Anne Stuart - Cold As Ice

Ms. Spenser was getting in the way, and the sooner he got rid of her, the better. He was a man who avoided collateral damage, and he wasn’t about to change his ways at this point, no matter how important the mission. And while he knew only a part of Harry Van Dorn’s maniacal Rule of Seven, he knew stopping Van Dorn was a very important mission indeed.

He knew what they called him behind his back. The Iceman. Both for his ice-cold control, and his particular expertise. He didn’t care what they called him, as long as he got the job done.

Ms. Spenser would have to go, before it was too late. Before he was forced to kill her.

He remembered her dark eyes as they’d looked through him. He shouldn’t have mentioned the crossword puzzle—that was something she might remember if someone started asking her questions once the job was finished. But no, he’d played his part well enough. She’d looked at him and hadn’t seen him, and that ability to vanish was his stock-in-trade.

She’d be no threat to their mission. She was bright and pretty and clueless, and she was going to be back in her safe little world before anything bad could happen.

And she’d never know how close to death she came.

Madame Lambert looked out over the bare tree branches outside her nondescript office in a nondescript building near London’s Kensington Gardens. She was slim, elegant and ruthlessly chic, with creamy, ageless skin and cool, ageless eyes. She stared at the trees, looking for some sign of life. It was April, after all, time for things to come alive again.

But it always took longer in the city, where pollution slowed the natural evolution of things. And for some reason the trees and gardens near the offices of the Spence-Pierce Financial Consultants, Ltd., tended to die. If Madame Lambert were a more fanciful person she’d think it was a sympathetic reaction to the actual work they did. Spence-Pierce was nothing more than one of a dozen covers for the covert work done by the Committee, a group so steeped in secrecy that Isobel Lambert was still just learning some of the intricate details, and she’d been in charge for more than a year.

It was April, and time was running out. The Rule of Seven was in play, backed by Harry Van Dorn’s brilliant brain and seemingly limitless resources, and they still didn’t know nearly enough about what it was. Seven disasters, orchestrated by Harry Van Dorn, to plunge the world into chaos, chaos that would somehow be turned to Van Dorn’s benefit. But the whens, the wheres, the hows were still maddeningly unclear. Not to mention who—Harry couldn’t be doing this without help.

Whatever it was, it was deadly.

And it was the Committee’s job to keep deadly things from happening. No matter how high the body count happened to be.

She wasn’t feeling good about this, and she’d learned to trust her instincts. Peter was the best they had, a brilliant operative who’d never failed a mission.

But she had the unpleasant feeling that all that was about to change.

She shook herself, returning to the spotless walnut desk that held nothing but a Clarefontaine pad and a black pen. She kept everything in her head, for safety’s sake, but sometimes she just needed to write.

She scrawled something, then glanced down at it. The Rule of Seven.

What the hell was Harry Van Dorn planning to unleash on an unsuspecting world?

And would killing him be enough to stop it?

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