LITMIR.BIZ

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her head didn’t hurt so much anymore.

      “I want to go home.” She didn’t care that she was whining, that there were tears in her voice. She wanted her condo. She wanted a shower. She wanted to be alone when the tears came.

      “I know you do. We’re going.” His voice rumbled against her cheek and the room spun again as he gathered her, blankets and all, in his arms and lifted her as though she weighed no more than her kitten. She closed her eyes and pressed her face in the hollow between his jaw and shoulder, where the smell of soap and musk was strongest.

      “Are you taking me to a cab?” She didn’t think she had the strength to get herself out of a taxi and into her condo, but if that’s what it took to reach her own bed, she’d find a way—even if it meant crawling up the stairs on her hands and knees with her safari underwear shining like a striped beacon out the back of the hospital johnny.

      She thought he smiled, heard a thread of laughter in his voice as he replied, “You’re not getting rid of me that easily, Genius.” The automatic doors whooshed open and she felt the change as they escaped from the hospital into the night air, crisp with fall in New England even through the funk of nearby Chinatown. “I’m taking you home.”

      THE WATCHER SAW A BIG MAN in a doctor’s coat carry Dr. Watson past a row of busy ambulances toward the garage. She was wrapped in a blue blanket and from his vantage point deep in the darkness of a recessed stairwell, the watcher imagined her naked. He throbbed with frustration as he imagined what might have been. It should have been a warning for her. A pleasure for him.

      His fingers rose to touch the neat bandage above his ear as desire turned to anger. The bitch had hurt him. She was going to pay for that.

      Before, he’d merely wanted to stop her.

      Now, he was going to end her.

      Chapter Two

      Nick left the blanket-wrapped woman asleep in his Bronco and unlocked the door to her home with keys he found in her practical canvas handbag. He started to make a quick check of the place, then slowed down as surprise rattled through him.

      He wasn’t sure what he’d expected Genie Watson’s home to look like, but it sure as heck wasn’t this.

      At work, Dr. Genius was a petite woman, maybe five-four tops, a hundred pounds or so wet, with middling brown hair always pulled back in some twisty thing and a penchant for wearing shapeless clothing in shades of brown, black and beige. Nick had always thought that her eyes, big gray pools framed by thick lashes and high, sculpted cheekbones, were her best feature.

      Now, having seen—and felt—firsthand how well she filled out those surprisingly bawdy underthings, he might have to reconsider.

      He would have figured her living space to be along the same lines as her wardrobe—conservative, boxy rooms with sensible furniture decorated in shades of gray and brown, maybe with a touch of navy added in a wild moment that had since been regretted. He never would have pictured the spacious two-bedroom condo tucked into the eaves of an elegant Victorian only a few blocks from his place.

      The four rooms on the first level flowed into each other like water, a river of golden wood floors, white trim and pastel walls. The huge windows were high and arched, topped by semicircles of abstract stained glass, and he imagined that daylight would splash crazily across the bold Indian rugs, the comfy, jewel-toned furniture and the dizzying array of dust collectors.

      If Watson’s constant complaints and annoying little memos hadn’t told Nick everything he needed to know, her condo would’ve done the trick. The place practically screamed “a high maintenance woman lives here,” and Nick’d had enough of them to last a lifetime and then some. In fact, he thought as he looked around again and scowled at the pretty stained-glass lamps, Lucille probably would’ve like this place—if it’d been three times bigger and ten times the price.

      Well, he thought, no matter. He was here out of kindness, not interest, so it shouldn’t matter to him that Watson was high-maintenance. He wasn’t in the market for a relationship, and if he was, Genius Watson would rank somewhere around fifth from the bottom on the list of women he knew—with the ninety-year-old grandmother at the Chinese Laundromat right above her.

      Scowling at the direction his thoughts had taken, which could only be excused by the bizarre events of the day, he returned to the Bronco to retrieve Dr. Watson. She didn’t wake up when he carried her in and placed her on the plush cushions of an oversize couch, and he wondered fleetingly whether he should rouse her. He was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to let a person with a concussion sleep all night.

      It was too bad he hadn’t thought to ask the fresh-faced intern for Watson’s care-and-feeding instructions, but since the doctor wasn’t going to spring her unless she’d had a medically trained observer to stay with her for at least twenty-four hours, Nick had snarled, “I’m a doctor. I’ll watch her.”

      Well, he was a doctor. But courses in what to do after a concussion hadn’t been required in the Biochem Department at M.I.T.

      He could’ve left her where she was, but he remembered the day he’d broken his wrist in a Little League game. His parents had been at a fund-raiser, the nanny had been on vacation, and a private nurse wasn’t available until the next day. So he’d stayed in the big hospital bed in an empty room far away from the rest of the children. He’d been ten years old. He’d been alone. And he’d hated every minute of it.

      High-maintenance, memo-writing Genius Watson might not be his favorite person on a good day, but this counted as anything but a good day. His mind blinked to the sight of her in the developer room and his gut twisted. After an experience like that, even if she couldn’t remember most of it, she deserved to spend the night in her own bed if that’s what she wanted. From his eavesdropping in the hallway, he’d gotten the idea that she was firmly set on going home, so here he was, in a pretty condo with an even prettier woman asleep on the couch.

      How had he overlooked Genie Watson’s beauty before? Even with a rainbow of bruises marring her jaw and a line of stitches crawling across her right eyebrow, she was lovely. Her narrow, bruised hands rested beneath her left cheek and her even breathing tugged at a ringlet of her hair that had fallen from its customary twist. The surprisingly rich brownish-bronze glittered as it rippled over the patchwork quilt he’d found on the back of the sofa and thrown over her.

      Nick supposed that he might have missed appreciating the delicate bones of her jaw when it was clenched in irritation because he’d forgotten the wipe tests again. He might not have noticed the pouting fullness of her lips when they were flapping at him for spilling stain on the UV projector or running the sterilizer too hot. But as Nick looked at Genius Watson now, he wondered how he ever could have dismissed her as ordinary. How he could have failed to look beyond the prickly gray wool and scratchy lace collars to see the woman beneath. Because, Lord, she was beautiful when she was unconscious.

      It was too bad she’d wake up eventually.

      “Wellington?” Her soft voice jolted him back to reality. He’d been so busy staring at her, he’d missed that her eyes were open, cloudy with fatigue and pain. “Why are you still here?”

      He shrugged and tried to choke down the hot ball of…something that rose when she sat up on the couch and the quilt drifted down to her waist. The hospital gown slipped far off her shoulder, down to the creamy up slope of a breast the likes of which he never would have imagined hid beneath those awful clothes. She shifted again and the material dipped lower, baring the faintest hint of darker, nubbled flesh—

      Get a grip, Wellington! The voice didn’t sound like the Senator now, it sounded like a slightly hysterical version of Nick’s own. That breast is attached to Genius Watson. Remember her? The most overbearing, overbright, annoying female you’ve ever had the misfortune of sharing lab space with?

      The voice was right. He had to get a grip. He shook his head to clear it. The incident that afternoon must have shaken him more than he’d thought. That was the only rational explanation for his sudden interest in Dr.

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