LITMIR.BIZ

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Why would anyone want to hurt researchers who were only trying to cure people?

      Nick had no idea. Nor, it seemed, did either of the detectives working on the case. At least not yet.

      Sighing, he picked up Dr. Watson and manfully rearranged her robe so it covered as much as possible. He carried her up the spiral staircase to her bedroom, flicked on a faux Tiffany lamp that lit the room in bits of sparkling color and laid her on the big brass bed. She didn’t wake when he slid her between the covers and tucked them all the way up to her chin, but she murmured and curled up with both hands beneath her cheek.

      Her two cats, which he had previously noticed only as flitting shadows at the edge of vision, appeared on the bed as if by magic. The big black shorthair curled itself behind her knees and the tiny gray tabby, maybe two months old or so, purred like a locomotive as it marched up to her face and sniffed at the line of stitches. It licked her chin worriedly.

      The kitten looked directly at Nick and mewed a question. He stroked its little head with the back of a finger, and said, “Yeah, I hear you. She’ll be okay though.” He stared down at the motionless woman, barely a lump beneath the bedclothes. “She’ll be okay,” he repeated. “I’ll protect her.”

      He paused and said to nobody in particular as he stared down at the woman in the bed, “I’ll protect her. God help us both.”

      Chapter Three

      While Genie slept, her brain, that precocious organ that had dictated much of her life up until this point, churned and spun in its liquid-filled housing and tried to make sense of the day’s events. A difficult task considering there was a large piece of that day tucked away in the back recesses of memory, protected by a twist of neurons and a few subconscious Keep Away signs.

      She frowned; her sleeping self registering the pain of pulled stitches and ordering her face muscles to relax even as her dreams flickered red and black.

      She had gone to the developer room, excited to read the films from the day before. They were about to begin analysis of a new Gray’s Glaucoma family and she wanted to see how the DNA samples were working, particularly since Molly had gotten a strange phone call from the family’s wealthy patriarch the day before.

      The old man might just be a tube of DNA to the lab rats, but to the rest of the world he was a tycoon. A powerhouse. Someone that Genie wanted to keep very, very happy in the hopes that he’d donate generously to the Eye Center’s new wing. She made a mental note to return his call and be extra nice.

      Placing a hand on the exterior port, she assured herself that the developer was running properly. The tray was hot to the touch, a puff of air ran across its surface to keep the films from sticking to the hard plastic, and the hallway was filled with the sound of turning rollers.

      She glanced over the new cartoon taped to the wall near the darkroom door and a faint smile touched her lips. Dr. Nicholas Wellington might be a big, handsome jerk with no sense of protocol and an annoying habit of appropriating her equipment just when she needed it most, but his arrival had given the lab a certain sense of character. She glanced at his office door and grinned at a poster that featured a buff body with a cutout picture of Wellington’s head taped in place, the caption reading, Is This The Face Of Erectile Dysfunction? followed by an eight-hundred number for one of those new potency drugs.

      Shaking her head, Genie grinned wider. Though she highly doubted that Wellington suffered from E.D., she had to give him points for leaving the poster where his techs had hung it.

      He either had a great sense of humor or he was, so to speak, awfully cocky about his abilities.

      Reassured that the developer was running, she reached for the spinning door and rotated it so she could step into the darkroom without letting in any white light. As she entered the light lock, she was surprised to see that the Occupied sign was lit. She sniffed. Wellington. She banged on the back of the light lock. “My turn, Beef. Check the chart!”

      But there was no response. Maybe he’d left the sign lit after he was done. Genie snorted. Slob. She tried calling his name again before she entered the light lock, heard the rubba-thump, rubba-thump of the revolving door as she let herself into the darkroom—

      She was in a field of daisies. Her cat, Oddjob, sat at her feet while Galore gamboled through the flowers, leaping in huge bounds to see over the stalks while he swatted at the yellow and black butterflies with kitten’s paws.

      In her sleep Genie cried out in frustration at her brain’s refusal to show her what had happened in the darkroom. She twisted against the bedclothes and whimpered when she brushed a clenched fist against the ripe bruise on her cheek. Then The Voice returned and she stilled.

      “Shh, sweetheart, it’s only a dream. You’re safe. I’m here.”

      She struggled against sleep again, fighting to wake to tell him that she wasn’t afraid of the dream, that she was frustrated by the missing pieces. But the bed dipped as he settled beside her and she felt a whisper of a touch at her forehead that took away the pain. She sighed and snuggled deeper, turning her bruised cheek into his hand.

      “Sleep now. I’ll keep watch.”

      In the field, the cats purred and Genie turned her face up into the warm yellow sunlight. She felt Nick behind her and knew if she turned her head she’d see him, larger than life and twice as handsome—the high Viking cheeks, the flat blade of a nose and the warm blue eyes. But as she moved, something else caught her eye, a flash of mossy color at her shoulder. She looked down—

      And saw that she was wearing green scrubs stained brown with blood.

      “GREENS,” GENIE PRONOUNCED the next morning, waving a forkful of strawberry pancake in Nick Wellington’s direction before popping it into her mouth. It sure beat a handful of granola on the way out the door. If Wellington sticks around, she thought, I’ll have to exhume the StairMaster from the attic.

      “Excuse me?”

      She dropped her fork onto the plate with a loud clatter and blushed before she realized he hadn’t heard her slip of the medulla. And where had that come from? There was no way Nick Wellington was sticking around. No way she wanted him to. In the cold, rational light of morning, that little incident in the shower seemed like an out-of-body experience, like something that had happened to someone else. Now it was—hopefully—time for them to get back to reality.

      Back to Dr. Genius Watson and Dr. Beef Wellington. Matter and antimatter. Magnetic north and south. It would serve her well to remember that, because there was no way in hell she was making the Archer mistake twice.

      Besides, Wellington wasn’t even interested. Sure he’d felt sorry for her, and maybe a tiny bit responsible because he’d found her. Nothing more. He certainly hadn’t felt the hum of rightness in the ambulance and he hadn’t been prey to the fantasies she’d briefly entertained in the night.

      He couldn’t have, or else he wouldn’t have bolted from the shower as if she had just grown a third eyeball in the center of her forehead. She had been naked—naked!—in his arms and her breasts had been rubbing up against his wet T-shirt and her thighs and her— Well, never mind. Genie resisted an unladylike snort. He hadn’t done a thing. He hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t even made a suggestive comment.

      Nothing.

      Ergo, he wasn’t interested. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out. And it was just as well, she thought, since she absolutely, positively, wasn’t interested, either.

      Screw me once, said Marilynn’s well-bred, Georgian contralto in the back of Genie’s mind, shame on you. Screw me twice… Genie’s lips twitched. She was pretty sure the conclusion of Marilynn’s malaprop didn’t really apply here, but it felt good to remember her friend, as if Marilynn’s ghost was standing at her shoulder, protecting her from being stupid.

      “Genie?” Nick waved his hand in front of her face. “You still here?”

      She mumbled something unintelligible while she tried to

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