by Ruth Owen
“I know what I said,” she replied as she picked up a dish towel and wiped her hands, “but I figure you’re right about it being for the good of science. Besides, if I don’t, I’ll always wonder if what I felt in the simulator was … well, I’ll just always wonder. Anyway,” she added with a shrug, “it’s only a lousy kiss.”
Lousy? Lousy! Ian’s recollection of their kiss may have been hazy, but he was quite sure it deserved a better modifier than that one. He remembered enjoying it. He remembered her enjoying it. His disastrous marriage to Samantha had destroyed much of his belief in himself, both as a scientist and as a man. But nothing in this world or the virtual one would ever convince him that the kiss he’d given Jillian Polanski in cyberspace had been anything less than first class.
A determination he hadn’t felt in years welled up inside him. Quick as thought, he reached out and captured Jillian’s wrist, pulling her against him. He took a thorough, satisfied look at her wide eyes and wonderfully shocked expression, then turned to the kitchen door, pulling her after him.
“Hey!” she cried, finally finding her voice. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Taking you back to your living room,” he explained simply. “It’s the most logical place to replicate the cyberevent.” But logic was only half the reason. Simulator or no simulator, he intended to kiss Ms. Polanski until her toes curled.
Then see if she called it “lousy.”
Jill expected the doctor to give her a quick, perfunctory kiss, jot a few lines down in his notebook, and be done with it. But, as usual, Dr. Sinclair didn’t behave at all as she expected. Instead of kissing her immediately, he led her slowly into the living room. Once there, he let go of her wrist and started to pace the perimeter of the room with the taut energy of a caged panther.
Jill rubbed her wrist, torn between anger and confusion at his sudden change in attitude. One minute he was staring at her with a look so intense, it stole her breath. The next, he left her standing on her own as if he’d completely forgotten her existence. Irritated, she propped her hands on her hips, not even attempting to hide her annoyance. “Tell me, Doctor, do you treat all the women you intend to kiss this way?”
Sinclair glanced at her over his shoulder, flashing her a cocky grin. “And why do you want to know about the women I’ve kissed, Ms. Polanski?”
“I don’t. I—” Jill’s speech sputtered out, choked off by anger and indignation. Honestly, the man was infuriating! “I just want to know what you’re doing.”
“Well, why didn’t you say so?” He stopped pacing and turned to face her, still wearing that infernal grin. “I was examining the room for possible visual matches with the simulator environment, something we could use to help recreate the cyberspace world. But there doesn’t appear to be anything—not unless you’ve got a bramble bush or a mountain meadow stashed in your closet.”
“I might have an orc,” she said dryly.
Ian chuckled, a warm sound that poured through her like fine brandy. “I think I’ll pass on that suggestion. However, since the visual aspect of the experiment is a dead loss, the best thing we can do is to block it out. Removing our visual input will heighten our other senses.”
“Fine. I’ll close my eyes,” Jill said, wanting to get on with it.
“That’s one solution,” Ian agreed. “But I think I have a better one.” He bent down to the lamp on the end table beside the couch and switched it off.
Jill’s irritation crystallized into sharp panic. She hurried over to the lamp and switched it back on. “I’d rather close my eyes.”
Ian’s dark brows arched in amusement. “Very well, I accept your alternate solution—this time.” Still smiling, he settled his long, lean frame onto her couch, and nodded to the cushion next to him. “Shall we begin?”
Jill’s body suddenly seemed to be made of melted wax. Her knees gave way and she sank down beside him, though farther away than he’d indicated. All at once the room seemed blisteringly hot, and so stuffy that she found it difficult to breathe. It’s just a kiss. One stupid kiss …
Yet in her heart she knew it was much, much more.
In her own way she was as determined as Ian to recreate the simulator event—but her reasons were very different from his. The doctor wanted to prove that their virtual kiss was identical to a real one. She, on the other hand, wanted desperately to prove that it wasn’t.
Try as she might, she couldn’t drive the memory of his kiss from her mind. She recalled every detail, from the searing touch of his fingers to the intoxicating taste of his lips. And the colors—oh, glory, she couldn’t help but remember the colors he’d made inside her. But the most indelible detail of all was the completeness she’d felt when she was in his arms, the uncanny sense of absolute rightness that had happened when his lips molded to hers. His kiss was a beautiful, magical experience—almost too beautiful to be real. Too beautiful, certainly, to be created by the dispassionate Dr. Doom.
As a child she’d lived in a world of dreams, using make-believe to shield herself against the painful realities of her everyday existence. But now she was an adult, and she could not allow herself to be consumed by foolish fantasies—especially fantasies that centered on a man who had a microprocessor for a heart. Dr. Sinclair’s “rainbow” kiss was an illusion created by crossed circuits and faulty diodes of the simulator, and she had to shatter that illusion before it took hold of her life.
She closed her eyes, glad now that the doctor had requested she do so. It made everything seem much less personal. Taking a deep breath, she leaned forward and offered up her tightly pursed lips.
“I’m afraid that won’t do, Ms. Polanski.”
Her eyes snapped open. “Why not?” she demanded with growing annoyance. “A kiss is a kiss.”
“But it’s not a replicated kiss,” he explained. “In the simulator we were sitting … closer.”
Closer? They were practically on top of each other! “Look, I agreed to kiss you, but this is getting out of—”
“What’s the matter?” he asked, his eyes glittering with dark amusement. “Afraid?”
Hell, yes, Jillie thought. But she wasn’t going to let him know that. She’d never backed down from a challenge in her life, and she wasn’t about to start now. Stiffly, determinedly, she moved into his arms, willing herself to ignore the unexpected gentleness of his hands, and the frantic thumping of her own traitorous heart. She squinched her eyes shut, using the physical movement to help her shut off her chaotic inner emotions. She could bear it for a moment, just long enough for the doctor to kiss her and prove that the virtual kiss wasn’t anything like a real one.
Just long enough to wash away her bright rainbow dreams into gray and dreary puddles.
Ian rarely made mistakes. He considered them the province of other people, negligent people who did not do their research and consequently reached miscalculations. But the moment he took the reluctant Ms. Polanski into his arms and lowered his mouth to hers, he knew he’d made one of those infrequent mistakes. And—in the words of Partridge’s Americanized vocabulary—it was a whopper.
He felt the tension in her body, the rigid fatalism of a person approaching a firing squad. Judging by her physical reaction, he suspected that she’d rather kiss an orc than him. He paused a millimeter above her lips, sobered by the thought that he’d manipulated her into this position with all the heartless cunning of his former wife. No experiment was worth that. Ashamed, he started to draw back, when the soft, warm whisper of her breath brushed his lips.
And suddenly honor meant nothing. Justice meant nothing. The desire he’d thought long dead rose within him like a slumbering giant, waking with a silent roar of triumph. Arms he no longer controlled tightened around her. The mouth he’d thought to apologize with descended on hers like an eagle falling on its prey. Rivers of passion, damned up by logic and distrust, burst through their walls and rushed down on him like a raging torrent, drowning him in pleasure and sensation.
He f
elt like a man reborn, eager to share his pleasure with the woman in his arms. Teasing and sucking her lips, he consumed her with all the lavish passion that consumed him. A mouth that could love a man a hundred ways, and make him beg for a hundred more …
Yet despite his passion, her lips remained closed to him. He felt the strain within her, the trembling that came from fighting herself as well as him. She was in his arms but walled against him, like a princess held captive in an impregnable enchanted tower. It was torture holding heaven in his arms and not being able to reach it. “Give it a chance,” he groaned against her lips. “For God’s sake, give it a chance.”
She gasped softly, a tiny hiccupy sound. Slowly, cautiously, she parted her lips, allowing his more intimate caress. He tasted her deeply, gently stroking her secret textures, patiently wooing her with his tongue. One by one he stripped away her defenses, encouraging her blossoming desire.
Gradually he felt her tension melt away and her stiffness transform into a small but undeniable flame. Her hands crept up his shirtfront, bunching the soft material as she unconsciously drew him closer, offering him the double treasures of her trust and her desire. Whimpering softly, she tilted her head to give him greater access, inviting his seduction. With growing confidence she began her own invasion, and when their tongues met in a rough and wild dance, the tiny flame between them exploded into a fiery holocaust.
“Jillie,” he murmured against her lips. Vaguely he recalled breathing her name in cyberspace during their kiss, but it hardly mattered anymore. This caress was no re-creation of a cyberevent—it was new and precious, as precious as the enchanted creature he held in his arms. Her passion renewed him, her trust humbled him. Empty years of jaded love and sterile equations had deadened him to passion. But her kiss, her sweet, ardent kiss, poured water on the wasteland of his soul.
Suddenly the harsh jangle of the kitchen phone interrupted their embrace. Jill started to pull away to answer it, but Ian couldn’t bring himself to let her go. It was too soon, too damn soon. “Don’t,” he said, his voice hovering between a command and a plea.
“This late it might be important,” she reasoned. Then, with her beautiful, trembling half-smile, she added, “I won’t be long.”
Reluctantly Ian relaxed his hold. She slipped out of his grasp, leaving behind an emptiness he hadn’t expected, and the completely unfounded belief that he’d never hold her in his arms again. Don’t be daft, he told himself sternly as he watched her lithe figure cross the room and disappear into the kitchen.
He slumped against the cushions and plowed his hand through his hair, trying to take an impartial clinical view of what had just happened between Jillian and himself. What had started out as a simple kiss had morphed into something much more complicated, something that rocked him at the very core of his being.
Something, he admitted with an unsuppressible smile, that was bloody marvelous.
Was he prepared for this? Probably not. His personal life was unsettled enough without adding a stubborn, idealistic, and completely irresistible female to the picture. His wiser side suggested he explain away his attraction for Ms. Polanski as pure animal lust, a by-product of his rigorously Spartan lifestyle. But he was too much of a scientist to twist the evidence to support that theory.
Since his divorce, he’d had a number of women literally throw themselves at him, and he’d never been seriously tempted to accept their offers. Purely physical sex had always left him unsatisfied, wanting more. He’d given his passion to his work, finding a stable if not entirely satisfactory existence in the immutable principles and cold equations. He’d consigned himself to a dull but bearable future—until a certain little “box turtle” had turned his carefully ordered world upside down.
A small sound attracted his attention. He looked up and saw Merlin staring down at him from the top of a nearby bookcase, his golden eyes wide with undisguised fascination. And from the comfortable way his paws were tucked up under him, Ian guessed that the black cat had been watching the activities on the couch for some time.
Ian grinned wryly at the cat, thinking that their occupations were much the same. He used his simulator to study events in the virtual world, while Merlin performed a similar task in the real one. “Well, my fellow voyeur,” the scientist commented dryly, “have you any advice to offer? Any words of wisdom gleaned from your nine lives worth of experience?”
If Merlin did, he kept it to himself. He continued to stare at Sinclair, unnerving the scientist with his wide, unblinking gaze. Once more the chilling uneasiness crept into Ian’s mind, the feeling of unforeseen disaster looming just ahead. The logical scientist in him wanted to discount the idea as pure fancy, but he couldn’t help remembering the last time this disturbing feeling had come over him—on a dreary, rain-soaked afternoon in his Cambridge flat, just hours before the faculty party where a colleague of his had introduced him to a beguiling, breathtakingly lovely woman named Samantha.…
“Dr. Sinclair?”
Startled, Ian turned. For a split second, he thought he saw his dark-haired ex-wife standing in the kitchen doorway, stunningly beautiful, but with eyes as cunning as a viper’s. Then the vision flowed into another figure, a slighter, deceptively ordinary-looking woman whose courage and character gave her a beauty Samantha could never achieve. He swallowed, feeling a profound change move through him, as if Felix Parker’s topological “wave” program were overlaying his own formless gray world with one bursting with color and life. Not one to believe in miracles, he suddenly considered the possibility of their existence. Perhaps my simulator isn’t the only way to change one’s reality …
“That was Marsha,” she said quietly as she leaned against the doorjamb. “She wanted you to know that someone called her house, looking for you.” She crossed her arms in front of her and looked at him directly as she added, “She wanted to know when you were coming home.”
SIX
Marsha had been quite adamant on the phone. “Look, I know it’s unexpected—Sinclair living with someone, I mean—but Kevin took the call, and he told me the person on the other end was definitely a woman.”
Marsha had paused, as if expecting Jill to reply. But Jill didn’t reply. She couldn’t. Her tongue seemed to have turned to stone, along with her heart and mind and the rest of her body. Only a moment before Ian had held her in his arms, making rainbows inside her that were bigger and brighter than anything she’d experienced in the simulator. He’d kissed her—not the virtual kiss of a storybook knight, but a man’s kiss, full of a man’s very real needs and desires.
And, apparently, a man’s deceit.
“Jillie?” her friend asked with quiet concern. “Look, if anything’s happened between you two … well, maybe this woman is his mother, or his sister.”
“He doesn’t have any relatives,” she replied dully, remembering what Ian had said about being an only child raised by his grandfather.
She hung up the phone, feeling an aching emptiness grow inside her, a hollow space where her dreams had been. The colors inside her had turned into cheap and gaudy trash, like party decorations after the celebration is over. She knew the feeling—she’d seen it on her mother’s face too many times to count. But this was the first time she’d actually felt the emotion herself, and it hurt more than she had ever imagined.
“Deal with it,” she whispered harshly, reciting the words that had become her personal mantra. And dealing with it, in her opinion, meant giving the two-timing doctor a piece of her mind. Balling her hands into fists, she stalked toward the living room—and stopped dead in the kitchen doorway.
Ian hadn’t moved. He still sat on the couch where she’d left him, his head bent down, his clasped hands resting on his knees. But although he hadn’t moved in body, his spirit seemed to be a million miles away. Shoulders hunched, he seemed wrapped in sorrow, his eyes staring blankly into a personal and private hell. His somber isolation touched the loneliness of her soul, and an ache started inside her that had nothing to do
with anger or embarrassment. She wanted to draw him into her arms and hold him—just hold him—until the pain in his eyes went away.
And afterward he’d go back home to another woman’s arms.
She propped herself against the doorjamb, physically needing the support. “Ian?” she began, and proceeded to tell him what Marsha had said.
She expected him to offer her an explanation, or at least to look guilty. Instead, he shook his head and grinned, showing no more remorse than a boy who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Damn,” he said, more to himself than to her, “I did promise to be home early tonight.” He rose to his feet and walked over to her, leaning against the doorjamb in a deceptively lazy stance. “But then,” he added softly, “promises were made to be broken. Wouldn’t you agree, Ms. Polanski?”
Yes, her body screamed. Sinclair’s intense gaze stroked fire across her skin, making her aware of every inch of herself, and every inch of him. Desire pooled in her middle, sapping her strength and her sense. She wanted to bury herself in his strong embrace and let him make rainbows inside her until she hadn’t a gray corner left in her soul. So what if he was living with someone else? If he didn’t care, why should she? For once in her life why shouldn’t she take what she wanted and damn the consequences?
Promise me, Jillie. Promise …
Across the years her mother’s voice came back to her—her loving but thoughtless mother who’d never meant to hurt anyone and had hurt so many in the process. A dreamer always looking for her knight in shining armor, Gretchen had dragged her daughter from one failed love affair to the next, always believing that her lover would leave his wife, or give up the road job, or generously agree to raise another man’s child. The inconstant lifestyle had taken its toll, and Gretchen had died too young of a cold she hadn’t bothered to treat but which had eventually developed into pneumonia.