‘Don’t you dare call me that!’
He laughed. Harsh. Contemptuous. ‘You stand there, at this hour of the night, offering yourself to me to show your gratitude if I give you back that modelling job, and yet you deny that you are whoring yourself to me?’
Her face contorted, rage ripping from her. ‘It was you! You moved in on me!’
‘To teach you a lesson! That no woman makes use of me!’ His eyes skewered her, pinioning her on lasered points. ‘Get out of here. Now.’
Emotion boiled in her—rage, blind rage, at him. Saying that to her! Doing that to her! And then, like a punch in her guts, the other reality returned. The sick, terrifying reality of why she had come here …
Oh, God! Mike was still downstairs—waiting for her.
Waiting with his razor, his mad, drug-fuelled sickness.
Terror exploded in her. She flew at the man standing there, calling her such vile things, ripping from her the one thing that she was desperate for—desperate! Her face contorted, her fists pummelling impotently at the steel wall of his chest as she pounded at him with all her strength, fury and venom spitting from her.
‘You offered me that job!’ she hurled at him, ripping words from her twisting mouth. ‘The agency told me the offer was there! They told me the fee and the schedule and everything! And then you yanked it back again! What do you think you’re playing at, you arrogant jerk?’
He thrust her back as if she were nothing more than a rag doll. She stumbled backwards, impacting the sideboard, clutching at its surface to get her balance, lungs pounding, fury burning through her. Her hand closed over something—she didn’t know what, didn’t register it, registered only that in the intensity of her anger she was panting, breathless, her head a maelstrom of emotion.
‘You absolute bastard,’ she said in a shaking, vehement voice. ‘I crawled to you! And that’s what I got for it! To be called a whore!’
He cut her vicious diatribe with a single utterance, eyes black. ‘Get out, Kat—or I’ll get Security to do it.’
His voice was like ice. Annihilating her. Throwing her out—with nothing. Nothing to keep her safe from that sick psycho downstairs. Nothing to keep his razor from her face …
Her hands spasmed, terror convulsing her fingers, and as they did she felt the shape of what her right hand had closed over.
It was a watch.
Like some kind of nightmare replay, she heard Mike’s voice in her head. Just bring me the lot, OK? Cash, jewellery—whatever …
Slowly, without any conscious will, she tightened her grip on what she held. Time and reality slid away. Her mind wasn’t moving. Nothing was moving. Her chest felt as if it was going to explode, as if she could not draw breath.
As if from the bottom of a deep, deep well she watched Angelos Petrakos stride to the door and yank it open. And as he did so, she turned. She saw—her eyes not registering, her mind suddenly totally blank—saw her hand move, saw her other hand reach for her clutch bag further along the sideboard, saw herself slip the wristwatch inside—the wristwatch of a man so rich it must be valuable—closing the flap of the bag to conceal it.
‘Out—now.’
Angelos Petrakos’s voice knifed into her.
She turned back. She had stopped existing. Someone else had taken over. Someone who was walking towards the door blindly, unseeingly. It wasn’t her any more—not her clutching her bag to her chest, where it burned against her like a flaming brand, walking past Angelis Petrakos, who had turned her boneless with his touch and then called her a whore. It wasn’t her—it wasn’t her. It couldn’t be her. It couldn’t be …
It couldn’t be her walking across the silent, deserted corridor to step into the empty lift and plummet down, down, down, the weight of the bag clutched against her like a stone—it couldn’t be her …
Inside her head, a voice was yelling. Take it back! Say something—anything! But take it back. Or leave it here—in the lift!
But she couldn’t do that. The person who had taken the watch was telling her she couldn’t do that. She had to take it to Mike, waiting out in the street, the razor in his jacket pocket.
The elevator doors sliced open. The hotel lobby yawned ahead of her. She walked out, shoes clipping on the marbled surface of the polished floor. It was late. The lobby was all but empty. The large, revolving doors of the exit were motionless. She went towards them, heart pounding inside her, skin blanched, muscles screaming with tension. She didn’t look to left or right. Didn’t see the concierge put down his phone, nod at someone at his side. Didn’t see the security guard walking towards her until, as she lifted her hand to push at the revolving door, he stepped up to her. Stopping her dead.
‘Excuse me, miss. Would you step this way?’ he said.
The police station was quiet at that time of night. Kat waited silently beside the officers who had come to the hotel to arrest her, summoned by the hotel’s security department. Angelos Petrakos, it seemed, had been swift to notice the absence of his watch—swifter still to phone down and have her intercepted before she could get out of the hotel. Now, she’d been impassively informed, he was on his way to the police station to make a formal identification—both of her and his watch … his custom-made platinum watch with its diamond face and handmade Swiss mechanism.
She knew she would be charged with its theft.
She would let herself be charged.
As she’d got into the police car outside the hotel she’d seen, across the road, Mike on his motorbike. And she had known, with sick terror, that if she walked out of the police station with nothing to give him she would be at his mercy. For a fleeting instant she wondered whether to tell the police officers about him. But they wouldn’t believe her—they would think she was saying it to divert them from her theft—and, anyway, what could they do?