LITMIR.BIZ

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heard the water being shut off upstairs while he peered into her refrigerator. Pleased that she was well stocked with food as well as beer, he decided on scrambled eggs and toast, making the meal heartier by adding onions, parsley, and a wedge of crumbly cheddar. He felt himself unwind a bit, relaxed by the mindless snick of the knife against the cutting board and the mundane pleasure of preparing a meal.

      Mrs. Greta had taught him well. The Senator’s cook had been a round, motherly woman who’d given her employer’s growing son a swat or a hug depending on the circumstances, and some of Nick’s happiest memories from back then were set in the rambling kitchen with her off-key humming in the background. She’d taught him to cook and hadn’t told his father, for which Nick had been eternally grateful.

      With the memory of the older woman bustling warm and happy around the edges of his mind, Nick breathed deeply through his nose and looked up toward the second floor, wishing idly that he could see through the walls to the steamy shower beyond. If he closed his eyes, he was sure he could picture Genie Watson in glorious, pink-wet nakedness….

      With a man’s fingerprints glowing purple against the rosy skin. The marks of violence at her neck, hips and face. A crumpled white ball under the chemical sink. A pool of blood, dried black at the edges, liquid and dark red in the center.

      The housekeeper’s happy ghost vanished and Nick scowled at a half-peeled onion. He was here because a co-worker had been attacked. Because she had wanted to come home and needed someone to stay with her.

      Someone to protect her.

      He slid the mixture into a skillet while his thoughts poked and prodded at the facts. The detective, Sturgeon, had said there was no reason to think that Genie had been the target, but it didn’t make much sense to picture someone hiding in the darkroom waiting to assault the first person that walked in. Then again, picturing someone hiding in the darkroom didn’t make any sense at all to begin with.

      Why their lab? Why the darkroom? How the hell had he gotten onto a locked floor in the first place? And how had he gotten away?

      At the thought of a blood-covered, would-be rapist escaping through his lab space, and what might have happened had Genie not defended herself, Nick missed an English muffin with a wickedly serrated bread knife and almost took off his own thumb. “Shioot!”

      “Be careful. I’m a little too shaky to sew you back together and I’m not up for another trip to the emergency room tonight, okay?”

      Sucking on the narrow slice he’d carved into his thumb, Nick looked up to see Genie, wrapped in a thick terry robe, standing at the threshold. Her hair was a damp waterfall across her narrow shoulders. Her eyes were shadowed, wary, and the bruises on her cheek forcibly reminded him of her vulnerability even as his heart thumped at the sight of her. She needed his help, nothing more. His protection. Besides, he didn’t even like her.

      “You cook?” Her voice was stronger, as if the shower had distanced her from the afternoon’s events, and he was grateful for that, since he wasn’t feeling particularly distant himself. In fact, he was fighting the insane urge to cross the room, scoop her off her feet and take her back to the shower so he could protect her. Naked.

      “Yeah, I cook.” He waved the thumb in her direction. “If you don’t mind the occasional miss.” Giving her a wide berth, he placed two plates on the granite breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the dining area.

      “But I thought—” She hitched herself up on a stool, seeming not to notice that the robe had fallen open across one rosy, damp thigh.

      Resisting the urge to pull the robe closed—or off, whichever she preferred—he sat opposite her so he couldn’t see her pink-painted toenails. Never in a million years would he have guessed that Genius Watson painted her toenails pink.

      “What? That a rich boy like me wouldn’t know how?” He shrugged. “Well, when you get along better with the help than with your own family, you pick up a few useful domestic skills.”

      Most women would choose that moment to comment on his father’s wealth and position, or ask him what the campaign had been like. Genie did neither. She popped a forkful of egg into her mouth, made a sexy “Mmm” sound when she swallowed and said, “Poor baby. Do you do windows, too?”

      He relaxed the tension he hadn’t even realized had crept into his neck and shoulders, bit into the toast and nodded toward the full-length windows surrounding the ground floor. “Yeah, but I’d charge you extra for those, particularly if you wanted me to polish the stained glass.”

      “I’ll keep that in mind.” After a few minutes of oddly companionable silence, she stared at her empty plate. “I guess I was hungry. Thanks.”

      He got up and dished out seconds, grateful that she was lucid and eating. He added a couple of prescription pain pills and a glass of water to her place setting before he sat back down.

      She scowled at the pills. “They’ll knock me out. I need something that won’t make my brain fuzzy.”

      Without a word he leaned across the breakfast bar and grabbed the ibuprofen he’d put there earlier, popped the cap and handed it to her. “Kind of thought you’d feel that way.”

      She swallowed four of the pills dry and chased them with a bite of egg. Gesturing again with her fork, oblivious to the fact that her terry robe was now gaping at the top, she said, “So what happened? I don’t remember much, but the darkroom was trashed, wasn’t it?”

      Nick tore his attention from the hint of smooth, round flesh at her widening neckline and glued his eyes to her face, which was looking worse by the minute as the bruises darkened to the color of rotten eggplants. Protect, he reminded himself, not ogle. “Yeah, the cassettes were opened and the films thrown around, and it looks like he went after the developer with that pipe wrench we use to change the chemical tanks. He, uh, must’ve done that before you got there.”

      “How do you know that?” She grimaced and pushed her plate aside.

      “Well, from the amount of—” Nick cleared his throat and willed the image away “—blood on you and in the room, he’d have been too hurt to demolish anything afterward.”

      Genie shook her head and her drying hair shimmered in the light of the stained-glass lamp. How had he ever thought her hair was a nondescript brown? The metallic threads of bronze and gold glowed as she moved, and the natural waves washed almost to the place where her breasts pushed against the rapidly loosening terry robe.

      Ordinary she was not. But that didn’t change the fact that she was a pain in the neck.

      “That doesn’t make any sense. I would’ve known something was wrong if the developer wasn’t running properly. And besides, how did he just waltz back down the hallway, onto the elevator, and past security? Wouldn’t someone have thought it strange? I mean, sure it’s a hospital, but bleeding people tend to stick to the E.R., not the research buildings.

      She had a point. “Well, there was blood in the sink. Maybe he washed some of it off.” Nick closed his eyes and tried to picture the ruined room. What was he missing? “How about clothes? A lab coat or something he could’ve put on over his other stuff? A baseball cap to cover a scalp wound?”

      “A scalp wound would work,” Genie agreed, her eyelids drooping and her words coming more slowly now. “It’d bleed like hell but not do too much real damage. The clothes make sense, but where would he get them? Bring them with him? Why would he do that unless he was planning on getting hurt? And why was he in there in the first…” She trailed off and would have fallen asleep face-first in her leftover eggs if Nick hadn’t seen it coming and reached over to catch her chin in his hand.

      Why indeed?

      He stared at her face, at the translucent skin, the bloom of violent bruises, the obscene line of black stitches above her swollen eye. She looked like an angel who’d gotten the losing end of a bar fight. Why would anyone want to hurt her? Hurt their research? They found disease genes, for heaven’s sake. They didn’t clone dinosaurs, they didn’t

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