Marilynn had been Genie’s best friend. Her only friend for a while; the sole person on campus who’d seen beyond the IQ to the lonely child beneath and had understood that Genie had needed a mother as much as a friend. Her remembered touch soothed Genie and she looked into both her mind and heart and knew it was no mistake.
Nick Wellington hadn’t attacked her. He hadn’t ruined her experiments or blown up her car. He had saved her, protected her. And she could swear he’d almost kissed her. Genie remembered the feel of his chest against her fingertips, the hot flush that had climbed her body when they had been nose to nose in the parking lot—before her car had exploded and all hell had broken loose.
“But I was probably just imagining it,” she told the cats. “He was just paying attention to me because, I ‘looked like I needed a friend.’ Well, the heck with him. I’ve got plenty of friends.” She looked down at her lap and thought, Yeah, friends with fur and tails. I’ve really got to work on that.
She sighed and glanced at the phone. She should call him and apologize. He lived nearby. She could get the number from information, dial it and apologize. Tell him that she was sorry for letting Sturgeon’s questions confuse her.
Tell him she wanted to be more than friends.
Where had that come from? But even as her face heated with a fierce blush, Genie’s tingling fingers tapped in four-one-one and she requested the number for Nicholas Wellington.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. That number is unlisted.”
Darn, darn, darn. Then she thought of calling Steph or Molly to ask if they knew the number, since Genie’s techs often went out on Friday nights with the members of the Wellington lab.
Yeah, she could just imagine calling one of her employees and asking for Beef Wellington’s phone number. How very high school, or at least the way Genie had always pictured high school. She’d spent those two years alone in a small room where she did individual projects while the other kids labored to learn stuff she’d mastered before the age of five.
Who was she kidding? She was a freak. An over-intelligent child pretending to be an adult. She wasn’t a princess fit for the likes of Nick Wellington. She was Genius Watson and there wasn’t a darned thing she could do about it.
But that didn’t stop her heart from pounding when the phone rang. Oddjob arched his back and hissed.
The phone rang again and Genie glanced at the clock. It was past ten, too late for one of her mother’s infrequent calls. It must be Wellington, phoning to yell at her again. Please, let it be him. She lifted the receiver and felt her palms sweat.
“N-Nick?”
There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Nick, I was an idiot tonight. I’m sorry. Forgive me?”
Silence.
Then a rasping chuckle that she didn’t consciously recognize, one that zapped shivers up and down her spine. “Forgive you? Perhaps I’ll forgive you. Maybe I’ll even let you live.”
The voice was harsh, the breathing heavy, and Genie clutched at the receiver as she saw a flash of black-red light and felt hot breath on the back of her neck, insistent pressure against her buttocks.
“Who…who are you? What do you want? Why are you doing this to me?” Genie knew her voice was rising hysterically but she didn’t care. She wanted to know why the monster had chosen her.
Another chuckle, another puff of breath, another involuntary shiver. “This is your second warning, Dr. Watson. Your last warning. Give up the Fenton project or die.”
Chapter Six
It was almost midnight when Nick cursed himself as ten types of fool, rolled across the rumpled bedclothes to the phone on the nightstand and punched in the number he had memorized earlier that evening when he’d dialed it five times and hung up each time before it could connect.
It rang once, twice, then was picked up.
“Hello?” The male voice was deep and vaguely familiar. Nick felt a surge of white-hot anger that was as fierce and overwhelming as it was unexpected. How dare she have another man over. It was Nick’s job to protect her, not anyone else’s.
“Hello?” The voice was annoyed, demanding an answer. “Is anyone there? Hello?”
But Nick wasn’t protecting her. He was sulking at home because she had asked a perfectly reasonable, perfectly rational question and he had been insulted by it. In high dudgeon, he had sent her home alone.
She wasn’t alone anymore.
Nick heard breathing on the other end of the line. Heavy breathing. A chill raced through him. What if it was her attacker on the phone? What if he’d broken into her condo to finish the job? What if he had raped her? Murdered her.
Clutching the receiver so tightly he heard the plastic creak, Nick said, “If you’ve hurt one hair on her head, you bastard, I’m going to kill you myself. That’s a promise.”
Silence. Breathing.
“Did you hear me, you sick son of a bitch? If you’ve touched her, if you’ve harmed her in any way, there’s going to be hell to pay. Got it?”
A dry chuckle. “I’ve got it, Dr. Wellington. Very enlightening.”
“Sturgeon?” Nick felt a flash of embarrassment, then a new clutch of fear tore at his belly. The fiend had already come and gone. Why else would the police be at her place? “What happened? Is she okay? Is Genie hurt?”
You stupid idiot, you left her unprotected not twelve hours after someone firebombs her car. What kind of a man are you? Not a very good one, Nick assured the Senator. He’d let his own sense of injury put her in danger. He’d never forgive himself if she’d been hurt.
“Dr. Watson is fine. But I think you should come over and stay with her. She’s a bit shaken up.”
“Why? What happened?”
“He called here just after ten o’clock.”
Nick slammed the phone back into its cradle and yanked on his jeans with an oath. He was jamming his head through the armhole of yesterday’s T-shirt on the way out the door when a thought struck him.
Lucille would’ve called him before she called the police, if only to tell him it was all his fault.
“YOUR BOYFRIEND IS on his way over.”
The B-word brought an illogical rush of pleasure, though Genie felt honor bound to clear up Sturgeon’s misconception. “He’s not my boyfriend. I just refuse to believe he has anything to do with this, okay?”
The detective’s shrug was eloquent, his tone business-like as he ran her through the phone call for the tenth time. She tried to concentrate on his questions while her mind swung between excitement that Nick was on his way and apprehension that he might still be mad.
She’d just about given up on fear, terror and jumping at shadows. It was hard to be too worried when there were two uniforms sitting outside in a cruiser, a rumpled detective drinking coffee at the breakfast bar and a collection of technicians huddled over her phone.
There was safety in numbers.
Then Nick arrived, and it was as if the others didn’t exist. His eyes sought hers the second he came in the door, and their ice-blue snapped with temper. Genie fought a sigh. He was still angry.
“Nick—” she began.
“Shut up.” He leaned over the couch where she sat clutching her grandmother’s quilt to her chest like a shield. “Are you okay?” When she didn’t reply right away, he brushed a lock of hair from her forehead and repeated, “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m—”
“Shut up,” he said again, and he kissed her. Hard.
It wasn’t a romantic kiss, or a lover’s kiss, or a friend’s kiss. It was, in its own way, an attack. A statement. A declaration of war, though she wasn’t sure anymore which side either of them was on.
She would have protested, would have pushed him away—or pulled him closer, she wasn’t sure which—but she didn’t get a chance to. While she was still paralyzed with shock, while her brain was still trying to grapple with the fact that Nick Wellington—Beef Wellington—was kissing her, it was over.
He pushe
d himself away and stood, looking down at her with something incomprehensible churning in his eyes. “I’m going crazy,” he said to nobody, and stalked into the kitchen.
Genie sat numbly on the couch and vibrated. Too much coffee, she thought, having lost count of the number of cups she’d consumed since the phone call. But the energy that zipped through her was brighter than a caffeine buzz, jazzier than sheer nerves.
Too much tension. She had every right to be stressed, given what she’d been through in the past forty-eight hours. But the liquid fire that raced through her veins and heated her insides was hotter than fear, stronger than terror.
I’m afraid, she thought, and she was. She didn’t know who was doing this, didn’t know why. Didn’t know how to stop him. But the trembling in her thighs wasn’t the same as the bone-deep chill she’d gotten from her caller’s raspy voice and dead inflection.
It was Nick. She glanced toward the breakfast bar and intercepted Sturgeon’s lifted eyebrow. Not your boyfriend, huh?
Genie scowled back, then glanced at Wellington. He was wearing the same T-shirt he’d had on at the lab, but his hair was appealingly mussed and his socks were missing. He’d been in bed.
The image that brought to mind was one of warm pink flesh and tangled sheets. Of damp, musky sighs and gentle, sliding touches. Of flash and flame.
Her cheeks heated and Nick’s eyes looked straight into hers. His nostrils flared and ice-blue melted to boil in an instant, as if he knew exactly what she had been thinking. As if he was thinking it, too. Genie slammed her eyes down into her lap and concentrated on her own tangled fingers while her lips tingled at the memory of his touching them.
He had an ex-wife as blond and beautiful and tall as Genie was dull and ordinary and short. If the princess hadn’t been enough for him, then who was Genie to try?
Madness. Insanity. She was falling for Nicholas Wellington, a man so far out of her league that the only reason they were in the same room was because of a murder and a phone call. A man who ordinarily wouldn’t even speak to her in the elevator except to complain about her use of the spectrophotometer.
A man like Archer who could have any woman he ever wanted and would therefore never need a freak like Genius Watson.
“Genie?” It was Nick’s voice.
She looked up. “Yes?” The technicians had gone, presumably leaving gadgetry on the phone that had carried that raspy, horrible voice to her.
“The detective is going to need a list of all the people involved in the Fenton’s Ataxia project, all the other labs and their people, and the names of the enrolled families.”
Genie glanced at Nick, then Sturgeon. “I can’t do that.”
“What? Why not?”
“I can tell you the names of all the researchers, that’s not a problem.” She gestured helplessly. “But I can’t tell you the names of the study enrollees. It’s unethical.”
Sturgeon twitched as if the word gave him a rash. “Why? It’s not like you’re a priest or a psychologist.”
“True, but there are huge confidentiality issues in genetic research. There is no disclosure of study volunteers, period.” She shrugged helplessly. “I know he said this is about the Fenton’s project, but I can’t do it. I can’t tell you who’s in the study.”
And she probably wouldn’t have even if it had been possible. The search for the Fenton’s Ataxia gene was too dear to her, too important. She closed her eyes for a moment and remembered a beloved voice, pictured a pianist’s hands turned to claws by the relentless, deadly disease.
Fenton’s Ataxia, with its progressive tremors, neurodegeneration, and drawn-out, painful death had taken Marilyn. For that, she had vowed to see the disease cured.
Nick chuffed out a breath. “Even if it’s your life we’re talking about?”
“I know what we’re talking about, Wellington, I’m not an idiot. But I don’t see what the families have to do with it. Each person signs a release before blood is drawn, then they have several weeks to back out of the study before their DNA is processed.” She sighed. “I can’t imagine a family member wanting to stop the project.”
“Who might?”
Nick answered Sturgeon’s question. “How about the pharmaceutical company holding patents on the drugs that are currently used to treat Fenton’s? It’s a common enough disease that there’s big money in treating it. Discovery of a gene could either update the treatment or suggest a cure, so the company might be looking to stall completion of the project.”
Genie was skeptical. “Oh, come on, that’s something out of the movies. Real people don’t hurt each other over things like that.”
Both men looked at her as if she were, in fact, an idiot. Sturgeon said diplomatically, “You’d be amazed at the things people do for money, Dr. Watson. I’ve seen worse done for far less.” He wrote something down on a scrap of paper. “How can I find out who holds those patents?”
“I’ll do it.” Nick sat on the couch next to Genie, his thigh brushing against her lower back where she curled on the far cushion. She couldn’t decide whether to slide closer or to scoot away. “I’ve got a friend in the P.T.O.—the Patent and Trade Office. I can find out what company’s holding the Fenton’s patents and whether they’ve got anything big coming down the pipeline.”
Of course he had a friend. People like Nick had friends all over the place. She was probably gorgeous, too, and popular. Genie scowled and pushed away from him on the couch.
Sturgeon nodded. “That’d be good. Also put together a list of any other labs working on Fenton’s that might be in competition with this group. They might be trying to shave the odds a little in their favor.”
Genie closed her eyes. They were talking about scientists here. Researchers. People who dedicated their lives to understanding human disease. Not thieves. Not gangsters or drug dealers or…mad bombers.
“This is all wrong,” she murmured.
Nick patted her thigh, then pulled his hand away as if he hadn’t intended to touch her. “I know, Genie. It’s weird thinking about scientists being capable of violence, isn’t it? But money can be a powerful motivator.”
He understood her too easily. Genie wasn’t used to being understood. She was used to thinking far more quickly than the people around her, often leaping to conclusions while they were still working through how to ask the question. Nick was so fast he was almost ahead of her.
She wasn’t sure she liked it.
“I still don’t think it has anything to do with the lab,” she insisted.
“Then what? Are you involved in some other Fenton’s project? Do you manufacture sports equipment in your spare time? Do you sell popcorn to movie theaters?” Nick referred to several other popular Fenton brand names and Genie wanted to smack him between the eyes for mocking her.
“No. I just think you two have it all wrong.”
“Then what do you think is going on, Watson? You’re the smartest person in this room, yet I haven’t heard a single theory out of that pretty mouth of yours.” Nick poked her and she moved further away on the couch until she was crammed up against the armrest. “Who do you think is doing this?”
“I don’t know!” she yelled, and was gratified to see both men flinch at the volume. “Don’t you get it? I don’t have the faintest idea what happened in that darkroom. I don’t remember who did it, and because I don’t, there’s a boy lying in the morgue tonight who didn’t need to be there. Okay? You get it? I don’t know.”
Without a word Nick leaned over and pulled her into his lap. Genie froze in shock, half expecting him to shake her for being such a bitch. But he didn’t. He pressed her face against his shoulder and wrapped both arms around her, rocking slightly. “Shh. It’s okay. Never mind that now, okay?”
She should have been insulted at his treatment, should have felt foolish being rocked like a child—or as she imagined most children must be. Her own parents had been unsure how to deal with a prodigy. They’d been mystified that they had produced suc
h a strange little girl, and though they had tried to love her, Genie had long ago realized they had been a bit afraid of her, too.
She supposed it had been hard to cuddle a five-year-old who could do differential equations in her head while reciting Proust.
Nick had no such worries. He must’ve sent Sturgeon some sort of secret male signal over her head, because the detective muttered something about talking to them later that day, said that a squad car would make regular runs past the house, and left. Genie kept her eyes closed. She’d complain about Nick’s high-handed tactics in a moment. Right now she was too comfortable to move.
His heart beat steadily beneath her unbruised cheek and at each breath he took, she rose and fell a little, too, finally realizing that they were breathing in tandem.
“I’m sorry, Genie.”
She frowned when he spoke, having been perfectly content to sit in silence for a year or so. She sighed. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have asked you where you were this morning. I never really believed what they were saying, but I think I went crazy for a few minutes there in the police station.”
“It was a reasonable question. I’m just sorry I didn’t handle it better. I should have been here for you when he called. My fault.”
She shook her head. “I’m not your responsibility, Nick. I’m grateful that you found me in the darkroom, that you stayed with me last night, and I’m really, really grateful you shoved me into that gutter, but I’m a big girl. You needn’t feel like you have to take care of me. I’ll be okay. Honest.”
Nick pushed her head back down to his chest with a rumbling chuckle and said, “Don’t worry about it now, sweetheart. Go to sleep. We’ll figure it out in the morning.”
But suddenly she wasn’t sleepy. She was energized. Twitchy. Ready for action.
She lay as still as she could, hyperaware of the man beneath her, of his breath against her cheek, of the softness of his T-shirt against her neck and hands. Of the way his legs pressed against the backs of her thighs and the fact that her robe had fallen aside so her bare calf was rubbing against the rough denim of his jeans.
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