And beautiful.
He cleared his throat past a sudden tightness and asked, “Can she have visitors?”
Genie nodded. “I asked Molly to take one of the officers to my condo and pick up these films before she went to see Steph.” She lifted the sheet of translucent gray plastic to the light and frowned over a mark. “Does this band look like this one, or this one?” She pointed on the film to three black bars that looked identical to Nick.
“Um. You’re the expert. Why don’t you keep working on this while I call my friend at the patent office to ask about Petrie.” And have a little chat with Richard Fenton Sr., although he wouldn’t tell Genie about it. The call would probably be a breach of both her ethics and Nick’s responsibilities as a collaborator, but frankly he didn’t give a damn.
He had a gut feeling about the Fenton family, and it was telling him there was something not quite right in the popcorn empire.
Chapter Thirteen
When Genie was finally done with her analysis, she pushed away from her desk and stared.
She got it now. She knew what was going on.
Her finger traced the single line she’d inked between Richard Jr. and his true father—his uncle Mac Collins. Then the double bar between Richard Jr. and his wife Deborah—who had been called Dolores Collins before she ran away from home.
Where a single horizontal line on a pedigree meant “married,” a double line indicated “consanguineous marriage.” Marriage between blood relatives.
Then Genie touched the sad little diamonds beneath Richard Jr. and Deborah. No wonder Deborah had Gray’s Glaucoma. No wonder they couldn’t have children.
They were half brother and sister.
And no wonder Richard Sr. was leaning on her for the DNA results. He must suspect something and not want the shame of demanding paternity tests.
Genie breathed deeply. She understood now. And ethically, she couldn’t use any of it.
She knew Nick would probably stomp around and holler when he found out, but there was no way she could take what she knew to Sturgeon. What she’d just discovered was bound by confidentiality as surely as she was bound by the oaths she had taken to become a doctor and a genetic researcher.
There had to be another way. There had to be some piece of information she could use to nudge the detectives in the right direction. Something they could take to court that didn’t rely on the blood samples and DNA information she had sworn to keep confidential.
There had to be a way she could save her own life. And Nick’s. Because as surely as blood ran through her veins, the monster that had been born of an unholy union would be coming for her—motivated by shame and greed and a wife who shouldn’t have been.
Think, Genie. Think!
She was left with conscious information she couldn’t use, and unconscious information she couldn’t get at. If only her brain would behave enough to let her into that deep, dark pocket in the very back where it had stored her memories of those minutes in the darkroom. If only.
She closed her eyes and strained, tried hard to force her way past that black curtain, and got only the same flash of black-red and heat and noise.
And saw…nothing. It was no use. She couldn’t do it out here in the light and the sun. She would have to go back into the darkroom. All the way back.
A tight band of nerves settled across her chest and Genie felt a greasy, uncomfortable churn in her stomach and a bead of sweat on her forehead. She thought she might be sick.
“No. You can do this,” she told herself, and shivered with a sudden chill. Catching sight of a flash of ivory hanging on the back of her chair, she grabbed the shirt she’d borrowed from Nick the night before and pulled it on over her sensible navy clothes.
Suddenly she was warm again. More than warm, she was heated, and a shimmering coil strung through her as Nick’s scent rose up to enfold her, giving her strength. She hugged the shirt tight and heard a crinkle from the breast pocket. Touching the little packet like a talisman, Genie smiled, took a deep breath.
And walked back into the red-black darkness of memory.
NICK HUNG UP the phone with a feeling of satisfied dread in the pit of his stomach. There was no Roger at Petrie Pharmaceuticals, and Richard Fenton Sr. had admitted that the strange son whose paternity he’d come to doubt sometimes went by the nickname Roger.
Sturgeon was on his way to pick up Richard Jr. Everything was going to be okay.
His stomach rumbled greedily and Nick looked at his watch, the Rolex that Genie had once derided as a fake. It was midafternoon and he wasn’t sure what meal he was hungry for, but he figured it was time for Genie to take a break regardless. He headed for her office, waving at the two uniforms in the elevator lobby as he passed.
They could call and have some spring rolls and Pad Thai delivered by the place around the corner. A few waters from the machine down the hall, a little light from a portable alcohol burner and, voilá! Instant picnic.
And after, for dessert… Something growled within Nick, a different kind of hunger.
A voice echoed in his head. Don’t crap where you eat, boy. Nick shook his head. “Stuff a sock in it, Senator.”
He burst into her office, full of good news and energy and the knowledge that the bad stuff would soon be over. And the good stuff just beginning. “Genie?”
She wasn’t there.
Dread clutched, sudden and complete as it tore at his heart and closed his throat. “Genie?” Louder now, but his hail wasn’t answered. Not from the lab. Not from the hallway. Not from the break room. And not even when he stuck his head into the ladies’ room.
He was almost to the elevator lobby, ready to knock the officers’ heads together for letting her leave the floor without protection, when he heard a familiar clanking groan, an exhalation of pent-up air forced through ducts by a churning, newly repaired behemoth.
The X-ray developer.
Nick took a step down the hall, which suddenly seemed a mile long. An enormous shiver crawled down his spine.
Forcing his feet to move, he tapped on the revolving door. “Genie, it’s me. Are you okay in there?”
There was no answer, but with an ominous rubba-thump, rubba-thump, the door spun so the opening faced Nick, inviting him into the blackness of the light lock, into the uncertainty of the room beyond.
As he stepped into the lock, Nick wished fleetingly for the pipe wrench, for a metal film cassette, for anything heavy and weapon-like. Rubba-thump, rubba-thump. The darkroom was warm and filled with the sound of the developer, the smell of chemicals and the eerie whine of red lights.
Digital numerals hung suspended in the red-blackness, flickering between a hundred-twenty and a hundred-fifty volts as a forgotten gel box sent killing current through a buffer-filled chamber. Standing just inside the narrow room, Nick was almost blinded by the almost total absence of white light.
“Genie?”
He sensed rather than saw movement in the corner by the industrial sink and fumbled at his back for the switch.
“Leave the light off, please.” Her voice was calm, though he thought he felt her hand tremble when she touched his arm. “I need your help.”
He nodded in the darkness and, as his eyes adjusted, he began to pick out the lighter color of her shirt against the dull cabinets, the glint of her eyes and teeth against the black circle of her face. “Of course. Anything. But I wanted to tell you what I’ve learned about Richard Fenton Jr.—”
She cut him off with a finger on his lips. “Later. Right now I need you to help me remember. I’m so close I can even see the place in my mind where the memory should be. But I can’t reach it. Can’t find it.” Nick heard a rustle of cloth as she moved across the room, saw her shadowy figure turn to face him.
“How can I help?” But he had a pretty good idea what she was asking, and he wasn’t proud of the twin spirals of lust and revulsion that moved through him at the thought of playing the rapist’s part.
“Stand over there, b
y the chemical tanks. I’m going to turn the dark lights off and leave, then come back in and turn them on again.”
“They’ll take forever to come back on once you’ve doused them. Why not just leave them on?”
“Because I’m pretty sure that’s what happened that day. It was pitch-black in here, which is why I didn’t notice him until it was too late.”
“Okay. Are you sure this is necessary?” Nick stepped back into the farthest reaches of the room, away from the light. Away from sanity.
“I am. I need to know, Nick. And this is the only way. Okay?” Whether she saw him nod or just assumed from his silence that he’d play along, she continued. “Wait until I’m all the way in the room, then grab me from behind and push me up against the sink.”
The idea repelled him.
The idea excited him.
He balked. “If you can remember so much, then why do you need to do this? Why not—” She stopped him by flicking out the lights and plunging them both into complete, terrifying darkness broken only by those flashing numerals. One hundred-twenty volts. One hundred-fifty.
“Just do it, please? I need this.”
She left the room through the revolving door, leaving Nick alone with the darkness and the chemical smell and the pumping, throbbing sound of the X-ray developer.
He pressed his back against the solid strength of the cement wall and put himself inside the mind of a monster.
GENIE GLANCED AT THE elevator lobby and reassured herself that the officers were still there. Then she ran a hand down her borrowed shirt and stared into the gaping maw of the light lock. Her stomach fluttered and her chest tightened. There’s a man in there, she told herself, and he’s going to grab you and touch you and make you remember exactly what happened.
But it wasn’t just a man in there, ready to snatch her from behind and push her up against the sink with his body. It was Nick.
Nick was going to grab her. Touch her. Breathe in her ear like a lover.
She lifted the collar of his shirt to her nose and sniffed, trying to bring to mind the warmth and safety she’d found in his arms before. But caught in the twilight between memory and reality, she smelled only developer chemicals and blood.
Rubba-thump, rubba-thump. The door was loud as a death knell, the room darker than a moonless night. Genie was alone as she stepped out of the rotating door and flipped the switch down, heard the whine of red lights struggling to warm up when they’d barely begun to cool.
Then there was a hand across her mouth, choking off the scream that leaked between her teeth, and a hard body pushing her from behind. She stumbled the few steps it took to cross the room and banged into the sink, felt a starburst of pain as her hipbone glanced off the stainless-steel rim. She whimpered and the pressure let up for a moment, then returned even harder as her attacker pressed his muscled stomach against her lower back to hold her in place.
“What now?” His voice was thick and unsteady, and suddenly Genie wasn’t in the pitch-black with a faceless murderer. She was in the warm, intimate confines of the darkroom with Nick.
He loosened his hold on her jaw to let her answer. “You put your other arm around my torso. No, higher than that.” His arm slid upward until it rested just below her unbound breasts. His thumb lay along her rib cage, and if he moved it just a bit, he would touch her nipple—and know that it was hard as a pebble.
“Like this?”
“Yes.” It was barely a breath, and she thought she felt him tremble, a fine shiver that raced through them both. “Now, push me against the sink with your, um, pelvis. Not your stomach. Lower.”
“Genie, I’m sorry. I can’t, I’m…”
She knew what he was trying not to say. That he was holding his lower body away from her on purpose, that he was as aroused as she and likewise ashamed. “It’s okay. I understand, Nick. Just do it, please?”
And he did, curling around her with a low groan as the hard bulge below his waist fit precisely in the cleft between her buttocks. He surged against her once, pressing her stomach against the metal sink as he slid up and down, rubbing his length against her backside a single time as though unable to stop himself.
Genie whimpered at the heat that flowed through her as the black-red room took a long, lazy spin and her insides melted, reminding her that she’d left her panties in Nick’s bathroom the night before and hadn’t had an extra pair in the office. She was bare beneath the loose navy skirt, and the thought of him separated from her by only a few layers of cloth was almost enough to send her over the edge. She felt a single trickle of wetness slide down her inner thigh and pressed her legs together to catch the sensation.
Nick was breathing hard now, and those fine tremors raced from him to her and back again as his breath fanned her cheek and his hand slid away from her mouth to cup her jaw as though it was an anchor.
“And now?” His voice whispered against her ear, hot and insistent, and she whimpered again.
And remembered.
Through the gory light she could see the silhouette of a man, the glint of teeth and tongue. Chuckling at her feeble struggles, he licked the side of her neck from shoulder to ear.
“Now you lick my neck.”
She thought she heard him curse but he complied. But he didn’t just swipe his tongue from her ear to her shoulder as the other had done. Nick took his time, bending his head to her collarbone and nibbling his way up while his hips pistoned in a mindless, insistent rhythm that was as old as evolution. When he reached the soft spot beneath her ear, he lingered, puffing quick breaths against her lobe before he took it in his mouth to suckle.
The sensation tore through her and Genie almost jackknifed in his arms, crying out as the curtain shredded and the little room in the back of her brain was suddenly lit with bloody-red light.
We’re smarter than you think, Doctor. We figured out what you and the old man are up to. And we’re going to stop you. Permanently.
“Genie? Genie? Are you okay? What happened?” She held his arms fast when he would have pulled away, shook her head when he would have demanded answers.
She remembered. She remembered everything. And she didn’t care anymore.
She cared only about the feel of the man that held her, about the shape of his maleness pressing against her from behind, insistent in its desire, and the smell that washed over her as she breathed hard in the aftermath of memory.
Developer chemicals and Nick. That was all.
And it was everything.
Without a word she held his forearm across her throat, leaned into its support as she guided his other hand down and helped him pull up the loose navy skirt and find her, bare and waiting. She angled away from the sink to give him room and reveled in his strangled moan.
“Dear God. Please tell me he didn’t do this.” But even as he spoke, Nick’s fingers slid deep into her as his erection pressed against her from behind, then released as he withdrew his fingers. Pressed. Released. In. Out.
Genie shuddered in reaction, feeling the pressure build, feeling the helix tighten. “No.” She was almost sobbing now, straining against the gentle implacability of his forearm across her collarbone. “No. This isn’t about him. This is about us. Only us.”
Reaching awkwardly between them behind her back, she cupped him through the soft slacks and was rewarded by a strangled oath and a sharp, unexpected movement of the fingers within her. She felt the tidal wave build, willed it back.
Went to work on his zipper, freed him to lie heavily against her buttocks. To pulse hotly through the thin navy cloth that separated them.
“Us?” His chest heaved when she pressed back into him, wiggled a little to torment. “Just us?”
He freed both hands to lift the back of her skirt, and he slid himself beneath her, under her from behind so that his ready flesh curled around her center and touched that greedy, dewy nub that wept for him.
“Us. You, Nick. I want to make love with you.” She nearly sobbed when his hands slid under
her shirt to close on her aching breasts, and he set a maddening rhythm from behind, sliding his pulsing hardness back and forth across the outer lips that shielded the place that yearned for him to fill it.
She thought he muttered an oath, but the words were muffled against the side of her throat as he laved her with his tongue, caressed her turgid breasts, and pumped her from behind.
Genie moaned wordlessly. It was too much.
It was not enough.
She twisted in his arms and grabbed at his hair to hold his head in place while she poured into him with a kiss, tried to tell him with her body that she wanted him. Needed him.
Loved him.
With a growl he boosted her up so she was sitting on the waist-high counter, at the corner between the sink and the long bench. He spread her legs wide, folded the navy skirt up to her waist and looked. Simply looked in the red darkness.
Genie couldn’t bother to be embarrassed. She was too hot, too needy. So instead of covering herself and shying away, she bared herself to his gaze and found no shame in the gesture. She felt beautiful.
The red lights glistened off the moisture that pearled at the juncture of her legs and off the wetness on her inner thighs. It gleamed on the length of his shaft, where it had rubbed against her liquid center. And it splintered off Nick’s Rolex watch when he reached into the breast pocket of her borrowed shirt with a teasing finger and withdrew one of the condoms she’d taken from his bedside table not even a full day before.
He sheathed himself, protecting them both, and she braced herself for the moment she’d only experienced once before, with— No. She wouldn’t think of him now. Wouldn’t ruin this moment with thoughts of a past that wasn’t worth remembering. Wasn’t important anymore.
But when she thought the moment had finally come, Nick surprised her by returning to her mouth, kissing her deeply with a rhythmical thrusting of his tongue that set off similar pulses deep within her. Needing to be closer to him, to feel the steady strength of his body, she slid forward on the counter and wrapped her legs around his waist while she tried to unbutton his shirt to feel the thump of his heart beneath.
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