Sighing, she snuggled closer, sliding her cheek back and forth against his chest and burrowing into him until she was warm from the inside out.
And growing rapidly warmer.
She shifted again, just for the sheer sensual pleasure of it, and wiggled a little deeper into his lap.
“If you’re not sleepy, why don’t we watch a movie?” In a single move, Nick slid her off his lap and stood, jamming his hands into his jeans’ pockets as if his life depended on it. “You have any videos?”
He stalked to the entertainment center on stiff legs and Genie repressed a sigh of disappointment. He wanted to watch a movie. Obviously he wasn’t feeling the same things she was.
Again, big surprise.
“Bottom door, left-hand side.” Her face, which moments before had been warm from rubbing against the springy chest hair she could feel through the worn T-shirt, heated again when he glanced at her videos and let out a low whistle.
“You’ve got quite a collection here.”
She squirmed and tugged the robe down over her legs. “Don’t tell anyone, please.”
That got his attention. He turned in the act of loading a movie into the VCR. “Don’t tell anyone what?”
“What kind of movies I watch.” Genie gestured surrender. “It’s a vice.”
Chuckling, Nick shoved the cassette the rest of the way into the machine and fast-forwarded through the opening garbage. Once the FBI warning was on the screen he returned to the couch, slung a friendly arm across Genie’s shoulders and tugged until she was leaning against him as the opening chase unfolded.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered in her ear, making little shivers run down her neck and coalesce in her belly. “Where I come from, James Bond isn’t a vice.” They watched 007 jump a motorbike off a cliff and freefall until he caught up with the airplane that had gone over the side just ahead of him.
Nick sighed with heartfelt appreciation when the deep, twanging notes of the theme sounded. “It’s a religion.”
THEY WATCHED GOLDENEYE and debated the merits of the BMW Z3 versus Bond’s trademark Aston Martin. They watched A View to a Kill and argued Roger Moore versus Sean Connery, but it wasn’t much of a debate. They watched Goldfinger as their eyelids grew heavy and the dawn’s early, bloody light crawled across the sky as a dark sedan rolled to a halt outside the house.
A window slid down and a camera lens was extended, flashing twice, three times, on the license plate of Nick’s Bronco before the sedan rolled away, unremarked by the officer dozing in his car.
Chapter Seven
“Rough night, boss?” Jared shot a tattooed elbow into Nick’s ribs and chuckled. “You look a little fuzzy around the edges.”
Nick stared at the ninety-six well plate on the lab bench. He was pretty sure he was supposed to measure a minute quantity of something and put it in each of the small wells, but he’d be darned if he remembered what it was or why he was doing it.
He’d also be darned if he’d ask Jared.
While taking a surreptitious look at his own lab notebook in case it had a clue, Nick answered, “Yeah, you could say that. We sort of forgot to go to sleep.”
Jared whistled and pulled his baseball cap lower over his brow. “You go, boss. Hooked yourself a real wildcat this time, did you? Does she have a sister?”
Aha. Nick read a few sentences in his own handwriting and blessed the grad school advisor who used to fine him beers when he forgot to write stuff down. Fluorescent sequencing. He was supposed to be rerunning those last fifty base pairs for the article he was putting together. He could do that. Piece of cake. He grinned and got to work.
“Or are you saving the sister for yourself? Come on, come on, fess up. Tell Uncle Jared everything.”
There was a muffled question from three benches over, where Jill was walking a grad student through the steps of DNA purification, and Jared answered with a loud, “The boss had a hot date last night and he didn’t get a wink of sleep, poor baby. She was an animal.”
Jared flickered his studded tongue grotesquely and Nick’s fatigue fuzzed brain finally got a grip on the conversation. “Hey, wait! It wasn’t like that. We just talked!” And watched movies and ate popcorn and sat next to each other on the couch with a pair of cats named after the bad guys in Goldfinger.
And had so much fun they forgot to go to sleep, even though the specter of a faceless killer had hung over the overstuffed couch and lurked in the shadows beyond the kitchen, waiting for them to let down their guard. Nick’s only consolation was that she’d let him drive her to work that morning and that she was safe in her office now, working on her own neglected experiments while the detectives did their jobs.
“Sure, boss. If you say so.” Jared winked and shot another pointy elbow into Nick’s ribs.
Sighing, Nick rubbed at his chest and wished his staff was as disciplined as Genie’s. Maybe if he wore a suit and tie to work every day they would give him more respect.
Yeah, as if that was going to happen in a million years.
“So, does she have a sister you could hook me up with?”
Jill finally came to Nick’s rescue, hustling over from her bench and grabbing Jared by an earring. “Can’t you see the man is busy? Let him alone and get back to your own work. If you can’t concentrate on that, then you can go help maintenance bleach the developer room.” The idea obviously appealed. She grinned and said, “In fact, you can go down the hall and grab a brush right now. Make sure every trace of…well, you know, is off the walls and sink before poor Dr. Watson has to go back in there, got it?” She sent him off with a kick in the rear. Surprisingly, he went.
Jill could get away with stuff like that because everyone loved her.
“You just talked, huh?” She folded her arms across her pristine lab coat and leaned back against the high bench. “All night?”
Nick sighed again and wished he could lock his office door and take a nap, preferably with Genie right next to him so he could be sure she was safe. “Doesn’t anyone have anything better to worry about this morning? Has it escaped your attention that there’s a madman running around, attacking women and blowing up cars? Doesn’t that worry any of you?”
“Of course it does, Nick. We’re all worried about Dr. Watson. But we’re also your friends.” She glanced in Jared’s direction. “Or at least I am. And I’m worried about you, too. In all the time I’ve worked for you, I’ve never seen you this way.”
“What way? Oh, never mind.” Nick stabbed a load of amplification solution into the sequencing mix and handed the plate to Jill. “Finish this for me, will you? I have to call the detectives.”
He snapped off his sterile gloves and tossed them into the trash. Jill handed the plate to her nervous-looking grad student and Nick stifled a groan. If he hadn’t fouled up the chemical mix himself, the student was sure to mess up the programming. He could kiss that sequencing goodbye.
“And Jill?”
She turned. “Yeah, Nick?”
“Try to keep Jared quiet, okay? I don’t want it spreading around that I’m having fun while there’s a madman stalking Dr. Watson. It just doesn’t seem appropriate, you know?”
Jill nodded and flashed a quick smile. “I’ll see what I can do, but it’s going to be a little difficult to control the rumors.”
Yawning hugely, Nick asked, “Why’s that?”
“Dr. Watson is in her office, fast asleep on her light box.” Jill shrugged and grinned. “Rumor has it she had a late night, too. Go figure.”
Nick laughed and opened the door to his office. The poster of the Face of Erectile Dysfunction grinned at him and he shook his head as he closed the door.
GENIE FROWNED AT THE little black bars when they swayed, merging and separating before her very eyes like tiny line dancers. “Stay still, darn it.”
Or maybe it wasn’t the shadows on the X-ray film that were moving. Maybe it was her head, bobbing around on her neck again as it had just before she fell asleep on her desk. But t
he light box, a white plastic rectangle lit from the inside for use as a horizontal X-ray viewer, was so warm and smooth. It was begging her to sleep on it again.
How humiliating. Dr. Genius Watson, sleeping on the job.
But it had been worth it. She couldn’t remember another night that she’d had so much fun, even though the circumstances were less than ideal. In fact, they downright sucked. But that hadn’t stopped her and Nick from snuggling on the couch until the wee hours of the morning. Who needed sleep? She had Wellington.
Whoa, there. She frowned. You don’t have Nick. He’s just being a nice guy, keeping you company while the police figure out what’s going on. He’s a white knight at heart. It’s nothing personal.
Nothing personal. Like it had been “nothing personal” when handsome, golden boy Archer had roughly relieved her of her virginity and then told her that half of his fraternity was waiting outside in the hall for her to emerge and prove that he, Archer Cavanaugh, had screwed the inscrutable Genius Watson. He had really done her a favor, he insisted, because she could no longer be voted The Most Likely to Die a Virgin.
Maybe not. But virgin or not, she decided she’d die before she walked through that door, so when Archer had left the room to accept back-slapping congratulations, she’d gone out the window and down the three story rose trellis. In an ice storm. And had gone straight to Marilynn, who had probably saved her life that night.
And while she’d survived, and the gossip was quickly replaced with the news of Marilynn’s illness, the lesson had stayed with Genie as surely as any other she’d learned in college.
No more rich boys. No more mistakes.
And Genie knew that when she let her heart lead the way, she made mistakes. When her brain was in control, she was in control. It was as simple as that. She had to stay in control, and that was more important now than ever before.
There was someone out there who didn’t want the Fenton’s project to move forward, and there was a man in the office down the hall who was nothing more to her than a gentleman. Maybe a friend. Never a lover.
Okay, then, brain. Let’s get back to work. No more arguments from you, hear?
She frowned down at the film again, then picked up the pedigree of Richard’s family.
She scanned the pedigree, which was a chart of the people, their relatedness, affected status and other pertinent information. She thought briefly of Richard’s strange phone call—and shoved aside thoughts of another, less benign voice on the phone—as she compared the information on the pedigree to the data on the X-ray film. She frowned.
Something wasn’t right.
She traced her finger down the lanes on the film. Her trained eye could pick up each of the two copies an individual inherited—one from the mother, one from the father. But one of the lanes, marked FNTN-III.7, was aberrant. This person inherited a marker from his mother, but his second copy didn’t match either of his father’s.
Too tired to hike down the hall, Genie called the lab extension from her office phone and was pleased when it was answered with a professional, “Good morning, Watson lab. How may I help you?”
“Good morning, Terry. How did those Humboldt’s amplifications come out yesterday?”
Terry swallowed audibly and she pictured his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. In the fifth year of his graduate studies, Terry would graduate in another year with a truly outstanding thesis that had grown out of the Humboldt’s project. He was awkward, brilliant, and Genie suspected he had a mild crush on her.
“F-fine, Dr. Watson. Should I bring the results to your office?”
“No, not right now. How about after lunch? Right now I need to see Steph in my office. Can you ask her to join me?”
Genie replaced the receiver with a smile. Terry reminded her so very much of herself. Overbright, overeducated and socially awkward around people he might find attractive. But Terry had one advantage she had lacked. His physicist parents had been fully capable of dealing with a child prodigy.
On the other hand, Genie’s mother Vivien, a French fashion designer who had fallen in love with an American financier, had been happy to give her daughter into the care of a succession of special schools. Vivien had had better luck with her younger son, Etienne, who had moved with her to Paris after her husband’s death in a small commuter plane crash. Etienne was handsome, outgoing and of dead-average intelligence.
Genie had often thought that she could walk past her mother and brother in a crowd and not even recognize them. She still missed her father from time to time, though. He had been the one to visit her at school and call her when she was ill. Upon his death, Genie had been the beneficiary of a large life insurance policy and half his estate, as if her father knew he hadn’t given her a good family and was trying to make up for it with money.
“Dr. Watson? You wanted to see me?” Steph’s red curls bobbed gently in the doorway and she looked concerned. “Is everything okay? Are you okay? Do you need anything?”
Genie felt a small glow of warmth and had the sudden urge to hug her entire staff. Two days earlier she would have sworn that not one person working in the Watson lab would notice if she just disappeared one day. They worked for her, they respected her, but Genie hadn’t thought they liked her very much.
How wrong she had been. When she’d come into her office that morning her desk had been covered with flowers, cards and even a stuffed teddy bear wearing a white lab coat, a test tube in its paw.
She didn’t think anyone had ever given her a stuffed toy before. She kept it on the top of her bookshelf and grinned at it from time to time with an unfamiliar sense of belonging.
“I’m fine, really. Just a little tired.” Genie smiled at Steph’s concern, feeling that warm flicker again. She’d hired Steph two years earlier, drawn by the look of quiet desperation in the back of the young woman’s eyes, coupled with impeccable references from an unfinished graduate degree. The single mother of a tiny girl, Steph had relaxed over time and had even begun to smile again in the past few weeks. Genie wondered whether the change had anything to do with the girl’s new beau, Roger.
Genie was beginning to understand the feeling.
She flipped the pedigree to face the other woman. “I wanted to ask you about the new family. See this guy, III.7? On the two films I’ve read so far, he’s an outlier. Either we have a DNA problem or the pedigree’s wrong. Can you get his file from down the street and check the DNA stocks to make sure he’s labeled correctly?” She thought of Richard’s promised donation to the Eye Center and tapped the film. “We can’t afford any question marks on this family, if you know what I mean.”
Steph frowned. “I don’t think I met that patient in person. Darlene enrolled him. She was helping because it had gotten so crazy. It was a super busy day, so we might have mixed up a sample. I tried to be extra careful, though.”
“I’m sure you were,” Genie assured her. “I’m not looking to place blame, I’d just like to figure this out before we go much farther with the project.”
“Of course.” Steph wrote the identifying code on a piece of paper. “I’ll call over to the Eye Center and get the original files. How about extracting his second pellet?”
Each study volunteer gave three tubes of blood that were turned into DNA pellets. If the mix-up had occurred during that part of the experiment, the pellet marked FNTN-III.7 actually could belong to a different member of the family, which would account for him sharing some of the correct DNA but not all of it.
Genie nodded. “Good idea.”
Clutching the piece of paper in her hand, Steph headed for the door. Not quite ready to face calling Sturgeon, which was the next thing on her to-do list, Genie said, “Steph?”
The redhead turned at the door. “Yes?”
“How was your date yesterday? The one with Roger from Petrie Pharmaceuticals?”
It was probably the first time Genie had ever asked her staff a personal question, but Steph handled it well. She only blinked.
“It was— It was okay. We went after, you know, after your car…”
Genie winced. “Sorry about that.”
Steph gave a slightly pained grin. “Not exactly your fault, you know? Anyway, he wanted to go see the car, but by the time we got there it’d been taken away. I was glad about that. Then we went out to dinner and he brought me home early. I think he had something to do after, but that was okay since I was pretty wiped out. He’s nice. I think this one’s a keeper.”
How do you know which one is a keeper? How do you know if he likes you at all? Genie wanted to ask, but she couldn’t. It would hardly be professional of her.
“I like your hair that way,” Steph said, startling her.
Genie touched the springy locks self-consciously. Her stitches and scalp still hurt too much for her to twist the hair up, so it flowed freely down her back. She’d worn one of her brown suits though, as a way of forcing her body to believe that they were actually going to work on zero sleep. “You do?”
Steph nodded. “It looks good that way and it has all sorts of interesting highlights. It makes a nice contrast to the suit, though I have to say that I really liked that sweater you had on yesterday with the jeans.” She added slyly, “And so did Dr. Wellington. I saw him checking you out a couple of times.”
“You did? He was? I mean—” From a breath of hope to utter, juvenile embarrassment, Genie dropped her head in her hands, wincing as the stitches across her eyebrow pulled. She pictured the sight that had greeted her in the mirror that morning and winced again.
The Frankenstein look. How sexy.
“Never mind,” she muttered, then glared at Steph, daring her to laugh.
She didn’t. In fact, she didn’t seem to find the thought ludicrous at all. “Yeah, he was. We all think it’s really cute how he’s gotten all studly and protective over you. Who would’ve thought? You and Beef Wellington.” But she still wasn’t laughing.
“He’s just feeling territorial because of what’s happened the last few days, that’s all. When Sturgeon and Peters arrest this creep, things’ll go back to normal around here. No more protective-stud stuff.” Genie’s face burned as she said the word stud. It brought to mind all sorts of delicious things.
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