by Cherry Adair
This was as close as he could get to the good doctor, he reminded himself.
The tight buds of her nipples pressed against the thin cotton of her T-shirt and her breathing become increasingly erratic. Lips parted, a hectic pink bloomed in her cheeks. She was close. Damn close.
Jesus. This was killing him. Letting his mind touch her as he wanted to do, Gabriel eased her jean-clad thighs apart. Picturing the heel of his hand on her mound, he pressed firmly. Almost there.
Glass shattered, breaking the moment, and Marshall yelled from the kitchen. “Sorry!”
Eden moaned. Dazed and disoriented, she opened her eyes. “What the hell wasthat ?!” she whispered, shaken.
“That what?” Marshall asked coming up beside her. “Sorry it took me so long. I had one of those things, you know? When you walk into a room and completely forget why you’re there? Anyway, here you go.” He placed a steaming cup of coffee beside her. “It’s hot, so be careful.”
I’m hot, too,Eden thought, picking up the jumbo cup with both hands. The heat bled through to her palms as she lifted it to take a sip. “Perfect.” Other than it being coffee, which she never drank, not tea. She hoped he didn’t put her into a diabetic coma after apparently dumping the entire box of sugar into the cup when the most she allowed herself was half a pack of Sweet’N Low.
She sipped anyway as she considered the possibility that she might have a brain tumor. What else could explain these hallucinations and inappropriate sexual behaviors?
Or, maybe she was just on the brink of a good, old-fashioned nervous breakdown. Clearly the stress of her moral dilemma was taking its toll. Taking another small swallow of too sweet coffee, she glanced up at the man beside her. “Do I look normal to you?”
Marshall’s lips twitched. “Define normal?”
Eden reached out and swatted his arm. “Seriously. How do I look?”
With his sharpei frown, he stepped back, then scanned her from top to toe and back again. “Normal. A little flushed. But normal.”
She blushed harder because she was blushing. “How have I been behaving lately?”
He gave her a bewildered look. “Like a person who found the murdered body of a friend should behave? Sad, angry, frustrated. And sometimes like a woman whose favorite toy was taken away. Pissed off.” He shrugged his bony shoulders. “I don’t know, Eden. You’ve been behaving like…agirl, I guess.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Guys don’t get sad and angry and frustrated?”
“Oh, yeah, sure we do. A lot.” Marshall flushed. “It’s—well, it’syou who usually doesn’t.”
“I don’t?”She didn’t?
“Eden. You’re always so…focused.Ninety-eight point seven percent of the time you don’t notice anything that goes on around you when you’re in here.”
“I notice things that go on around me.”
“Inthis lab?”
“Yes. Sometimes.”
“As I said. Normal.” He wandered back to his desk.
“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.” She shot at his back. He was already pounding his keyboard.
The truth was, she wasn’t very good with people. Give her a computer any day. Not only was a computer logical, it wasn’t judgmental either. She’d always been a misfit because of her high IQ. She’d never really fit in anywhere but in an academic setting and the lab. Was it any wonder she felt emotionally safest,happiest here?
Theo’s violent death had taken some of that away from her. Not being able to continue their work on the robot was contributing to her enormous feeling of loss. She liked her life ordered. Regulated. Predictable. Right now it was none of that.
Getting back to work, miring herself in a project, would, she hoped, get her back on track. And get her emotions back on an even keel where she could deal with them in a rational manner. She’d rather spend the day with her computer than a person.
God,she thought with self-deprecating humor,no wonder I can’t get laid.
A focused hour later, Marshall swiveled his chair around. “Can I ask you a hypothetical question?”
“Hmmm?”
“Could we maybe rebuild Rex?”
Eden’s head snapped up as she realized just how dangerous that information could be. “Even if we could, that’s something we’ll keep to ourselves.”God. He’d just voiced her worst fears. “Imagine what the wrong people could do with Rex. Imagine it—multiply that grim possibility only a hundred times worse, and then tell me, should we rebuild him?”
His face went blank with disappointment. “Damn. What a waste of brilliant technology.”
“Yes. It is. But that’s the way it has to be.” Once the killer discovered that Dr. Theo Kirchner was merely a figurehead in the lab, and that he’d known very little, that whatever schematics and data they’d stolen from her computer were pretty much useless window dressing, she was positive they’d come looking forher.
In fact, she couldn’t understand why they hadn’t already.
She rubbed a hand absently around the back of her neck. She had the uncomfortable sensation that someone was watching her. Silly of course. Only she and Marshall were in the lab. The problem was she had been waiting for the other shoe to drop for weeks. Everything was creeping her out right now.
“We shouldn’t even be talking about this,” she warned, dropping her hand. The sensation of being watched persisted, but this time she ignored it.
Marshall’s eyes brightened and grew large. “But you could? Right?” He tapped his forefinger to his temple. “You’ve got it all stored in your head, don’t you, Eden? You remember everything down to the smallest detail. We could rebuild Rex. It would be way cool. Give me schematics to work from, and—”
“Forget it,” Eden said harshly, then modulated her tone because it wasn’t Marshall’s fault that she’d done something terminally stupid. “Schematics take time, and most of them were on the hard drives. The computers were wiped clean, remember?” She gave him a pointed look, which he returned with a blank look of his own.
“Oh, yeah.” He rolled his eyes. “Mr. Verdine was totally pissed that the data was wiped from the hard drives.”
They shared a glance. She didn’t give a damn if she was acting paranoid, and as if the walls had ears. There were anomalies happening that she couldn’t explain. She wasn’t willing to put either her own life, or Marshall’s, in danger by saying anything about…anything.
Marshall knew she and Jason Verdine had shared a few dinners and must be wondering why she’d left out the part that she had total recall of the data. “Of course.”
His brow furrowed and he lowered his voice to barely a whisper. “Are you ever going to tell him that everythingwasn’t lost because you have it all in your head? What about that Homeland Security guy? The cops?Any of them?”
“Marshall, my friend,” Eden said just as quietly. “Right now there are only two people I trust in the world. You would be the other one.”
“Who…Oh, you meanyou. Yes, of course. Sorry. You’re right. Excellent. Don’t tell anyone. Right. Got it.” But he clearly couldn’t understand why something so incredible was being kept under wraps. He’d never understood why Eden didn’t share with people the fact that she had a photographic memory.
He just didn’t get it.
And that was fine with her. Ignorance, in Marshall’s case, could very well save his life. And hers.
“Don’t freak on me now, Marshall.”
“I don’t want to freakyou out, Eden. But I keep telling you. You need more than those four muscleheads as bodyguards. You need—an army maybe. If not, somebody—abad somebody—could get that information out of you. Easy.”
They probably could. She hated pain. A hangnail required an Advil. Okay, not quite. But close enough. On the other hand, if she knew someone wanted what she had in her head, she would use every fiber of her being to make sure they couldn’t access it. It was a case of mind over matter. She took pride in her willpower. A woman who had lost fifty pounds th
rough sheer determination, and thenkept it off for years, could achieve anything.
“Uh-oh! You’ve got that look on your face. I’m not putting money on it!”
“Marshall. Listen to me. Nobody can know that I have a photographic memory. Swear to me.”
“I do. But youare scaring the crap outta me, Eden.”
“That makes two of us,” she told him grimly, wishing the eerie feeling of being watched would go away. She was spooked enough as it was without being paranoid as well. “From now on I don’t even want it discussed. Not even between the two of us, do you understand?” She waited for his emphatic nod.
“It wouldn’t have taken the killer long to realize that Dr. Kirchner wasn’t the one who made Rex. You know that, Eden. You must know that.”
Eden frowned fiercely. Bless his heart, she’d adored Theo, but Marshall was right. Theo had become vague and forgetful by the time he’d slid into his early eighties. At one time he’d been a brilliant mathematician and scientist. A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. Proving to his peers—and teaching her—that truly autonomous robotic behavior was feasible long before anyone else thought it was much more than an idea on the drawing board.
His first AI project, many years ago, had put his expertise and skill above everyone else in the field. Five years later, he’d groomed a seventeen-year-old student straight out of MIT to follow in his footsteps. But for years, it had been Eden, his former student, who’d made startling findings in the artificial intelligence field.
Her brilliant mind, coupled with a photographic memory and—as Theo used to put it—the retentive skills of a pachyderm, had allowed Eden to catapult artificial intelligence to an entirely new level.
She’d allowed her mentor to accept all the accolades and credits. He deserved them.
But now he was dead.
She straightened her shoulders. “I can’tknow anything,” she told Marshall. More to calm herself down than to pacify him.
“Let’s get out o—” She spun around to look at the door as the buzzer sounded, alerting them that someone had entered.
The inner door swung open. “Jason?”
“Good morning,” he said, his handsome face showing concern as he strode toward her, hands outstretched. “I called your apartment to see if you’d like to join me for breakfast, and was told you’d left for work. I couldn’t believe it.”
She gave him a blank look. “Who could tell you that? I live alone. And why couldn’t you believe it? I work here.”
“Of course you do. But I told you to ease back into your routine slowly. You’ve been traumatized. And the answer to that is that I have my security people there watching your place. Dr. Kirchner was brutally murdered thirteen days ago,” he reminded her unnecessarily. “I’m not taking any chances with you.”
He looked genuinely concerned, and Eden was touched. “But I’m here. Behind a locked door with your whole security detail posted inside and outside the building. No one can get to me, Jason, thanks to you.”
“I still wish you’d take me up on that cruise I offered you. Take a few months off. Regain your equilibrium. Let the authorities put Theo’s killer behind bars.”
“That would be a pretty long cruise,” Eden said mildly. Jason might be offering her time off, but they both knew the only place he wanted her right now was here in the lab. Jason was good at saying what he believed the person he was talking to wanted to hear. But Eden never mistook the subtext. He was all about the bottom line.
“You know what I mean. I care about you deeply, Eden. I’d hate for anything to happen to you.”
That made two of them, Eden thought rather bemused as Jason pulled her into his arms. She wondered if he even noticed Marshall sitting ten feet away. Probably not.
As kisses went, Jason’s were pretty good. But even a full lip lock with Jason Verdine didn’t come close, not even marginally, to the sensations evoked by a dream man who hadn’t ever touched her. Eden almost smiled. Imagination was an amazing thing.
As pleasant as the kiss was, she wondered, not for the first time, why she felt not even a spark of sexual interest in Jason. And, just as puzzling considering his amorous and frequent attempts to get her into his bed, she suspected he felt none for her.
Whatever the motivation, this was neither the time nor the place. He wore some sort of necklace or medallion beneath his shirt that always jabbed into her chest when he embraced her, as it did now. She didn’t like jewelry of any kind on a man so that was a demerit—a small one, but a demerit anyway.
Gently she extricated herself from his arms and smiled. “Good morning.”
Jason had a lean, clever face, with laugh lines beside his attractive blue eyes, although he wasn’t laughing now. He looked serious and intense. His hair was dark blond, thick and expertly cut and styled. He dressed well. Always wore very nice suits, silk shirts, expensive shoes.
He ran his multibillion-dollar R&D company like a well-oiled machine. And he looked like exactly what he was: wealthy, handsome, used to having his own way, and as though he’d stepped straight from the pages of a magazine.
Which was only slightly problematic for Eden. She usually looked as though she’d gotten dressed in the dark. And the only time she combed her hair was when she got out of the shower. It curled and waved no matter what she did to it, and since doing anything to it took far too much time, she left it alone to do whatever it wanted to do.
Her two concessions to fashion were killer shoes and great perfume. The best she could say about her clothing was that it was—usually—clean. Today she’d tossed on her usual uniform of jeans and T-shirt, and wore her favorite FM scarlet Jimmy Choos in an attempt to lighten her mood. The only jewelry she ever wore was Grandma Rose’s lucky ring on her baby toe.
“What’s up?” she asked her boss. Not elegantly put, but it saved time.
“Special Agent Dixon from Homeland Security is here again.” Jason started walking around the lab. Observing, but not touching. She wondered if he was thinking as he looked around the lab, “This is mine. This is mine. This is mine.”
And did he think the same thing when he put his hands on her? This is mine?
The thought annoyed her a little. Which didn’t bode well, she supposed, for their budding relationship.
Jason glanced over at Marshall, who was watching the two of them like an attendee at a tennis match. “They’re waiting for you in conference room seven. Go ahead.”
Marshall blinked several times as if getting his bearings. “Oh, but—Eden—She needs me to—” Jason gave him an uncompromising look. Marshall turned scarlet. His Adam’s apple rose and fell in his throat as he swallowed. “Okay. Sorry. I’ll go now.”
Eden waited until the door closed behind her assistant. “You intimidate him.”
“I barely spoke to the man.”
“My point exactly. You make him feel worthless.”
“Heis worthless,” Jason said, standing a little too close for Eden’s comfort level. His eyes held hers. His breath smelled faintly of licorice from the Sen-Sen he was always eating. “I’ve been aware of the inequity in this department for years,” he told her gently. “We all know who generates the most products for the company. And Kirchner and Davis aren’t two of them.”
“Oh. Please! That is absolutely not true.” She and Marshall had worked on dozens of Verdine Industries’ top-selling AI products together.
Jason brushed her lower lip with his fingertip. She shifted her face out of reach.
“I don’t want to argue with you, babe.”
Oh, yeah? Then why did you malign both my friend and my mentor? And don’t call mebabein that annoying, condescending way either. “Dr. Kirchner has been—wasmy mentor for a huge chunk of my career. Everything I know I learned from him,” she told him stiffly.
“And,” she added, “Marshall Davis is one of the smartest people I know. He’s invaluable to this company and to me.” Eden wasn’t subtle about her steps out of range. “Not only do
es he work with me, I consider myself fortunate to call him my friend.” Another demerit for Mr. Verdine. He was racking them up fast. How could she have ever thought of him as her fantasy man last night? “I’d appreciate it if you’d grant him the same respect you grant me. I’m serious, Jason.”
He gave her an assessing look. “I intimidate a lot of people. But not you.”
“Not in the least,” she told him, trying to keep her voice calm. What was he referring to? Her refusal to his frequent requests that they sleep together? Or the fact that he’d been pressuring her into taking the development of Rex into a military application for more than two years?
As yet she was undecided about the former, but it wasn’t looking good, and she refused do the latter. She wasn’t prepared to budge on either stance. She’d already gone further than she’d wanted to. Just for her own curiosity. But Jason, no matter how much he paid her, wasn’t privy to that information.