“What can he do?” He shrugged. “Sic the Iranians on me? Kill me himself?”
“Yes and yes.”
Sonya stood beside the deck chair next to his. Today she wore her usual work uniform of tailored trousers and a form-fitting button-down blouse. Some things hadn’t changed. Her wardrobe still managed to look both professional and yet ridiculously sexy, and there was the ever-present book clutched in her hand. She’d always loved the classics, and it wasn’t unusual to find a copy of one of Austen’s or Hemingway’s or the Brontë sisters’ novels in her purse.
Then again, some things had changed. Gone was the hot-pink fingernail polish. In its place were bare nails filed to a subdued length.
It was a stark reminder that the woman standing so close was not the same woman he’d met in Paris. That woman had glowed, so full of color and light that she had reminded him of a Lite-Brite. That woman had feared nothing, had laughed with him and loved with him and made him want to be a better man, the ultimate man. In the place of that woman now stood a traitor, a no-account bootlicker of one of the world’s most vile men and—
Angel cut off his thoughts and stood.
He couldn’t bear to breathe the same air she breathed or smell her sweet perfume that still reminded him of freesia and apricot blossoms. The sad truth of the matter was, despite how far she’d fallen, despite what she’d become, there was a part of him that still loved her.
All of him still wanted her…
Chapter 2
“Why do you scurry away like a roach in the sunlight anytime you see me?”
Sonya posed the question to Angel’s retreating back. When he stopped in his tracks, his shoulders snapping straight, she noted that it wasn’t only his face that was pure perfection. His physique fell into that category too.
He had that quintessentially male V-shape. Wide shoulders tapered down to a slim waist, which gave way to a high, tight ass and long, muscular legs. His arms were roped with power. Veins stood out in sharp relief against the tan skin over his forearms and biceps.
To put it simply, he was a study in masculine architecture, and Mother Nature had injected him with more than his fair share of that most potent drug: testosterone.
Sonya had been suffering from a bad case of forbidden fruit syndrome since he’d walked into the manor. Which was absurd because…for one thing, she didn’t know him from Adam—and what she did know about him had her shaking in her boots. For another thing, he’d agreed to work with Grafton, the scum of the earth, to acquire a bomb’s worth of fissile materials, and that was just…wrong. If those two things weren’t bad enough, she’d only felt instant attraction once before, a long time ago when she’d met a vastly different, but no less beautiful and mysterious man. She’d fallen for that man so hard and so fast her head had spun. And the landing? It had nearly killed her.
So yeah. She’d be smart to take all her unseemly thoughts and bury them deep. Digging a fantasy twenty-foot grave, she imagined tossing her ridiculous libido inside and then throwing mounds of dirt atop it.
There. Done. She wiped imaginary hands and nodded with satisfaction.
Slowly, Angel turned to face her, those hell-black eyes narrowing as they went on a leisurely tour of her body, taking rest stops at particularly interesting spots.
Her stupid, undead libido crawled out of its freshly dug grave. Ugh! She mentally herded the silly thing back toward the yawning maw of its final resting place. This time she was determined to throw it in and cover it with concrete.
“I did not realize I scurried away like a roach in the sunlight,” he said in that raspy, ruined voice, with that odd formality and that ever-changing accent that made it impossible to pinpoint where he was from.
No doubt that was his objective. He was making certain that, along with the vocal cord scouring, no voice-recognition software could identify him. If he truly was the Prince of Shadows—and in the two weeks he’d been at the manor house, she’d become convinced he was—then the Iranians were searching the planet for him. A fatwa, pronounced by the ranking ayatollah, had been issued against him, demanding his head in the name of Allah.
“Well, you do,” she assured him.
“Why do you care?”
Merde. He had her there. Why did she care?
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Then opened it again. Nothing came out. Not a single word.
The man should be crowned the high king of shutting down conversations.
“Take a breath,” he instructed after watching her fish-out-of-water routine for a few seconds. “It will help you relax.”
“Who says I’m not relaxed?”
“Me.”
“And how would you know whether or not I’m relaxed?”
