She was shaking. Maybe they both were. He murmured nonsense words into her hair as she burrowed against his chest and held on tight. He boosted her up onto the waist-high counter and let her cling. Let himself soothe.
Three days ago Dr. Eugenie Watson had been nothing more to him than a worthy opponent in the Battle of the Thirteenth Floor, a woman whose reputation for utter brilliance and cool standoffishness was hard to deny when she wore old-lady clothes to work and turned down every social invitation sent her way. And a woman whose annoying habits were hard to ignore when his every breath was greeted by a pithy memo and a pointed complaint.
Now, in just seventy-two short hours, Genie Watson had become a whole new person to Nick. She was tough and resourceful, sweet and sexy and shy. And though Nick still didn’t want the complication of a woman in his life—particularly this one—he couldn’t seem to stop himself from touching her. Wanting her.
One of her narrow hands left his wrist to stroke his hair, his neck, then slide down to his shoulder and clench. He winced involuntarily when she touched the raw, singed place on his back. She made a small sound of distress and sat up, framing his face in her hands. “I hurt you. I’m sorry.”
The burn pulsed thickly with the surge of blood through his body, and when she lightly traced the sore place with her fingertips, Nick couldn’t tell whether the sensation that rocked through him was pleasure or pain.
It was simply everything.
The sweet torture continued as her fingers stroked the small scrape on his chin where he’d whacked the sidewalk after her car exploded, taking away the hurt and leaving flames behind. Her face was so close that he couldn’t see the line of stitches marching across her brow, couldn’t see the dark bloom of bruises on her cheek and chin. He could see only the liquid silver of her eyes boring into his.
Then her lips touched him, kissing away the pain in his shoulder and face and creating a new ache deep in his soul. He closed his eyes and felt the whisper of her lips travel across his cheek to the bridge of his nose, from the corner of his mouth to his temple.
He couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t take advantage of her. She was scared. Vulnerable. And he was her protector. In any other circumstance she wouldn’t have looked his way. She was destined for greatness, for Nobel prizes and groundbreaking research, not for a pedestrian biochemist who had left his mother and sister behind and saved himself. Not for a man who knew from experience that he made a better scientist than husband.
It wasn’t lust. It was gratitude. That was all. But it didn’t feel like gratitude when her mouth cruised back down and her tongue lightly, tentatively, traced the seam of his lips.
“Nick?” Her whisper was barely a breath but it echoed in the tiny room, a sibilant hiss of things that waited for them in the dark.
“Nick. I know that this will be over soon, that they’ll find this guy and things will go back to the way they were before, but will you do me a favor and kiss me? Just once, now. So I’ll have new memories of this room, good ones rather than bad.”
She leaned closer and traced her tongue across his lips again, an uncertain touch that made him wonder in his foggy brain just how many men she’d kissed before and whether they’d been both blind and stupid to let her go.
“Kiss me, Nick. Just once, so I know what it’s like.”
He could barely comprehend what she was saying, he was so caught up in the feel of her mouth hovering near his. Her scent spilled around him, drowning out the sharp tang of bleach and developer chemicals. He shouldn’t. Couldn’t.
“Genie, I—” Shouldn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
Will.
When he started to speak again, she covered his mouth with her own, slid her tongue between his lips, and he was lost. Utterly, irrevocably lost.
On a groan of surrender he slid his palms from her hips to her shoulders and stepped into the welcoming pocket between her knees, only peripherally aware that as she wrapped her calves around him the sensible brown skirt hiked up to her waist.
Muscles so tight he thought he might crack, Nick returned only as much as she gave, for in the hesitant little darts of her tongue and the fluttering motions of her hands at his shoulders, he knew that though she might have had a lover in the past, she had not been well served by him. But even the thought of Genie in the arms of another man was enough to irritate Nick and he unintentionally deepened the kiss, sliding her forward on the counter until their bodies were flush against each other and he felt the firm globes of her breasts press against his chest and her secret softness cradle him below.
She made a wordless sound and he pulled back, fearing that it was too much, too fast. But she followed him with another murmur, cupping his face in her gentle hands and sliding with him into that deep, wet darkness where dreams spin out and reality is lost. For though she kissed like an innocent, she tasted like pure sin, rich and dark with promises and secrets. And as the flavor seeped into Nick’s soul, he thought that he might never get enough of her.
Alarm bells went off in his head.
Whoop, whoop, whoop.
This is Watson we’re talking about, he told himself. Genius Watson. Remember Pain-in-the-Butt Watson? You’re supposed to be protecting her, not mauling her. He groaned when he realized he had both hands wrapped firmly around Pain-in-the-Butt Watson’s butt, pulling her even tighter against the place where every drop of hot, screaming blood in his body seemed to have collected.
She made a sexy purring noise in the back of her throat and slid her lips from his throat to his ear.
For a novice she learned really, really quickly, and Nick almost whimpered when the alarms rang more loudly in his head, almost drowning out his own groan when she traced the outside of his ear with her tongue.
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
“What the hell?” Genie pulled away from him and frowned over his shoulder, not meeting his eyes as she cocked her head as if listening for something.
Had she heard the bells, too?
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
And that was when Nick realized that the warning bells weren’t in his head.
They were in the lab.
Chapter Nine
“It’s the freezer alarms!” Genie pushed Nick aside with a two-handed shove and jumped off the counter. She lurched awkwardly when she landed and he noticed that one of her sensible brown shoes had fallen off. She kicked the other away and bolted for the light lock.
“Wait!” He practically slammed her out of the way, pausing to grab her arm before she fell. “I’m going first.”
If this was a ruse to get Genie to run into the lab in a panic, then her little friend was going to be in for a surprise. Nick grabbed the developer’s pipe wrench—a new one donated by the maintenance man since the police had taken the old one as evidence—and snuck out the rotating door.
Stealth was difficult when the door insisted on announcing their actions with a loud rubba-thump, rubba-thump, and Nick leaped into the hallway with the pipe wrench held high, ready to swipe it at the head of any crazed rapist-murderer who might be lying in wait.
The hallway was deserted.
“Okay, Genie, you can come out. It’s clear.” Nick turned to help her through the light lock and almost ran her over. She was right on his heels. Big surprise.
“Come on, I’m pretty sure it’s the ultralow freezers in the main lab.” Without waiting for her big protector with his pipe wrench, Genie pattered down the hallway in her nylon-clad feet.
“Genie?” Nick called, but she didn’t turn around, giving him a nice view of a single strip of soft-looking satin flanked by two perfectly round, perfectly proportioned cheeks. He tried again, catching her just before she passed through the thankfully deserted reception area. “Dr. Watson?”
“What? Are you coming or not?”
He caught up to her and gave her a friendly pat on one panty-hose-covered buttock. “I’d suggest you pull your skirt down before maintenance gets here.”
While she was wr
estling the staid brown material back down around her knees, Nick slid into the lab with his weapon at the ready.
GENIE PAUSED AT THE threshold and peered around Nick’s wide shoulders. The big room was empty except for the marching rows of lab benches, the crouching condors of fume hoods, and the lurking pieces of equipment that looked like something from the set of Moonraker.
Usually she adored being in the lab alone at night. She loved wandering from bench to bench and checking on her techs’ progress, loved touching the big machines and thinking about all the lives they could save if only the silly humans asked the right questions.
But tonight the lab didn’t feel peaceful in its loneliness. It felt unhappy. Menacing. Whoop, whoop, whoop! The shadows that clouded the far reaches of the room were murky and Genie could imagine someone hiding there dressed in green scrubs and blood.
Nick’s solid presence at her side was a comfort if she ignored what had just happened between them. She couldn’t believe she had forced him to kiss her. Couldn’t believe how much she had enjoyed it and how much she wanted to repeat the experiment, and how utterly, unbelievably stupid that was. She had a fleeting urge to run downstairs—barefoot or not—get in her car and drive north until she ran out of gas or got to Canada, whichever came first.
But she couldn’t do that because she didn’t have a car anymore.
The alarm bells shrilled louder as they neared the cross aisle where the ultralow freezers sat. Seven feet tall, with enough armor to survive almost anything except a direct nuclear attack, the freezers stood in a row, normally silent guardians of the frozen samples they held within them—the collective work it had taken Genie and her employees almost five years to assemble.
Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!
Nick opened the door to the aisle and the alarms screamed in response. Any minute now Boston General’s Equipment Response Team would storm into the lab, ready to repair the broken equipment or to move the samples to another freezer if there was no hope of a quick fix.
Her wrench-wielding protector seemed paralyzed in the doorway so Genie poked him in the ribs and tried to peer around him. She gasped when she caught a glimpse of the hallway beyond.
Oh, no. Please no.
“He didn’t.” Genie pressed her aching forehead against Nick’s solid, warm shoulder. “Please tell me he didn’t.”
Not the samples. Please, not the samples!
“Sorry, Genie. He did. God— I’m…I’m so sorry. Just look at this place.”
Two of the three freezers stood open, their contents strewn around with malicious disregard. The neat cardboard boxes that held hundreds upon hundreds of pellets painstakingly collected over five years were opened, crushed, and the small plastic tubes within had been ground underfoot.
The DNA of more than ten thousand people suffering from Fenton’s Ataxia, Gray’s Glaucoma, Humboldt’s Dystrophy, and a handful of other diseases lay in melting smears on the linoleum floor of Genie’s lab.
A bag of frozen cow’s eyes she’d ordered for a forgotten experiment lay near Genie’s foot and she had the sudden mad urge to kick those leering spheres across the room and to scream bloody murder. She stepped further into the aisle and when Nick tried to gather her close in comfort, she slapped him away.
“Don’t coddle me now, Wellington. I’m in no mood for it. Who does this guy think he is?” Her voice was starting to rise in volume as the anger that had simmered inside her erupted in an overdue fit of temper. “He trashed my samples!”
She dropped to her knees and plucked up a few of the crushed boxes, finding only a handful of DNA pellets intact in each one.
“Look at this. Do you see what he’s done to my pellets? Five years it’s taken me to collect all these families. Five years, four technicians, three clinical coordinators, two graduate students…” Inanely she heard the words and a partridge in a pear tree playing in her head, yet more rebellion from her formerly well-behaved brain. She snarled and stood, dropping the broken boxes amid the rubble on the floor. It was then that she noticed a single empty tube lying on the floor. It was labeled with a single word: Marilynn.
Whoop, whoop, whoop!
Genie’s head throbbed harder at the continued shrill of the thaw alarms that were set to sound when the interior temp of the ultralow freezers went above fifty degrees below zero. She stabbed at a pair of red buttons and the noise ceased.
The silence was deafening.
She stooped and picked up the sad little tube. Slipped it into her pocket.
“Are you okay?” Nick’s question was quiet, gentle, and meant to help, but Genie found a bitter-tasting humor in it.
She laughed shortly. “Yeah. Just ducky. In the space of three days I’ve been attacked, knocked out, practically raped, had my car blown up with someone else in it, gotten the heck scared out of me by a totally strange phone call, and now most of my working DNA library has been destroyed. I’m doing just great.”
Staring at the bag of cow eyeballs that were staring back, Genie felt a bubble of hysteria rise and threaten to break free, but she beat it back with sheer willpower. She put both hands over her eyes in a childish attempt to block out the sight of the open freezer doors. “And it’s only Wednesday. I need a vacation. When this is over, let’s go to Disney, okay? I’ve always wanted to go to Disney.”
She’d meant it as a joke, but that didn’t stop it from stinging when Nick turned her to face him. Looked down at her with serious eyes. “Genie, I—”
“Never mind. Bad idea.” She held up a hand to stop him, though on top of the anger over the destruction of her lab, it felt as though something was cracking in her chest. “I know kissing you in the darkroom was my idea. And I know that when this is over, it’s over. You don’t have to worry about me. I’m good at being on my own.”
Rather than looking pleased that she’d relieved him from any awkward explanation, Nick looked pissed. “Damn it, Genie. Don’t—” At that moment, the Equipment Response Team arrived with a clatter.
“We’re here. What’s wrong with the freezers? Holy sh—” A string of expletives followed the team’s entrance and Nick stepped back, creating a distance between them that seemed to stretch for miles.
She could still feel his hands on her shoulders. Still taste him on her lips, a heady combination of vanilla coffee and man. And she wished it could’ve been different between them.
Genie took a deep breath and tried to wrap the tattered cloak of Dr. Eugenie Watson, M.D., Ph.D. around her shoulders, but it didn’t seem to fit quite right anymore. “There’s been a break-in. Or at least I think he broke in.” She was beginning to think the bastard had a passkey. He certainly seemed able to waltz in and out of the building on a whim.
The response team shuffled from foot to foot. They were used to blown fans, frayed power cords and computer malfunctions, not mayhem. They didn’t seem sure of what to do and they milled about uncertainly, all except for a single shadowy figure that Genie noticed at the outskirts of the E.R.T. “George, what are you doing here?”
Dixon shrugged and his eyes flickered from Genie to Nick and back. He smirked. “I was just passing by when I saw these guys hustling up to your floor. I figured I’d tag along and see if you’d had yourself another spill.” He glanced down at the scattered tubes and broken boxes on the floor, nudged the melting cow’s eyes with a toe. “Seems as though you don’t need me, though. Not unless you’ve been storing radioactive samples in the ultralows again.”
Wouldn’t he just love to write that up? Genie shook her head and felt her brain swim. “Nope. You’re out of luck, George. Nothing to see here, so move along.”
He grumbled and left, and the E.R.T. workers coughed and looked at each other. Their leader said, “Do you want us to help clean up?” and the others nodded, surprising Genie, since that wasn’t their job.
“No. Thanks, but no. The freezers are fine. The alarms sounded because the doors had been left open long enough to bring them past temp.” She paused and looked at the de
struction, feeling that sick, unfamiliar anger churning in her stomach. “I think we should leave this stuff the way it is and call in the detectives.”
“Already done.” She hadn’t noticed Nick speaking into the lab phone, but just a few more minutes passed before Sturgeon and Peters buzzed from the elevators to announce their arrival. They must have been in the neighborhood, just like George Dixon had been. Coincidence?
Genie scowled. She didn’t believe in coincidences.
NICK NOTICED THAT GENIE was very quiet throughout the detectives’s questioning and he sensed a maelstrom of emotions flickering through her—anger, frustration, helplessness, rage, despair, desire.
Anger at whoever was doing this. Frustration that the police seemed unable to make headway, unable to prevent the culprit’s next move. Desire for the kisses that had begun in the darkroom to be continued in another place, at another time where there were fewer interruptions and no dangers from lurking shadows.
Darting a quick glance at her frozen face, Nick grimaced. It was also possible that she was numb with shock and he was projecting. She hadn’t seemed particularly affected by those kisses a few minutes ago when she was explaining why it had been no big deal. The thought stung.
She was barely responsive as Sturgeon jotted notes on his index cards and devoured a steady stream of peppermints. The detective had graduated from sucking on the candies to outright crunching, and Nick wondered whether that boded well or ill for the case.
He feared the latter. Sturgeon and Peters seemed somewhat at a loss, and as they went through the routine of requesting the passkey logs from the main door and the sign in sheets from the front lobby, it was obvious they didn’t expect to find anything out of the ordinary this time, either.
“We need to talk to all the employees on this floor.” Sturgeon shuffled cards until he found the one he wanted and passed it to Nick.
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