Kate had Shelby believing she and Graham had been an item before preservation. It seemed Temple had bought that possibility also. He hadn’t been sure if it was a good idea or not to insist on sharing this room with Kate. It could backfire on them. But there was no way in hell he was going to sleep in separate suites. Plus, he needed to keep an eye on her if she was going to put herself at risk digging around in the bunker.
They hadn’t fooled Tushar into believing they’d been an item before preservation, but Temple hadn’t worked directly in the lab with them, so she wouldn’t have seen how painfully shy Graham had been around Kate. And certainly Shelby and Mina could fall for the idea. They hadn’t even been there ten years ago.
Kate sighed loudly. “I don’t want to see him checking out of life. I’m worried I should have kept him away. He just…wasn’t thriving. I was scared.” Even though intellectually Graham knew Kate was acting, her wobbly voice on the verge of tears tore at him.
“Stay close to him. Make sure he knows you care and you’re here. He’ll come around. Most of you suffered from some depression after being revived. It’s not surprising. Maybe his is just worse than others.”
“Let’s hope so.” Kate’s voice trailed away, and then he heard the door open and close, the deadbolt snick into place. A moment after that Kate was back in the bedroom.
Graham climbed out of bed immediately and stalked toward her. He nailed her with his gaze.
She looked confused, eyes wide, backing up. “What’s the matter? I thought I played into your hand rather well.”
He continued to approach until her back hit the wall and then he closed the distance between them entirely, flattening his body against hers and setting his hands on the wall at the sides of her head. It was hard not to laugh. “How uninterested do I seem to you?” he asked, but he heard the lilt of humor in his voice.
Her face went from concerned and serious to light and fun in a heartbeat. She set her hands on his hips. “Do I get an Oscar?”
“You get payback. That’s what you get.” He lowered one hand to her neck and stroked her chin with his thumb.
“Hey, you wanted her to think you were depressed. Good thinking, by the way. I was impressed enough to award you an Oscar. Though I’m sure everyone is going to be confused about why you insisted on sharing this room with me if your goal was to break up with me when we got here. Sorry about that. I was flustered and started rambling. I probably went a little overboard.” She tipped her face into his touch.
He loved when she did that, subconsciously wanting more from him. “The depression angle will totally work. It’s perfect. It also keeps people from wanting to run a bunch of tests. But you didn’t have to tell her you thought I wanted to get rid of you.”
She turned her face into his palm and kissed him there. “I was ad-libbing. It worked. She bought it.”
“So did I, but I didn’t like it.”
She shrugged, grinning. “Well, at least now everyone will think I should stay near you more often. They’re all going to feel sorry for me if you dump me.”
He decided to take a risk and let his hand trail down her back and around to the middle of her waist. His thumb landed precariously close to her breast, and he stroked her skin through her pale pink scrubs.
Since her eyes fluttered and a soft sigh escaped her lips, he took the opportunity to lower his lips to her neck and kiss a line to her ear. “Let me show you how uninterested I am,” he whispered.
She leaned into him for a moment as if she’d forgotten herself, and then she righted and stiffened. “You’ve been awake a week, Graham…”
“Do I seem like an invalid?”
“No. That’s what scares me.”
He lifted his face and met her gaze, his hand at her waist, roaming to her back again. He was dead serious when he responded to that. “I never ever want you to be scared of me.”
“I’m not scared of you. I’m scared…of me.”
He frowned.
She swallowed. “Sex is new for both of us. I want us to both be sure so that neither of us ends up regretting it. I’m not strong enough to survive it if we fuck this up.”
“You’re the strongest person I know. You even agreed to come back to this bunker to sneak around without hearing the details. You’re incredible. I envy you.”
“I know that’s how I present myself to the outside world. It’s intentional. I would never want anyone to think I had a weakness. I was this way before I was preserved too. I like people to see me as outgoing, friendly, and totally put together.
“But inside, I’m not as solid. Friendships, I can handle. They grow slowly and don’t usually implode. But dating is something else entirely. I don’t have the ability to do casual or half-ass.”
“Kate, nobody is doing casual or half-ass. It feels fast because we laid our cards on the table when I first woke up. But, we were both already interested in each other before we were preserved. You know that. I know it. There’s a lot happening around us. It’s intense. But when it’s over, we’re going to face this thing head on.” His heart squeezed. He wanted her in every humanly possible way. He wanted her as a friend, a lover, and a life partner. The way he felt about her hadn’t been casual before they were vitrified, and nothing about that had changed during their ten-year hibernation.
“I know. I know. But I’m still scared. Bear with me. I need more time to trust myself.” She gave him a slight shove. “And you need more time to recover.”
He gave her a slight half grin. “At some point you’ll have to recognize you can no longer use my weakness as an excuse. Which is fine. I’m not going anywhere. Stall all you want. I want you to be sure.”
“And I want you to be sure,” she added before slipping under his arm and putting space between them. “I don’t care how physically strong you are, nor do I care how sharp your mind is, you can’t possibly be in a place emotionally where you can make heavy life decisions yet. So yeah, the speed at which this relationship is moving scares the hell out of me.” She smoothed her hands down her waist as if she were disheveled and needed straightening.
He suspected the dishevelment was in her head, not in her scrubs.
“How is the downloading going?” she asked without meeting his gaze.
“Slow. I don’t see how the hell I can save all the data in this bunker in just a few days, but I’m working as fast as possible.”
“I brought another computer,” she stated, rushing from the room and then returning moments later with it in hand. “I can help while people think we are sleeping.”
“You can’t stay up all night. People will notice.”
“You’re planning to,” she pointed out as she opened the laptop and set it on the bed.
He came up behind her, pinning the front of her thighs to the mattress as he surrounded her with spread legs and his arms at her waist. “Everyone expects me to look tired. I’m supposedly depressed and sickly.”
“Well, they can also easily believe I sat up long hours worrying about you.”
“Which isn’t far from the truth,” he added.
She threaded her fingers with his and drew one of his hands to her lips to kiss his knuckles. “Your patience means everything to me.”
“It’s never-ending,” he assured her, knowing definitively that even if she held him at arm’s length for ten years, he would wait.
He hoped she wouldn’t hold out that long, but he wouldn’t care if that’s what she needed.
He also knew they had a lot of work to do and they were treading in dangerous territory. They needed to keep their heads in the game and get this data downloaded and transferred as fast as possible. If they got caught, there was no telling what might happen. Though he still didn’t understand who might unintentionally give him up to Blue Cell if they caught him.
Shelby?
Mina?
Temple?
Those were the only people besides support staff in the building who could possibly care, and it disturbed hi
m greatly to imagine a world in which any one of those people would sabotage Project DEEP. He’d known Temple for many years. Shelby and Mina were new to the project, but they’d been vetted by Ryan.
Granted, Graham had not seen Ryan yet. He’d spoken to him on the phone in the last few days, but he hadn’t met the thirty-year-old adult Ryan, the genius son of Tushar and Trish who had made it possible with the help of Dr. Damon Bardsley for all of them to be reanimated.
What Graham knew in his soul was that Ryan would never undermine his life’s work and put his own parents in danger. In addition, Dade trusted Ryan. Neither Dade nor anyone else on the first team could have been involved in this disaster. It had started while they’d been preserved.
Or had it?
According to Dade, every mishap in the lab and elsewhere had been the work of either Spencer or someone from Blue Cell. If that was true, what about the broken beaker that shattered into a million pieces nearly eleven years ago to put all of them at risk in the first place? Was that incident included in the insanity? Or was it truly an isolated accident?
If Graham allowed himself to consider that for even a moment, his mind would explode. He didn’t want to voice the thought out loud even to Kate. Though surely she’d pondered the same possibility: that a member of their own team had intentionally put them all at risk and succeeded in essentially killing them all for some unknown, unfathomable reason.
Kate turned around in his arms and faced him. Her eyes were filled with concern as she met his gaze. “You okay?”
He nodded and took a deep breath, realizing he’d been resting his head on her shoulder from behind for far longer than he’d intended. He needed to snap out of it and get back to work. “Yep. Do you think we’ll be left alone for the rest of the night?”
“Yes. I’m pretty sure Shelby will report to the others that we’re concerned about you being depressed, and then no one will think it’s odd that I stay here and hold vigil over your gloomy self.” She smiled.
He closed the distance and kissed her lips. He could do that all day every day. She melted into him as usual, solidifying his belief that she was on the same page as him.
When her mind was clear and she wasn’t touching him, she seemed capable of convincing herself she wasn’t ready to take their relationship to the next step, but when he held her in his arms at night or kissed her, she relaxed against him every time.
The battle was in her mind. The fear. The uncertainty.
Eventually she would let it go. He had to believe that. There was no other way. Time to make her smile so they could get back to work. “Did you know they found a gene for shyness?”
She rolled her eyes. Good. At least she didn’t know this one yet. Finally.
“They would have found it sooner, but it was hiding behind two other genes.”
Chapter 15
Three days later…
* * *
Kate smoothed her hand over the expanse of Graham’s chest, loving the feel of his warm skin under her palm. She did this often: lay beside him, her head on his shoulder, her body snuggled close, her fingers toying with his pecs.
It was late, or early. Three in the morning. They had just moments ago decided to take a break and sleep for a few hours. It always took a while to wind down, though. The fast-paced scramble to download data was stressful. Kate trying to snoop on every conversation in the bunker was even more stressful.
“How much more time do we have?” she asked, drawing circles around his pecs with a finger. His chest was bare. Loose pajama pants were the only thing he had on. She wished for a moment that her own thin T-shirt could poof out of existence so she could be closer to him.
Graham’s hand moved along her hip, smoothing over the skintight material of the black leggings she wore. The clothes were comfortable, and ordinarily she thought nothing of them while working long hours in the night. But suddenly, the tight, stretching Lycra drew attention to the ever-building need she felt when she was close to him.
She cleared her throat, shaking that thought from her mind. “Did you communicate with Spencer today?” Spencer had hacked into the computer Graham was using on the second day and made contact with him. They trusted Dade and by default Spencer and did as he said even though they’d never met him.
“Yes. He says he can hold off two more days at most. We have to get this done. It’s making me so nervous that I’m not sure I can sleep at all.”
Kate tipped her head back to see his face. “You have to rest, Graham. You’ll get sloppy and be useless if you don’t take a break.”
Graham sighed. “I know, but I also keep reminding myself about the repercussions of not getting the job done in time. Lives are at stake. So many of them. Countless. There’s no way to be sure what would happen if that data were all deleted with no backup in place.”
“Have you spoken to Ryan?” she asked next.
He nodded. “Yes. He’s been downloading the research from his facility in New Mexico to the main cloud so I can access it also. Spencer created a hidden chat room for the two of us. Without speaking to Ryan out loud, I can tell he’s worried. He and his current staff are so close to a breakthrough with Myasthenia Gravis.”
Kate understood the stress they all must feel in the New Mexico bunker. It was crazy to think some government conspiracy was jeopardizing not only the lives of ordinary citizens, but more specifically the lives of the two people preserved in New Mexico who had mysteriously contracted Myasthenia Gravis.
Graham continued. “I’m certain Ryan isn’t sleeping at all. Nor are Emily, Zeke, or Michelle. And I still can’t picture our Emily in a relationship with Tushar and Trish’s son. He was so young.”
“Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but when you see them together, you’ll understand. They were made for each other. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were already planning a wedding and four kids.” Kate smiled at Graham in the dim light coming from the bathroom nightlight.
“Sounds to me like every one of us has woken up horny and ready for a relationship. It’s going to be a race to the finish line. By the end of the year, there will be ten weddings to attend.”
He didn’t specifically mention the two of them, but Kate knew he was thinking it. She prayed all the cards fell into place and the perfect path opened up for her and Graham. One in which she found a way to trust her instincts and relax.
She stared at him, pondering his words. There was no doubt he was a different man from the one who’d gone into the cryostat. He was still an introvert, figuring out something in his head before he talked about it. But he’d also changed. Everyone had to an extent. Waking up to find out they’d defied the odds had a tendency to make people decide to live life to the fullest. Carpe diem.
She wanted him. So badly. Especially right now, pressed against him, their entire bodies in line. But she also wanted to get this job done and get the hell out of this bunker. Until then, she couldn’t fully let her guard down. No way could she drop everything and have a wild night of sex while so many people were counting on them.
In a way, this pit stop to save the world from some unknown organization called Blue Cell was also buying Graham time to get fully healthy and her time to calm her damn nerves when it came to sleeping with him.
So many concerns. It didn’t matter which one she focused on. The important thing was she didn’t want to sleep with him right now while their lives were at risk. She wanted them to be together for the long haul and not rush out of a sense of danger. She couldn’t take the chance that he might walk away when things went back to normal. Her feelings were so strong for him, they scared her.
He gave her a squeeze. “You slid into your head again.”
She lifted her cheek and kissed his neck, nuzzling against his warm skin and inhaling his scent. “Sorry.”
“We’re going to be okay, you know. You and I and everyone else.”
“I hope so.” She jerked her thoughts back to the work Ryan was doing, the discussion they’d been having
before jumping to the anticipation of a rash of weddings. Getting married wasn’t something she could begin to ponder. Disease eradication, though, she could dive into any day. “Do you think it’s possible we were all intentionally infected with AP12, and likewise that the two preserved in New Mexico were also intentionally infected with Myasthenia Gravis?”
Graham sighed. “I have to admit the thought has crossed my mind, but I can’t come up with any reason why.”
“Maybe some faction of the US government doesn’t want Project DEEP to succeed. Or perhaps some enemy slipped into the bunker to sabotage us.”
“But why?” he asked. “Who the hell wouldn’t want to cure disease and prevent the spread?”
“Some radical survival-of-the-fittest supremacists or something, I guess.” She didn’t have answers, just questions.
“I’m sure there are plenty of religious zealots out there who think we’re playing God every time we even immunize people. Their voices have been loud and clear for decades. A substantial number among us thinks nature should take its course and we should leave it up to God to decide who should die and when it’s their time.
“However, what I can’t figure out is how the fuck some of those people infiltrated our government. And, if this thing is a big as it seems, the implication would be that whoever is manipulating us has been doing so for over a decade. That part makes no sense. How are they getting away with it? Why is there no system of checks and balances stepping in to help us?”
Kate closed her eyes and held on to Graham a little tighter. She didn’t have answers to any of his questions, and he wouldn’t expect them.
When he ran his hand up and down her back and then settled it on her hip, his fingers on her ass, her breath hitched. Conflicting emotions took over. She wanted him to stop before she got carried away, rose to straddle him, and threw caution to the wind. She also willed him to continue, reach lower, do something to ease the growing ache that never received gratification.
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