dry-eyed and hollow, and she wanted to kill him. And then she froze.
The man was not without his physical charms. His back was to her, narrow at the hip, broad at the shoulder. On his left side was a knife scar, from a bar fight in Algiers. On his right, just under his arm, was the mark of the gunshot that almost killed him the night they escaped Paris.
He was Bastien.
He rose from the bed, moving naked through the room, and she wondered that she had ever doubted. She knew him, as only a wife could know a husband. But to him, she was a total stranger.
“Get dressed,” he snapped. “We’ll want breakfast.”
Climbing out of the bed, she kept her own back to him.
He hadn’t used a condom and she was wet between her legs, but she barely gave that a thought.
Without hesitation, she went straight into the bathroom, into the shower.
She didn’t want to wash the signs of his possession off her, but she really had no choice, and he made no effort to stop her.
She washed quickly, and when she came out, he was waiting for her, still gloriously naked.
Without a word, he took her place, and she dressed quickly, moving to the door. It was locked—she would never have gotten through it the night before. She looked around and found the key on the table next to the bed, unlocking it and leaving the damned door open behind her.
Flambeau and Luc were sitting in the living room, staring at her with speculation, and she realized they knew she’d spent the night in his bed.
Ignoring them, she went up into the kitchen and set the water on to heat—even though she’d mastered the expresso maker, she wasn’t about to make their lives more pleasant by sharing the secrets.
The water was boiling by the time Bastien came into the living room, and she cringed as she heard Flambeau’s lewd whistle.
“How was she, boss?” he demanded. “Did she…” She couldn’t translate the idiom, and she was just as glad.
But Bastien answered him in English. “You wouldn’t be interested in her, Flambeau. She fucks like a nun.”
“And how many nuns have you fucked?” Luc said lazily.
“You’d be surprised,” he replied, and both men laughed.
Chloe checked once again for rat poison beneath the sink.
Peter Madsen hung up the phone. Anderson’s latest report was nothing—he’d found no trace of Chloe in Paris, but he was still searching.
The damnable truth was that Chloe on her own couldn’t hide from them.
Bastien had trained her, but she didn’t have the killer instinct, the ability to disappear that her husband had.
But Anderson was one of his best men and so far, he hadn’t found a trace of her.
Heading back to the crowded dining room table, he braced himself for the usual chaos.
Bastien and Chloe’s children had been better behaved when they arrived—Sylvia was a demure thirteen, a new teenager, and Swede a quiet fourteen-year-old.
Now, after five weeks of exposure to Mahmoud’s goading and Dylan’s cynical charm, they were just as obstreperous as the two young men who shared their residence.
He looked at his younger children. Alex and Ali were thirteen and ten, mostly well-behaved, but the organized chaos surrounding them had taken its toll.
Genevieve met his glance across the table, managing a cheerful shrug.
The more children she had the better—she’d taken in Mahmoud and Dylan the moment they’d arrived in England, and they were truly a part of them by now.
If Chloe and Bastien were never found, they could count on Swede and Sylvia joining their haphazard little family.
But that wasn’t going to happen. Bastien was somewhere in hiding, though Madsen had no idea where or why, and now Chloe had disappeared in her quest to find him.
He could only hope they were together somewhere—at least then Chloe would be safe.
If something happened to her on his watch, Bastien would probably kill him.
Or at least he’d damn well try. Madsen wasn’t an easy man to kill, any more than Bastien was.
Genevieve had learned long ago not to question his off-hours phone calls, though she made a face at the interruption.
She was about to say something when a piece of chicken went flying, thanks to Alex, who didn’t like being teased by Dylan, and the rest of the dinner became airborne as a full-on food fight began.
It wasn’t the first one in the last few weeks, and it wouldn’t be the last, and they knew perfectly well they’d have to clean it up.
Peter thundered his disapproval, and the battle stopped abruptly, leaving Ali’s golden blond hair caked with mashed potatoes and Dylan dripping with gravy.
He had to find Chloe and Bastien, or he wasn’t going to have a place left to call home.