Black Ice (Ice 1)

“What’s she doing here?” he demanded furiously. “It was supposed to be that stupid British female. How do we know we can trust this one? She may not be as unobservant as the other. Get rid of her, Hakim.”

“Signor Ricetti, it’s impolite to speak Italian in front of someone who doesn’t understand the language,” Hakim said in disapproving English tones. He glanced at Chloe. “You don’t speak Italian, do you, Mademoiselle Underwood?”

She didn’t know why she lied. Hakim was making her nervous, and the clear animosity on Ricetti’s part didn’t help. “Only French and English,” she said brightly.

Ricetti was not pacified. “I still think it’s too dangerous, and I’m sure the others would agree. Madame Lambert, Monsieur Toussaint, don’t you think we should send this young woman away?” He was still speaking Italian, and Chloe kept her expression blank.

“Don’t be an idiot, Ricetti.” Madame Lambert spoke Italian with a British accent, a surprise. Like Sylvia, she had somehow managed to absorb the ineffable chic of French womanhood, something that had so far eluded Chloe.

“Oh, I think she should stay,” Bastien Toussaint said in a lazy voice. “She’s too pretty to send away. What harm could she do? She probably doesn’t have a brain in her head—she’d be incapable of reading between the lines.” His Italian was perfect, only slightly tinged with a French accent and something she couldn’t quite define, and his voice was deep, slow and sexy. Things were not improving.

“I still say she’s trouble,” Ricetti said, setting down his coffee cup. Chloe noticed that his hands were trembling slightly. Too much coffee, perhaps? Or something else.

“Well, you don’t need to say it again,” the baron spoke up. He was plump, white-haired, grandfatherly looking, and some of Chloe’s strange forebodings lessened. “Welcome to Château Mirabel, Mademoiselle Underwood,” he said in French. “We’re very grateful you were able to fill in at the last moment.”

It took her just a millisecond to remember that she was supposed to understand the last speech. “Merci, monsieur,” she replied, trying to focus all her attention on the sweet old gentleman, trying to ignore the man who stood just past her right shoulder. “I promise to do my best.”

“You’ll do fine,” Hakim said, a faint edge to his voice. Ricetti flushed, lapsing into silence. “We’ve finished work for this afternoon, and I imagine you’d like to get settled. Drinks are at seven, dinner at nine, and I hope you will join us. We try not to discuss business after hours, but we all tend to have our lapses, and it would aid us if you’d make yourself available.”

“How available will she be?” Bastien spoke in German this time. “I may be in need of a little recreation.”

“Get your mind out of your pants, Bastien!” Madame Lambert chided him. “We don’t need your womanizing complicating matters. Men have a habit of confiding all sorts of unfortunate things when they’re between a woman’s legs.”

Chloe blinked, trying not to react as Bastien moved into her line of view. His smile was slow, secretive and impossibly sexy. “My wife tells me I fuck in total silence,” he said.

“Let’s not put it to the test,” Hakim said. “Once we’re finished here you can follow her back to Paris and screw her brains out. In the meantime we have a job to do.” He switched back to English. “I’m sorry for all this conversation, mademoiselle. As you can guess, only half of us understand the same language, and it gets very confusing. From now on we will have no languages other than French and English. Is that understood?”

Bastien was looking at her from beneath his hooded eyes. “Crystal clear,” he said in English. “I can always wait.”

“Wait, monsieur?” Chloe asked innocently.

A mistake. He turned the full force of his gaze on her, and the effect was startling. His eyes were very dark, and she wondered if anything even reflected off their opaque surface. She hoped she wouldn’t be in the position to find out. She hoped she wasn’t entirely without common sense. The man was undoubtedly gorgeous. He was also, undoubtedly, way out of her league.

“Wait for a late supper, mademoiselle,” he said smoothly. Before she realized what he intended he’d taken her hand and brought it to his mouth. She’d had her hand kissed before—it wasn’t an uncommon occurrence even in modern-day Europe. But it had always been by polite old men, flirting without meaning anything by it. Bastien Toussaint’s mouth on the back of her hand was neither polite nor meaningless, but he dropped it before she could pull it away.

“I’m certain you’re hungry, mademoiselle,” Hakim said. “Marie will take you to your room and see that a tray is brought. If you’re interested in exploring the grounds you have only to ask and one of the gardeners will take you on a tour. It’s a bit cold for swimming right now, though the pool is heated, and Americans are such a hardy race.”

“I don’t remember if I brought a swimsuit,” she said, wondering what the hell Sylvia had packed for her.

“You can always go without, Mademoiselle Chloe,” Bastien said in silken tones.

It should have been her first inkling that he was interested in her, though she couldn’t quite figure out why he was, when he’d barely seemed to acknowledge their introduction. Maybe he’d decided she was just the best of slim pickings.

But she wasn’t going to let him unnerve her. “It’s definitely too cold for that,” she said cheerfully. “I imagine if I want any exercise I’ll just go for walks.”

“You must be careful, Mademoiselle Chloe,” Ricetti spoke up in heavily accented French. “It’s hunting season, and there’s no telling where a stray bullet might come from. Not to mention that the guard dogs roam free at night and they’re quite merciless. If you want to go for a walk make sure you have someone to keep you company. You wouldn’t want to accidentally wander into someplace…unsafe.”

Was it a warning, or a threat, or a little bit of both? And what the hell was going on here? What had Sylvia gotten her into?

Sex and violence, she reminded herself. Just looking at Bastien filled the quota for sex, and violence wasn’t actually her cup of tea. Still, for a weekend it would, at the least, be entertaining, and she would be foolish to think that she was in any kind of danger. This was modern-day France, after all, and she was surrounded by staid, ordinary businesspeople. She’d been reading too many of Sylvia’s translated thrillers.

“I will be very careful not to wander where I don’t belong,” she said.

“Of course you will,” Hakim said in his distant voice. He had a peculiar air to him, slightly sinister, which must have been her tiresome imagination running amok. He was both bullying and faintly subservient, and she couldn’t quite figure his position among the business partners. It was no wonder she thought something strange was going on, what with people muttering cryptic things in languages she wasn’t supposed to understand, but in the end they were nothing more than a group of people locked away without any form of entertainment. “We will see you at seven.”

A staid woman in a starched black uniform had appeared, more of a Mrs. Danvers than a Mary Poppins. “If you will follow me, mademoiselle,” she said in French that was clearly a foreign language to her, though Chloe couldn’t begin to guess what her native tongue

was.