I Gotta Feeling

by Kress, Alyssa

  Felix glared at him. Couldn't they see? He wasn't nice. He wasn't their friend. He was a user—and he intended to use all of them.

  Deciding it was time to lay his cards on the table, Felix fixed his gaze on Aletheia. "I wasn't thinking about helping. I was merely following the lead I had in a case I'm working so I'd get a chance to question her."

  As Felix had planned, everyone went silent. They all gazed at him with varying degrees of confusion.

  "What?" Aletheia asked. "I'm a lead?" With a laugh, she added, "I'm afraid you're mistaken."

  Steeling himself against her amused smile, Felix continued. "You are the Aletheia Cooper who is sister to Benjamin Cooper, aren't you?" He knew she was. Her name, address, and phone number had been recorded by Benjamin as his emergency contact on his employment papers.

  "Benjamin?" Aletheia's amused smile vanished. Her surprise appeared unfeigned. "You're here about Benjamin? But—that doesn't make sense. He lives in Atlanta."

  Felix watched her face closely. "When's the last time anybody here heard from Benjamin?"

  There was a stunned silence. Baffled glances were traded around the table.

  "I'm not much for telephones or email," confessed Aletheia's father.

  "Benjamin and I aren't that close," Parker excused himself.

  "Benjamin. He's the one who's so good with computers, isn't he?" Aunt Rosa exclaimed. "My accountant, I believe, but so far I haven't seen my first royalty check."

  Aletheia was the only one who seemed to get Felix's drift. Her face paled. "Is— Did something happen to Benjamin?"

  Felix picked up his fork and tapped the dull end on the table. She'd had no idea—which meant he was about to drop yet another problem on her plate. Not that he minded adding to her troubles. Hell, he had problems of his own. "Benjamin Cooper disappeared three days ago. Before leaving Goddard Research and Design, the secure laboratory where he worked, he sabotaged an expensive, delicate, and top-secret product that was under development."

  It had been Felix's job to keep Goddard's lab secure, Felix's job to make sure the confidential and costly products under development there remained safe. It was Felix's reputation which would lie shattered if he didn't find Benjamin and return a repaired Cloak to Goddard.

  A hush fell over the table. For a long, pregnant moment everyone stared at Felix.

  Mumbling incoherently, Mr. Cooper, Aletheia's father, produced a pen and bent over his table napkin. Disappearing into another world, he began writing equations.

  Parker sucked in his cheeks and Aunt Penelope narrowed her wrinkled eyes.

  It was Aletheia who finally answered Felix, speaking quietly. "Mr. Roman, are you suggesting that my brother deliberately destroyed someone else's property?"

  Felix hooded his eyes. "I'm not suggesting it, Ms. Cooper. I know it. The whole thing is on videotape."

  Aletheia's eyes flashed at Felix. "Videotape," she snorted, as if this meant nothing.

  Everyone's earlier gratitude had built a tension across Felix's shoulders. Now, with Aletheia's scorn, he felt that tension ease. He was far more used to antipathy than warmth or friendship. "My guess," he told Aletheia, "is that he wrecked the device in order to drive up the price."

  Aletheia looked baffled. "The price? What are you talking about?"

  "The U.S. military was on the point of contracting for this invention, but any number of unfriendly nations and criminal organizations would be happy to get their hands on it."

  Aletheia gaped at him. "You think my brother, the computer scientist, is blackmailing the United States government?"

  Felix lifted a shoulder. "More likely selling to the highest bidder."

  Aletheia's eyes widened. "You're crazy."

  "The evidence is there."

  "A videotape."

  "A pretty damning one."

  Aletheia folded her hands on the tabletop. "I have no idea what's actually on that videotape, but I guarantee you've drawn the wrong conclusions from it."

  Exasperation clashed with Felix's calm. He'd seen the evidence she scorned. Slight and youthful Dr. Benjamin Cooper, software genius extraordinaire, ripping apart the wiring for the Cloak. It was as if he'd wanted them to see it, had wanted them to know they'd have to deal with him if they wanted the thing operational again.

  Felix wasn't so pure he couldn't understand the temptation, the thrill of holding so much power. On the contrary, he'd spent his whole life making sure he didn't fall prey to the same temptation. Darkness was in his blood.

  Now his jaw set. "It's my job to see my client gets his property restored. The only one who can do that is Benjamin Cooper. He's the only one with the technical know-how to fix what he wrecked. Help me find Benjamin, then my client gets his product, everybody is happy. No charges will even be filed." Felix paused. "I'm willing to pay generously for any information leading to Benjamin's whereabouts."

  This time Felix looked away from Aletheia to address the rest of the family. Mr. Cooper was still fixated on his napkin, George and Rosa looked confused, Parker appeared concerned.

  But Aunt Penelope, her lips pursing, searched Felix's face shrewdly. "Just out of curiosity: how generous?"

  Pleased by the question, Felix raised an eyebrow. "How much is the note on the house?"

  Mr. Cooper stared down at his napkin, breathing heavily. Nobody spoke. For a terrible moment, Felix feared the foreclosure proceedings were a disaster known only to Aletheia. But then Aunt Penelope licked her lips. "Fifty thousand dollars."

  Felix stared at her. That was it? Fifty thousand dollars? The family was living so close to the edge they couldn't swing that?

  Surprised, but also relieved, Felix nodded. "I can manage fifty K if you help me find Benjamin. Remember, no charges will be pressed if he fixes what he broke."

  Again, no one said a word. Felix had a feeling none of them had dreamed they'd find this much money, not even Aletheia, who'd been trying to sell her café in an obvious bid to raise it.

  Nevertheless, the silence stretched. Felix realized they were all awaiting direction from their leader.

  He turned to regard Aletheia.

  The look in her eyes told him she'd totally revised her gratitude. It had all turned to hate.

  This was the reaction he'd expected from the beginning, but it gave him an odd feeling in his gut. Covering the sensation, he smiled slightly and rose from his seat. "Excommunication and starvation for me, Parker. I'm afraid I ruined your soufflé."

  "True," the shaggy-haired man replied. "You'll get no dessert, and it's chocolate fudge pie, too, one of my best." But he appeared to regard Felix with more curiosity than accusation.

  Aletheia's gaze, however, remained pure loathing as she, too, rose from her seat. "I'll see you out," she said, the words steely.

  Felix lowered his lashes. Excellent. A private word with her was exactly what he wanted. But he was still fighting an unpleasant sinking sensation as he followed Aletheia from the room.

  On the front porch, he put out a hand to halt her hasty progress toward the steps.

  She turned with rigid fury. "What do you want, Mr. Roman?"

  For a moment Felix was taken aback, not by her level of animosity, but by his own reaction to it—almost...regret. As if he could have kept Aletheia Cooper's kind regard in any case.

  He frowned. The only thing to regret would be failing to retrieve Cooper. He needed that scientist. "You know what I want. Your brother's whereabouts. Think about it, Ms. Cooper. Fifty thousand dollars. You could pay off the loan on the house." He paused before giving her his best shot. "None of your relatives would be put out on the street or shunted off to institutions."

  Aletheia's eyes became even darker in the dwindling light of the summer evening. He'd scored a hit, but she wasn't down. "And my brother would be—what, Mr. Roman? You claim no charges would be filed, but his career would be finished, wouldn't it? He'd be convicted without a trial."

  Didn't she get it? There was a videotape. But she was standing up for her
brother as if the evidence didn't exist. No, worse—as if the evidence didn't matter.

  For some reason that, more than anything, threatened Felix's control. Frustration became a low simmer of anger. He shoved it down, this flicker from the dark side. "Your brother would only reap what he'd sowed."

  "In other words, you're asking me to weigh Benjamin's welfare against that of everyone else in the family."

  Felix frowned. "Yes."

  Aletheia shook her head. To Felix, there was a pitying quality in the gesture. Pitying him, as if he didn't understand.

  The simmer of anger became a spike. He understood. He understood that she'd be the one proven wrong. Her loyalty was completely misplaced. Nobody could be trusted the way she trusted her brother, nobody in the world. But amidst his rage lurked a strange sensation of...yearning. To be trusted that way—

  Felix put on his very blandest expression. "With you or without you, I'm going to track your brother down."

  She tilted her head. "You may find that more difficult than you imagine—particularly if I'm making sure that you don't."

  Their eyes met. That odd yearning, together with his underlying anger, pushed Felix over the edge. Hell. He could feel his darkness stealing through. Not only anger, but a host of emotions swirled and sought to gain sway: want, frustration, desire. At the same time that he wanted to throttle her, he was also aware of her scent escaping into the heat of the day and the dewy freshness of her skin only inches away from him. Dammit, he was attracted to her. Fiercely attracted.

  With their solitude on the dusky porch, her flashing eyes and soft-looking mouth, he actually wanted to kiss her.

  Jesus. Slowly, deliberately, he pulled himself back from the brink. With practiced care, he shoved his darkness back where it belonged, under control. This woman had just sworn herself his enemy. He wasn't about to come on to her, nor would she welcome such an overture. So with a deep, uneven breath, he asked her straight out, "Do you know where Benjamin is?"

  She looked at him. Usually Felix was good at reading people, but he couldn't read her. There were too many distractions in the way. Her eyes, her inescapable femininity, and that utterly ridiculous loyalty. Damnation, he couldn't tell: did she know?

  "You have my card," Felix told her. "Call me if you change your mind." He turned and started down the steps, away from an increasingly unsettling interaction. "Fifty thousand dollars," he reminded her, over his shoulder.

  Aletheia said nothing, but Felix could feel the arrows she shot into his back all the way to his rented Lexus.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When was the last time she'd spoken to Benjamin?

  Sitting cross-legged on the old quilt laid over her bed, Aletheia held her phone to her ear and stared through the faded curtains of the lopsided double-hung window. She tried to remember. Last week. Surely it had been last week sometime.

  Though not since Friday. Not since three days ago, when Benjamin had allegedly disappeared.

  Why, oh why, had Felix Roman walked into her life?

  Aletheia should have been working on finding the money to pay off the second mortgage her father had taken out on the house, and then allowed to lapse. She should have been calling Brad to make sure there'd been no problem closing the café.

  Instead, she had her telephone to her ear, leaving a message on Benjamin's voice mail. For the twentieth time in two hours.

  All because Felix Roman had planted a seed of worry. Not doubt. Worry.

  Benjamin was only four years Aletheia's junior, but she'd considered him her responsibility, along with the rest of the family, upon her mother's death. Unlike herself, Benjamin had inherited the science wiz kid brains in the family, so she'd helped put him through college and then prided herself on all his awards and accolades. The day he'd passed the quals for his PhD, she'd cried.

  Now as she hung up the phone, dread settled like a stone in the pit of Aletheia's stomach.

  There were a thousand reasons her brother might not be answering his phone, Aletheia told herself. He could be out on a date. Okay, that was unlikely; Benjamin wasn't the suavest guy when it came to women. But he could be out with friends. Or he could have forgotten to recharge his phone. Aletheia grimaced. Benjamin collected fancy gadget phones. But so what? He could have forgotten to recharge all four of them.

  Right.

  Aletheia rubbed her forehead. On top of everything, she was battling a burn of shame. For a little while there, she'd thought Felix was...interesting. Okay, fascinating. He was the only man she'd ever met who seemed even stronger than herself.

  Unfortunately, he wanted to use that strength to eat Benjamin.

  Oh, God, where could her brother be?

  A knock sounded on her partly open door and Parker stuck his head in. His eyes went from the telephone to Aletheia's face. "No luck?"

  "No luck." The stone of dread in Aletheia's stomach made her lower lip begin to tremble. She bit it so it would stay still. The whole thing was so—ridiculous. Benjamin was an innocent. The street smarts of a child in the mind of a Nobel prizewinner.

  With a deep sigh, Parker came into the room.

  "You know Benjamin wouldn't have done what that jerk accused him of doing," Aletheia told Parker. "He's no saboteur."

  Parker leaned a hip against Aletheia's big wooden desk. "Benjamin's the kind of guy who's happy with pizza money so long as he's left alone to play with his computers."

  "Right!" Aletheia could always count on Parker to understand. He wasn't so hot when it came to the big and practical things, like their imminent foreclosure, but he would always listen. "Benjamin doesn't have a—a conspiratorial bone in his body."

  "He's a pretty simple kid." Parker scrunched his lips to one side. "All the same, something fishy seems to be going on." He gazed pointedly toward the phone on Aletheia's bed.

  She put her hand over the phone, as if that could stop whatever was happening. The dread resumed its weight in her stomach. "I keep hoping there's a simple explanation."

  "Maybe there is." Parker shook his head with a laugh. "Though I doubt anything's going to turn out simple for Benjamin now he's got Felix Roman mad at him."

  Aletheia winced. "Can you believe, I imagined for one minute that snake was a good guy?" Okay, he'd stood on the balcony ready to catch Aunt Rosa, Aletheia had to admit. But he'd probably only done that to try gaining everybody's trust. Aletheia huffed. "My judgment regarding men leaves a lot to be desired."

  Parker took a half-carved length of wood out of his pocket and rubbed it between his fingers. "Nothing wrong with your judgment, just your lack of choices."

  True, there weren't a lot of unattached, decent, and relatively attractive men around Deer Creek, but Aletheia now wondered if that were the only reason she was still single. The way she'd reacted to Felix—a definite bad guy—went far beyond any pull she'd felt toward the few men she'd dated in recent years.

  And none of them had sought to destroy her younger brother.

  Clearly, her judgment in men was just as poor as her judgment in other significant life matters.

  "Besides, Felix isn't so bad." Parker smoothed a finger over his piece of wood, a habit he had when he was working on a sculpture. "Oh, sure, he plans to hunt down Benjamin, but all the same, he's doing it with a certain..."

  When Parker's voice trailed off, Aletheia found herself supplying the word. "Integrity." All right. It was true. Whatever the actual facts of the matter, Felix clearly believed Benjamin had done something wrong, and was determined to right that wrong.

  As enemies went, he'd be formidable.

  "Integrity? Oh, sure, that, too," Parker agreed with a smile.

  Aletheia bit her lower lip again and stared down at her telephone. Panic was spinning off of her dread and clawing its way up her throat.

  She couldn't afford panic. In the next thirty-eight days she needed to find a buyer for the café. Selling it was the only way she could think of to get together enough money to save the house. If she couldn't manage th
at, they'd all be tossed out just like Jim Blodger hoped.

  At the same time, she needed to find Benjamin. He was clearly up to his ears in something strange, and possibly dangerous. Not to mention, he had Felix Roman after him.

  "Where on earth could he be?" Aletheia murmured.

  "I don't know, coz, but one thing Felix was right about." Slipping the half-carved piece of wood back into his pocket, Parker straightened from Aletheia's desk. "If anyone can figure it out, it's you."

  ~~~

  Felix told himself he didn't mind the arrows Aletheia had mentally shot into his back. Why should he? But he was fairly well down the narrow, winding mountain road from Aletheia's house before he thought to turn on his cell phone. Hell. It was after eight o'clock, high time he checked in with the office.

  Felix's phone was top-of-the-line, as was the service he contracted. Despite the mountainous obstructions, the call went through.

  Felix's office manager answered the company line, even though it was after hours. Meredith would guess Felix wanted a recap of how the day had gone in San Francisco. Being a perfectionist with a workaholic complex, she'd stayed at the office until she heard from her boss.

  "Yves Goddard called." Meredith told Felix this straight off. "Four times." A tall, leggy blonde, Meredith went far to dispelling stereotypes. Sharp as a tack, she knew exactly what Felix most needed to hear.

  "Four?" Felix queried.

  "He wanted to know if you've made any progress in tracking down Dr. Benjamin Cooper."

  Felix chewed the inside of his cheek. It was a reasonable question. Goddard was the client who stood to lose millions, not to mention all credibility, thanks to Felix's failure to do his job and keep Goddard's products safe. While it was true that Goddard had insisted on vetting his employees himself, conducting his own background checks and psychological evaluations, Felix still should have been able to prevent the disaster with the Cloak.

  "I'm working on it," Felix told Meredith.

  "That's what I told him." Meredith seemed unfazed by the harassment she must have been getting from Felix's disgruntled client. She certainly didn't blame Felix for it. Unlike Felix's ex-wife, Meredith didn't expect a thing of Felix, not even his appreciation. He certainly did appreciate her, however, giving her a generous bonus every quarter.