“It's late,” she said, trying not to give into raw nerves, the fear over the past several hours, the possibility that he might not come back, and the cold fury that he had.
He refused to let her off that easily.
“Look at me.”
She was angrier than he'd ever seen her. Not the incident at the airport, anything that had followed, not even her meeting with Inspector 'Dickless' with the Inverness police had made her this angry.
“You could have called.”
Even as she said it, she realized how it sounded. As if he needed to check in. But she needed him to understand. If something had happened...
“Not with the people we went to see,” he fired back at her, trying to control his own temper.
“Where we met, not even the French authorities go there. These people operate in the shadows. They make their own rules, and they don't trust anyone. They would have been suspicious of a phone call.”
“I should have been there,” she threw back at him.
“You had no business there,” he added, his voice suddenly quiet.
Too quiet. A warning? She ignored it.
“No business?” She couldn't believe what she was hearing.
“That's right. These aren't nice people. They run underground businesses, and buy and sell just about everything, including drugs and women, some of them very young.” Children, too, was his guess, a hot commodity in the underworld that people like Captain Jack operated in.
“The young ones bring an especially high price, lots of profit. But they're not young for very long once they get passed around.” He didn't spare the details. “You might bring a couple thousand dollars.”
The anger boiled over. “If you're trying to scare me...”
“You need to be scared! These are the sort of people Cate would have interviewed in some village or remote compound with an armed escort, and the sort of place where everything, anything can be bought or sold for a price, and human life is the cheapest commodity of all. We were on their home ground tonight. There were guards and they were armed. I didn't want you there. I won't take that chance.”
She knew what he was doing, and it only made her angrier.
“That's not your decision to make, and I don't need your permission.”
She was on dangerous ground and she knew it. She'd seen his reaction before, at the roadside tavern on the road to Inverness, the quiet before the storm, the way he had looked at those young men. It was there now in the expression on his face.
“It's not about permission! If something happened out there...!” He'd needed to get through to her, to make her understand what they were dealing with.
It was that simple. And anything but simple, her body pinned against his.
“Bloody Christ!” he swore, hands fisted on the wall.
He wanted to drag her back to that bed, or the floor, or up against the wall. He wanted to strip away that cool composure,to feel that long body naked against his, to tear down the barriers until he found the heat that he knew was there, then lose himself in her.
He swore again, and pushed away from the wall. He didn't look at her, didn't trust himself to leave the room if he did.
The door slammed behind him.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
The apartments were unusually quiet.
Her first thought was that it was early, no one was up yet. But the light that slanted in at the edge of the drapes was that hazy gray of Paris in winter, the sun angling over the rooftops mid-morning as she pulled back the heavy drapes.
James hadn't come back to the room, not that she expected it. There had been too much anger. They both needed some distance, some time to cool off. Still, they needed to talk.
