Cold As Ice. Anne Stuart

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СКАЧАТЬ she brought with her were another question—were they simply an excuse or a clue to something more important? Harry hadn’t seemed the slightest bit interested, but then, Harry wouldn’t.

      He had to get the woman off the boat, fast, before they could put their plans into motion. They would get the go-ahead in the next few days, and he didn’t want any stray civilians to get in the way and complicate things. The assignment was relatively simple— nothing he hadn’t done before, and he was very good at what he did, but timing, as always, was everything.

      Ms. Spenser was getting in the way, and the sooner he got rid of her, the better. He was a man who avoided collateral damage, and he wasn’t about to change his ways at this point, no matter how important the mission. And while he knew only a part of Harry Van Dorn’s maniacal Rule of Seven, he knew stopping Van Dorn was a very important mission indeed.

      He knew what they called him behind his back. The Iceman. Both for his ice-cold control, and his particular expertise. He didn’t care what they called him, as long as he got the job done.

      Ms. Spenser would have to go, before it was too late. Before he was forced to kill her.

      He remembered her dark eyes as they’d looked through him. He shouldn’t have mentioned the crossword puzzle—that was something she might remember if someone started asking her questions once the job was finished. But no, he’d played his part well enough. She’d looked at him and hadn’t seen him, and that ability to vanish was his stock-in-trade.

      She’d be no threat to their mission. She was bright and pretty and clueless, and she was going to be back in her safe little world before anything bad could happen.

      And she’d never know how close to death she came.

      Madame Lambert looked out over the bare tree branches outside her nondescript office in a nondescript building near London’s Kensington Gardens. She was slim, elegant and ruthlessly chic, with creamy, ageless skin and cool, ageless eyes. She stared at the trees, looking for some sign of life. It was April, after all, time for things to come alive again.

      But it always took longer in the city, where pollution slowed the natural evolution of things. And for some reason the trees and gardens near the offices of the Spence-Pierce Financial Consultants, Ltd., tended to die. If Madame Lambert were a more fanciful person she’d think it was a sympathetic reaction to the actual work they did. Spence-Pierce was nothing more than one of a dozen covers for the covert work done by the Committee, a group so steeped in secrecy that Isobel Lambert was still just learning some of the intricate details, and she’d been in charge for more than a year.

      It was April, and time was running out. The Rule of Seven was in play, backed by Harry Van Dorn’s brilliant brain and seemingly limitless resources, and they still didn’t know nearly enough about what it was. Seven disasters, orchestrated by Harry Van Dorn, to plunge the world into chaos, chaos that would somehow be turned to Van Dorn’s benefit. But the whens, the wheres, the hows were still maddeningly unclear. Not to mention who—Harry couldn’t be doing this without help.

      Whatever it was, it was deadly.

      And it was the Committee’s job to keep deadly things from happening. No matter how high the body count happened to be.

      She wasn’t feeling good about this, and she’d learned to trust her instincts. Peter was the best they had, a brilliant operative who’d never failed a mission.

      But she had the unpleasant feeling that all that was about to change.

      She shook herself, returning to the spotless walnut desk that held nothing but a Clarefontaine pad and a black pen. She kept everything in her head, for safety’s sake, but sometimes she just needed to write.

      She scrawled something, then glanced down at it. The Rule of Seven.

      What the hell was Harry Van Dorn planning to unleash on an unsuspecting world?

      And would killing him be enough to stop it?

      2

      Harry Van Dorn’s McMansion of a yacht was large enough that Genevieve could almost forget she was surrounded by water. The smell of the sea was still there, but she loved the ocean if she wasn’t on a boat, and she could easily pretend she was on some nice safe cliff overlooking the surf, rather than bobbing around in the middle of it.

      Harry Van Dorn was both quirky and charming, there was no denying it, and he was focusing all that charm on her. His megawatt smile, his crinkly blue eyes, his lazy voice and rapt attention to her every word should have made her melt. Except that Genevieve didn’t melt easily, even beneath the warm Caribbean sun with a billionaire doing his best to seduce her.

      The Tab had appeared, of course, cold with a glass of ice as well. She knew she ought to have insisted on Pellegrino or something equally upscale—the firm would never approve of something as mundane as soda pop—but she should have been on vacation, and for now she could let little things drop. She’d even kicked off her shoes as she stretched out on the white leather chaise, wiggling her silk-covered toes in the sunlight.

      She knew how to make the most self-effacing man become expansive, and Harry was hardly a wallflower. The Van Dorn Foundation had never been under her particular purview—she’d been kept busy with the relatively simple concerns of several smaller foundations—but she found his worldview fascinating. It was no wonder he collected humanitarian awards by the bucketload—he’d even been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, though she thought it would be a cold day in hell before he got one. The profits from his overseas production companies were cut in half because he refused to let them employ child labor, and the workers received enough of a living wage that they didn’t have to send their children into factories and brothels. He still made a profit, Genevieve thought cynically, and his generous salaries were still only a fraction of what he used to pay the workers in the American factories that now lay closed and abandoned in the dying cities in the Midwest, but the humanitarian organizations ignored that part. Either ignored it, or knew that giving a billionaire an award was likely to make his charitable foundation feel even more charitable toward them.

      His money came from everywhere—oil fields in the Middle East, diamond mines in Africa, investments so complicated she doubted even he understood them. All she knew was he made money faster than he could spend it, and his tastes were lavish.

      But she had become used to billionaires in the past few years, and in the end there were all the same, even someone like Harry Van Dorn with his little eccentricities. She listened to him ramble on in his lazy Texas accent, telling herself she should just relax, that by tomorrow she’d be stripped of these clothes and her professional armor and be hiking through the jungles of Costa Rica, fending off mosquitoes and blisters. Compared to this plush cocoon it sounded like heaven.

      She awoke with a start. Harry was still talking—apparently he’d never even noticed that she’d drifted off for a moment. She could thank her mirrored sunglasses for that—if Walt Fredericks ever knew his protégée had fallen asleep in front of a client she’d be out on her ass in a matter of hours. Though there was always the good possibility that that was exactly what she wanted.

      And then she realized what had woken her. Not Harry’s lazy ramblings, but the feel of the boat beneath her. The unmistakable rumble of an engine, when this damn thing should be floating and silent.

      “Why did they turn on the engines?” She broke through Harry’s discourse on tarot cards.

      “Did they? I hadn’t noticed. I think they do that every СКАЧАТЬ