LITMIR.BIZ

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eased a bit, and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

      Lulled by the feel of the man against her, it took a moment for Genie to register the words. Then she said, “For what? You didn’t grab me in the darkroom. Even you wouldn’t go that far to get time on the sequencer.” She’d meant the last as a weak joke, but fell silent when the words came out sharp, bitchy, the way they always did when she tried to talk to Beef Wellington, thirteenth floor hunk.

      No wonder he hated working near her. She couldn’t even say good morning without sniping at him. Get a life, her brain reminded her.

      Yeah, easy for it to say. It was just too bad for her that of all the classes she’d aced over the years, she’d missed Get a Life 101. It had probably conflicted with calculus.

      They stood there for a moment and Genie tried to frame an apology in her mind—one that sounded if not friendly at least less nasty. She shifted away from him, hoping that distance would bring more clarity to thoughts that seemed steeped in his heady scent. Instead the motion dragged the tips of her breasts across the wet material of his T-shirt and she froze as she became intimately, acutely aware that she was naked and he was not.

      The small space within the butterfly curtain grew warmer and her breasts suddenly felt harder and softer at the same time, heavy with an unfamiliar, pulsing ache.

      Over the pounding rush of the shower, she heard Wellington take a sharp breath. She looked up into his face and froze, mesmerized by the play of color and light across his features. The tendons of his strong neck stood out sharply beneath the slick skin of his throat, the muscles of his jaw rippled as he swallowed hard, and she wondered what he was thinking.

      Was he wishing that he were anywhere but in the shower with Genius Watson? Was he thinking that his good deed for the day had turned into more of a project than he had planned? Was he thinking of the ride in the ambulance? Of the blood on her gray wool skirt and what might’ve happened if she hadn’t fought back, hadn’t been lucky?

      Her eyes traveled up from his throat, slid across the wide planes of his cheekbones and up the aggressive jut of his nose to his eyes, which glittered through the steam like chunks of pale blue topaz. She wondered if maybe, just maybe, he was thinking the same thing she was thinking. Feeling the same things she was feeling.

      Suddenly the events of the day didn’t seem quite so unbelievable in the face of another incredible fact.

      She was naked in the shower with Beef Wellington. She, Genius Watson, who in college had been voted by one mean-spirited fraternity as The Most Likely to Die a Virgin, was standing in the shower. Naked. With Nicholas Wellington III, the most popular, eligible, drop-dead gorgeous man at Boston General Hospital.

      The wet material of his T-shirt grazed the hard tips of her breasts when he rasped in another breath and his soaked jeans were rough against her thighs and belly. She felt a liquid throb, warm and low, and her lips tingled with a phantom imprint as though he had kissed her already.

      He sucked in a third breath as though filling his lungs was the most important thing in the world, then slid his hands up to cup her shoulders and Genie thought, He feels it, too. He’s going to kiss me. Her belly churned with a dizzying combination of anticipation, painkillers and delayed shock. She felt his fingers tighten, saw the muscles beneath the wet T-shirt ripple, let her eyelids drift shut…

      As he gently but firmly pushed her away, his eyes glued to the nearest butterfly, he growled, “Since you seem okay in here, I’m going to head downstairs and dry off. Yell if you need my help.” He practically leaped out of the shower and was gone.

      Genie sagged against the cool bath tiles and pressed both hands to her burning cheeks once she heard the bathroom door shut in his wake.

      What had just happened here?

      You almost jumped Nick Wellington, that’s what happened, her brain supplied as her heart stopped pounding from excitement and started thumping from sick, horrified embarrassment.

      What had she been thinking?

      She shook her head as the blasting inferno of—lust? desperation? mental instability? delayed reaction?—slowly cooled and left her feeling nauseous. She hadn’t been thinking, which just showed what a terrible day it had been. She always thought first and acted second—it was the secret to an ordered, controlled life. A scientist’s life.

      A safe life.

      Genie knew from experience that when she thought through her actions she didn’t make mistakes. Didn’t do stupid things. Didn’t end up climbing out the third-story window of a house on fraternity row with her teeth chattering as sleet cut through her ripped shirt and slicked the rose trellis beneath her numb fingers.

      Pressing her bruised cheek to the tile, she made a small sound of pain and frustration. Why could she remember every detail of that one humongous miscalculation during her college career and not a thing about this afternoon in the lab? Remembering her single date with Archer—gorgeous, popular, wealthy Archer—did her no good. It hadn’t helped back then and it served no purpose now. But remembering what had happened in the darkroom was important. It could help Detective Sturgeon find the man who had attacked her. Could help hospital security figure out how he had gotten onto the locked thirteenth floor of Boston General’s Genetic Research Building.

      Might prevent it from—dear God—happening to someone else.

      “Tell me!” she ordered her brain, and tried to fight through the layers of defense to that blank place at the back of her mind. “What happened, damn it? Who was it? Why?”

      The fingermarks on her hips and breasts throbbed in time with her heartbeat, in time with the pounding of her head, but the blanks remained stubbornly blank except for a gentle California drawl and the phantom press of a man’s fingers.

      She closed her eyes and knew why Archer was suddenly vivid in her mind after more than a decade had passed. Her brain might not be willing to show her what had happened in the darkroom, but it wanted her to remember that she’d been stupid about men before. Really stupid.

      “I get it, I get it,” she muttered. “Wellington’s out of my league. You think I don’t know that?” She reached for the bar of expensive soap her mother sent her each month from Paris in an attempt to forge the connection they’d never managed when they lived on the same continent. “Besides, I don’t even like him.”

      But she knew, as she slicked the soap over her breasts and down again, that for the first time in a long, long while she was lying to herself.

      NICK PULLED A BEER out of the fridge—who would’ve guessed Dr. Genius drank beer?—and drained half of it while he stood at the sink and waited for his hands to stop shaking with a potent combination of lust and self-loathing.

      What had he been thinking?

      The answer was obvious. He hadn’t been thinking. At least not with his brain. He closed his eyes and swore while the feel of her rocketed through his system and set off every warning buzzer in his body.

      In a hundred years or so he might get past seeing Genie Watson lying in a pool of blood next to the smashed developer. But he was never, ever, going to forget the sight of her naked body, wet with the shower and glowing with reflected butterflies that filtered through the plastic curtain. And the feel of her. He cursed. It had taken every ounce of willpower he’d possessed to set her aside and to leave the shower while he still could. And it had been a close call at that.

      He’d almost kissed a woman who’d been sexually attacked not eight hours earlier—that knowledge was enough to make him feel like a jerk. And the fact that the woman in question was Genius Watson…well, that was just downright scary.

      Hadn’t he learned anything from Lucille?

      He chugged the rest of the beer in self-defense and it went straight to his head, reminding him that he’d been too caught up in DNA sequencing to eat lunch and he’d spent dinnertime in the E.R. waiting room.

      Since he absolutely wasn’t going to follow up on any of the

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