Nadia looked him critically, menacingly, up and down from chin to brow and brow to chin. Her nostrils quivered; her cheeks sucked in; her eyes narrowed to shining cracks.
“There are moments when I suspect you of double dealing, Detective. You may be out to get me after all, and are finding the back-handed method the cleverest. (Damn the O’Neill reiteration of that fog horn!)”
In a flash he saw the single frayed thread by which she held her nerve.
“That is not true, Nadia, and you know it.” Belknap returned her look with one as piercing and equally cruel in its way. “Guilty or not, it’s all one to me. But I am out to get you. Yes, I want you.”
Her look was filmed with another, a softer one.
“You—want me. What does that mean? Is ‘want’ the word you intend?”
He admired her frankness; though he hated the woman of it, that must always have the facts sugar-coated. He was hard to her.
“That is the word I meant. Want. Are you suggesting that overnight it should or could be anything else?”
She gave an odd little sigh.
“That’s that,” she said with a faint shrug of her lovely shoulders. “Only there is so much want and so little—of the other.”