Aces High Read Online Free PDF

toward the door. “Dinner?” he asked with a hopeful expression that would have been effective if he’d looked more like a spaniel and less like a sulky Henry VIII.
    She didn’t look up. “You’ll find a menu in your suite.”
    He snorted and left, slamming the door.
    Gigi’s lips twitched.
    —
    Katrina didn’t run away. Given a choice, at least during the early part of the day, she might have run, but it happened that she was to meet a man for dinner that night. He was an agent, and the information he was to give her was too important to be missed. Since Katrina served as a conduit to Gigi, she could hardly escape the responsibility.
    It wasn’t only that, however, which kept Katrina at the hotel and made her endure the passing hours with a surface appearance, at least, of her normal calm. Her instant recognition of the very real power Skye had over her had hardened somewhat as she had thought about the situation. She was too honest with herself to pretend she could fight him once she was in his arms, but the twenty-two-year-old girl who had loved so heedlessly had become a woman who had learned to survive, and that hard-won ability was not one she would willingly give up.
    He had told her that he had left Germany in pieces; she had said little about her own torment. But Katrina would fight him with every weapon she could find to avoid the pain he had left her with before. She both understood his actions when he had left her so abruptly in Germany and had long ago forgiven him for them, but that was something she had no intention of making clear to him.
    He was a different man now, just as she was a different woman, and she thought that this man would turn any knowledge about her suffering into a weapon. It was obvious he was out for revenge now, or at the very least determined to purge himself of the desire he still felt for her.
    But it wasn’t in Katrina, innately proud and too aware of both the fragile peace she had found and the wild emotions he could still make her feel, to submit tamely to any man. In her was the certainty that he could seduce reason, that she would not be able to fight him physically, and that she would fight him on every other level.
    And so she spent the day in her usual calm way, while her mind worked with the sharpness of desperation behind her tranquil expression. Refusing to accept either the full blame for what had happened to them or his implicit demands, she reached deeply into herself to tap the core of implacable determination that had been born inside a cell in East Germany.
    “Trina, do you have the guest list?”
    She looked up from paperwork she was going over automatically, and immediately picked up a computer printout at her elbow. “Here it is, Gigi.”
    Her friend leaned a hip against the desk and began scanning the printout, saying dryly, “Hagen has arrived, and I wanted to check the list before it occurred to him to do so. Ah, good! They are all on the sixth floor, then?”
    Katrina nodded. “And all under assumed names. They’ll take the freight elevator up and down so as to avoid the lobby.” She studied her friend curiously. “Why is Hagen early?”
    With a grimace that was both amused and exasperated, Gigi replied, “He wants to mend fences.”
    “Between you two?” Katrina asked, aware of a long and decidedly stormy relationship that few others knew about.
    “Yes.” Her fine eyes sparkled in sudden temper. “Do you know that when he arrived he left word at the desk to send his bags up to my suite when they arrived? Fortunately I had the forethought to leave other instructions.
That man.
”
    Katrina fought back a smile. Both fascinated and appalled by Hagen—a common reaction, Gigi had told her—she had observed the relationship between him and Gigi these last years with something like wonder. In one sense it was heartening to watch so many tempestuous emotions flourishing between a man and woman who were both fast approaching sixty; in another