Cold as Ice Read Online Free PDF

ruthlessly slim mother had been alive she would have been horrified.
    But her parents were dead, the house was gone, and Genevieve Spenser earned a fortune at the hands of Roper, Hyde, Camui and Fredericks. She belonged with a man like Harry Van Dorn, her mother would have said, though she would have wrinkled her nose at his politically correct factories. The only acceptable way to have money was to inherit it, according to her mother. Her father would simply have had another scotch.
    The shower was huge, somehow managing to be both tasteful and ostentatious, and she let the water pound some of the tension from her body. She'd take another tranquilizer before she joined Harry again, though she'd have to watch her intake of wine. And she'd sleep alone in that luxurious bed, doubtless beneath Egyptian-cotton sheets with an astronomical thread count, and tomorrow night she'd be in a sleeping bag on the ground. And she'd be a hell of a lot happier.
    It was getting dark when she came out of the shower, and she could see lights from the shoreline through the filmy curtains. She wasn't sure they were a reassurance that land was nearby or a reminder that she wasn't on it, but she left the curtains closed anyway as she dressed in the new clothes, pulling off the tags that had been left on. Size eights. She didn't know whether to be annoyed or relieved.
    She reached for her bottle of pills, and at the last minute popped two in her mouth. It had to be the ocean water that was making her paranoid, uneasy, convinced that something, somehow, was wrong. But the pills would take care of that, and after tomorrow she could throw them away. Or at least pack them until she had to return to the city and the way of life she'd chosen.
    She sank down in one of the oversize chairs, closing her eyes as she waited for the Zenlike calm to envelope her. It would all be all right. It would be lovely. And then she'd be gone.
     
    She was a pretty little thing, Harry Van Dorn thought, watching her on the closed-circuit television in his stateroom. A little too padded for her clothes, but stripped she was just right. He'd gotten tired of bone-thin models who performed tirelessly.
    But then, that was normal for him. He was a creature of impulse, and he had a short attention span. He became obsessed with something, overindulged, and then lost interest. He'd gone through virgins, older women, ugly women and handsome men. He'd stayed longest with the children, but they tended to cry too much, and even when he found a good one they had an unfortunate tendency to age, and he'd never cared for anyone over eleven.
    His taste for models had been a fortunate alternative—it was socially acceptable, even encouraged, and he had no trouble attracting them. He was just as much a trophy as they were, and the relationships were mutually beneficial.
    The only problem was he couldn't hurt them without paying a huge price. Their bodies were their livelihood, and any kind of scarring, any broken bones or bruising would
diminish their value. He'd gone a bit overboard with one, and then had to try to buy her off. She'd made the very grave mistake of refusing, and no one had thought it the slightest bit strange that an anorexic supermodel had been found starved to death in a little French château.
    But that was in the past. He looked at Genevieve Spenser's creamy, beautiful skin and knew he was going to have her. His lawyers knew how to quiet things up, and if he made a mistake, went a bit too far, his ass would be covered. No, Ms. Genevieve Spenser was a downright thoughtful gift from the universe, as well as those contracts she'd brought with her. The ones that severed his connections to some of his most lucrative oil fields. The ones that were going to be blown up in just about two weeks' time.
    The Rule of Seven, his lucky number. Seven disasters to throw the financial world into an uproar, the kind of uproar a smart man could benefit from. And he considered himself a smart