by Cherry Adair
“How many is a handful?”
“Jason Verdine. His president of marketing, Tom Reece, his president of sales, Steven Absalom, Hector Gonzales, vice president of R and D, and, of course, Marshall Davis, our assistant.”
“All of whom had a hell of a lot to gain by stealing your prototype.”
“I doubt it. I don’t see any of those men walking in and killing Theo in cold blood. And frankly, whoever has Rex wouldn’t be able to spend the money they made from the sale for twenty years or more, because it would just be too obvious. Not to mention the capital outlay to go into production. It would be prohibitive to the average person. I told you, Rex cost over three hundred million dollars to create. So whoever has him has to have enormous start-up capital to afford to manufacture even one unit, let alone several.
“And without my working notes, my data, and schematics…”
“Anyone with half a brain looking at your notes and your program would realize like I did that you have a photographic memory, Eden. They tried to take you next.”
“Now,that’s not true. Honestly. No one came near me.”
“They came near you,” he said grimly. “Too damn near you. Or rather, they tried. In the past twenty-eight days, there were two kidnap attempts. The only reason they didn’t succeed was because I put a protective spell on you the night Dr. Kirchner was killed.”
“But as it turns outyou were the lucky winner in the kidnap Dr. Cahill sweepstakes.”
“They didn’t want to protect you.”
“Right. ‘They’ just wanted to suck information out of my brain. Oh, wait. That’s exactly what you want to do, isn’t it?”
Gabriel observed Eden as she completed her third lap walking around the pond. She’d kicked off her shoes by the door, then stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jeans. Head up, she kept to the softness of the grass rather than walk barefoot on the gravel path rimming the water’s edge. It was close to midday, and no shade was cast by the thick hedge of natural scrub and twenty-year-old Douglas firs ringing the glade.
Gabriel’s mother had been an avid gardener, and in an attempt to make her husband feel at ease here, had the clearing planted, and the small pond chiseled out of the land. The original had sat just as this one did, beyond the doors of the castle’s solarium in Scotland. She’d wanted her husband to feel at home.
Magnus Edge had never seen it.
Living here fatherless, Gabriel and his brothers had watched their beautiful mother fade away, day by day, as she waited in vain.
“She’ll do the right thing,” MacBain said, standing beside Gabriel’s chair. Both men watched Eden’s long strides on the unfamiliar landscape, yet she didn’t look down. She looked ahead at possibilities, Gabriel realized, almost hearing her mind racing with each pensive step.
A large part of him admired her for her vision. And the mind and talent she possessed to bring that vision to reality. But the cold, hard truth was, from everything he’d gleaned, she’d perfected something that could get millions of people killed. Today.
It didn’t matter how brilliant her invention was. It didn’t matter a jotwhat altruistic functions her Rex bot was capable of. As valuable as it was for good, its value for just the opposite would have many more far-reaching and devastating consequences.
T-FLAC operatives all over the world were on high alert for any lead on who had stolen the prototype, and what it was going to be used for.
Gabriel’s job, his only job here, was to retrieve the necessary data to duplicate the robot. T-FLAC had scientists on staff, a superior think tank with some of the best minds in the world, but none of them could do what he could do. Build a fully functioning robot, within minutes, from Eden’s thoughts alone.
When—not if—the original was located, it had to be destroyed.
Like against like.
How long did he have before she either relented and allowed him in, or he had to use a form of coercion? There was a lot to be said for self-discipline, he thought, stretching his legs out beneath the table. He was proud of his ability to control his raging appetite for her. Proud of his iron will, and downright fucking thrilled by his restraint. “I won’t touch her.”
“And I see the strain that’s putting on yer face, lad. Yer options are running out.”
Gabriel shot the old man a fulsome look. “Do you think I’m notaware of it? She’ll give more freely if no force is used.”
He thought about what he’d learned of her life: the string of degrees before she was even sixteen; the early marriage; the rapid divorce after the son of a bitch husband had stolen her life’s work. She was still singularly unused to the kind of deceit Gabriel was familiar with. Despite all she’d gone through, Eden Cahill was straightforward, honest, and honorable.
He could overwhelm her doubts and objections to extracting the data from her mind, but that would take time, and a finesse he didn’t feel when he was anywhere near her.
“All of us give more freely if no force is used,” MacBain said quietly beside him. “That curse of yers is a form of coercion, is it no’?”
“It is what it is.” Gabriel watched Eden pause near the rose garden. If she walked around the low wall behind her, she’d find a small stone bench tucked into a shady corner. It was where his mother had sat, for hours, talking to his father on the phone. Montana to Scotland. More than fifteen hours of air travel had separated his parents.
Five hundred years of Edge men had tried to break the curse.
It could not be done.
It didn’t matter, he told himself, watching Eden cup a pale yellow rose in her hand. It didn’t matter because unlike his father before him, he wasn’t stupid enough to buck the inevitable. Gabriel had learned by experience.
Had he ever seen his father smile? Had he ever heard his mother laugh?
Hell no.
Because they’d foolishly believed that what they had was strong enough,powerful enough, for God’s sake, to turn five hundred years of cold hard fact into fiction.
Eden bent to smell his mother’s Peace rose. Her green T-shirt pulled out of the back of her jeans as she leaned over, exposing a smile of pale skin, and the indentation of her spine on the small of her back.
Gabriel wanted to put his mouth there.
He wanted her. So much so that it scared him in ways bullets and bombs never had. “She’s a smart lass,” MacBain rested a gnarled hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. “I’m guessing she’s almost as stubborn as ye are. Note I saidalmost. She’ll work through her conscience and do what needs doing. But ye, my fine lad, are playing with fire, keeping her here, and ye know it. I see the way she watches ye, with a hunger that should be singeing yer hair follicles.” His fingers tightened warningly. “Use caution with the lass. It is already beginning.”
“Where would she be safer, old man?” Gabriel glanced up at MacBain. “Tell me that?”
“Where could she be in more peril? Tellme that?”
The answer, Gabriel thought grimly, to both questions was: Here. Here at Edridge Castle. With him.
God help them both.
“She’s no match for ye, lad. She’s led a sheltered, sterile kind of life there in her insular scientific world. Yer offering her danger and excitement. To a lass like Dr. Cahill that could be seductive indeed. ’Tis fortunate Nairne’s Curse prevents ye from playing with her, my lad. There’s a lass who’ll believe herself in love with one kind word.”
Gabriel gave a snort of disbelief. “Don’t fool yourself, old man. Eden Cahill is nobody’s fool. She dislikes me intensely. As she should. She wouldn’t trust a kind word from me if I had it notarized, believe me.”
“She’s a wilted flower with her face turned up for a drop of rain. Ye better watch yerself, ye hear me? The wee lass has had precious little love in her life from what I can gather, so don’t ye be doing any more with that sweet girl than is absolutely necessary.”
“You’re flogging a dead horse, MacBain. She’s just a means to an end.”
“Keep reminding yerself of that.”
Gabriel didn’t even pretend to himself that he wasn’t observing every graceful move she made. He watched her hips move beneath those baggy jeans, and tried to imagine her heavy. Instead he conjured up an image of her even more lush, more desirable, if possible. He pictured a younger Eden, self-conscious as any teenage girl would be at that age, overweight, out of her depth trying to relate to students years ahead of her in age and experience.
A light breeze teased her hair, causing the glossy curls to shine chocolate in the brilliant sunlight. He gripped the metal arms of his chair to hold himself back from charging outside and pulling her to him. The more he was around her, the stronger the hungry yearning to touch and be touched by her. Hell, he thought, just observing how the wind lifted her hair from her slender neck made him harden uncomfortably. The depth of his response to the stimuli that was Dr. Eden Cahill scared the hell out of him. It was too strong. Too tempting. Too dangerous.
Idiot.
He was like a dog chasing a car. He couldn’t catch her, and even if he did, there was absolutely nothing he could do with her once he did. Yet the hunger inside him was building and building like a gathering storm, tearing at him, driving him insane, blinding him to reason.
Get a grip, dickhead.A man in his line of work who wasn’t in control of himself made mistakes. Fatal mistakes. Wanting and taking are vastly different things, he reminded himself.Acknowledge the want, then deal with abstinence and move on. “She’s wearing a ditch in the fucking path.”
MacBain smacked Gabriel on the back of the head. It was no light tap. “Mind that mouth, my lad.”
The Edge boys hadn’t grown up without a father figure, Gabriel thought, wryly watching as Eden, deep in thought, started on her fourth lap.
He frowned.
Years ago, while on assignment in Johannesburg, Gabriel had reason to be at the zoo. He’d watched a polar bear circle the too-small confines of its cage. Clockwise. Then counterclockwise.
The animal had kept up this ritual for hours. He’d gone back the next day, and the next, compelled to see if the animal had eventually resigned itself to its fate. Each day was exactly the same. A continuous loop. When he’d sought out the keeper, he’d been told that eventually the magnificent animal would die, because she wouldn’t stop looking for a way out of the confined space.
Gabriel had offered to buy the animal. What the fuck he’d thought he’d do with a six-hundred-pound polar bear he had no idea. Bring it back to the States on the T-FLAC jet? But by God, if they’d let him, he would have figured out that minor detail in a heartbeat.
“Hot out there on that pretty fair skin. She needs a hat,” MacBain moved away to straighten a fold in the pristine tablecloth.
“She’s a big girl. If she’s too hot she’ll come in.”
“Aye, but then maybe she thinks it’s hotter in here.”
“Itis hotter in here,” Gabriel told him. Which was a ridiculous lie, since the old castle walls were a foot thick and kept out both heat and cold. He stood. “I’ll be in the library if you need me.”
In the library doing my job, not thinking about a caged polar bear walking herself to death.Gabriel considered asking Sebastian to come back when he talked to him next. He’d really like to get out the claymores and do an intense round of swordplay. Maybe it would get rid of some of this pent-up sexual tension.
And maybe not.
MacBain had a way with those white eyebrows that said it all. He verbalized the brow wiggle. “And why would I be needing ye?”
“Ifanyone needs me,” Gabriel told him tightly. He strode out of the solarium, shoulders stiff, temper hanging on by a thread.
“Ah.”
“Ah?” Eden asked, walking back into the sunroom, blinking to adjust her eyes from brilliant sunlight to the dimness inside. She knew instantly that Gabriel wasn’t there anymore. The disappointment she felt was disproportionate. But there she was. She’d just made the hardest decision she’d ever made in her life. And that decision was based on nothing more concrete than a gut reaction to a man she didn’t know, and probably shouldn’t trust.
The other day upon the stair, I saw a man who wasn’t there.
She smiled as MacBain handed her a frosted glass of orange juice, partially wrapped in one of the pale green napkins.
“Thanks.” She took a sip of freshly squeezed juice; it was tart and sweet, the flavor bursting on her tongue. “Are you talking to yourself?”
“It would appear so. He said to tell ye he’s in the library.”
Eden raised her eyebrows. “He did?”
“He’d surely enjoy a cold glass of fruit juice,” MacBain poured a second glass, expertly folded a napkin around the lower half, and handed it to her. “He mentioned he was overly warm.”
Yeah. She could understand the sentiment. But perhaps not in quite the same way. “It is a hot day.”
“And getting hotter by the moment,” he told her. With that parting salvo, he turned, back erect in his natty black suit, and shuffled off at the speed of snail.
Setting down the two glasses, Eden grabbed her shoes, and with a smile sat down to put them on as she watched him go. “What a funny, dear old guy.”
“Eighty-three isna old!” MacBain shouted from the other side of the room without turning. He disappeared from view behind a giant broad-leafed tree in a terra-cotta pot the size of a small car.
She grinned as a door slammed shut out of sight. “And he has ears like a bat.”
Shoes on, she rose, picked up the glasses of juice and headed to the library to tell Gabriel that as long as he could assure her of two things, she’d agree to work with him on Rex 2. One: She wanted assurances and confirmation from Homeland Security that he was who he claimed to be. Two: Once Rex 2 found Rex 1, both bots would be destroyed. This time she’d build in a self-destruct mechanism to the bot. She didn’t want one particle of them to remain.
As she came to the slightly ajar door of the library, she noticed that the front doors were still standing wide open.
Turn left. Talk to Gabriel.
Run like hell, and go through those doors. Possibly to freedom.
Decisions. Decisions. Life-altering decisions.
“I have her,” Gabriel said quietly from inside the room. He was on the phone.
“I agree. Whatever it takes.” His cold grim voice sounded impersonal. Businesslike. Matter-of-fact. “No. As I suspected, nothing useful on the hard drive. I took care of the little I did find. Yeah. I used mumbo-jumbo,” he responded dryly.
“She has a photographic memory for Christ’s sake. I guarantee you. The second she fucking-well gives up the data, she’ll be dead—” He stopped speaking and she knew he’d heard her outside the door. Heart hammering, she froze.
“Just a second—Eden?” he called out.
The drinks slipped from her nerveless fingers.
Glass shattered, spraying orange juice over her feet and the stone floor.
She ran.
By the time Gabriel raced out of the library she was already halfway across the entry hall. The little fool was running flat out in high-heeled sandals on the uneven stone floor. “Eden!”
She didn’t so much as hesitate as he yelled her name again. She was going to break her damned neck.
He slammed the front doors shut before she could reach them. The sound reverberated through the cavernous room like a pistol shot. Damn it to hell, how much had she heard? He kept advancing on her, but she didn’t appear to give a damn.
Using both hands, she grabbed one of the enormous wrought-iron handles, putting her entire body weight into pulling on it.
“It’s not going to open,” he said quietly, not daring to get any closer. He stopped where he was, torn. The pull he felt for her was profound, even at twenty paces.
Beneath the short sleeves of her T-shirt her muscles flexed, and her knuckles were turning white as she strained to pull the door open using every ounce of strength she had.
“Eden—”
For a moment she stopped, her hands still gripping the handle. Her cheeks were stained, more due to fury, he suspected, than anything else. The sight of tears running unchecked down her face speared him like a knife to the gut.
“Either open this f-fucking doorright now, Gabriel Edge, or kill me.” She punctuated the words with aggressive yanks on the door handle.
“Jesus. This isn’t a soap opera, for God’s sake. Stop hauling at that damn handle before you hurt yourself. It’s not going to open.”