Red Alert (19 page)

So instead of pressing a kiss into the sweat-slicked hollow of his neck and saying
I love you,
she turned her head in the opposite direction, toward the bedside table and the square of light that shone from the bathroom, reflecting on the open box of condoms. “Oh, hell. You’ve only got a six-pack.”

He chuckled, that rusty, unfamiliar sound that did a little dance beneath her heart. He snaked out an arm and snagged the box without looking. “Then we’ll have to make the other five count.”

Chapter Thirteen

The six-pack of condoms had a sole survivor by morning. Erik lay back happy and spent, with energy humming beneath his skin, even though his muscles were nearly limp with fatigue. He eyed the half-open door of the master bath and the shower steam curling around the edges, and briefly considered joining Meg in there with the last condom.

But something held him back. A need for a breath of space, perhaps, or a moment of lucidity without her soft skin a touch away, her softer lips in range.

He wanted to push her away as much as—if not more than—he wanted to join her. He’d never intended to let it go this far.

No, he admitted, that wasn’t true. He’d been fascinated by her the moment she’d turned down his first few offers for the NPT technology, from the moment the investigator’s file had landed on his desk and he’d learned that Dr. M. Corning was a strawberry-blond pain in the butt.

He’d wanted her for weeks. Months, even.
Wanted to have her. Touch her. Taste her. And now that he’d had the experience, his need for her was by no means slaked. If anything it was worse, because he knew what she tasted like, what she felt like underneath him, around him, how she moaned his name in the back of her throat when she came.

He knew all that now, and it made the wanting stronger.

Worse, it made him care for her more than was comfortable.

He shifted beneath the sheets as his blood heated again, as a few words filtered out from the shower and he learned something else about Dr. M. Corning.

She sang in the shower. Badly.

A faint smile touched his lips and a fainter thought entered his heart.

What if they could make this thing between them last? They were intelligent, mature adults. They could agree to disagree on the NPT deal, couldn’t they? It was business, after all. He’d help Peters and Sturgeon get the bastard hunting her, they’d let the lawyers figure out the NPT deal, and then maybe they could take a few days away. Someplace pretty, where the leaves were just turning. Or maybe farther north, where the snows had already begun. He didn’t ski anymore, but that wouldn’t matter.

The past eight hours had shown him he still had plenty of leg left for other, more important activities.

He grinned at the memory of those activities, and felt the grin widen when Meg emerged from the steamy bathroom, wearing a towel and a smile of her own.

“Hey, sleepyhead.” She crossed the room to an upholstered chair. He’d never thought about the decor much when he’d escaped the city and stayed at the house, but now, watching her bend over the chair to collect her discarded clothing, watching the towel ride up over her long, taut thigh, he decided he freaking loved that chair. Maybe he’d even buy another, just to watch her bend over it. Then he could—

“I can feel you staring, Falco.” But she looked over her shoulder, arched a brow and waggled her butt, letting him know she didn’t mind one bit.

“Yeah, well, I like the scenery.” Erik folded his hands behind his head on the pillow and grinned. “Don’t let me distract you. Unless you’d like to be distracted?”

She grinned as she stepped into her panties, pulling them up beneath the towel. “You’ve had your distractions, buster. We’ve got work to do.”

That had him sitting up in the wide bed. “What work? You’re safe here.”

She shimmied into her bra and buttoned the white shirt over it before she jerked her chin at the window, where gauzy drapes framed a clear blue sky dotted with puffy, perfect clouds. “You said you’d moved the sale up to today, right? I’d fight you, but I haven’t been able to get the licensing deal done and I’m out of options, so why bother? Besides, things are different now.” She smiled at him. “We’ll need to meet with Cage and the lawyers at Boston General and get the new paperwork drawn up.”

A deadly chill chased through Erik’s bloodstream. “What new paperwork?”

She pulled on her pants, hopping on one foot so her back was to him when she said, “Why, making sure we agree on the scope of the sale, of course.” She straightened and turned to him. “It’s not like you’re going to insist on an outright sale now that we’re together.” When he said nothing, her shoulders tightened beneath the white shirt. “Are you?”

Erik stayed frozen in place, flesh cold beneath the sheet that provided scant barrier between him and the realization that he’d done it again.

He’d fallen for a woman who wanted something from him.

“Erik?” Her voice sounded small and quavery, and though part of him wanted to believe it was an act, the more self-aware portion of him knew it was genuine—and therefore a bigger problem—when she said, “You’re not actually going to force the deal now, are you? I thought we had an understanding.”

He rubbed his chest, where a low, aching weight had settled beneath a sluggish stir of anger. “So did I, but I’m starting to think we weren’t understanding the same thing. I thought we would keep this—” he gestured between the two of them “—separate from the business dealings. That we could be professionals and lovers at the same time.”

Something flashed in her eyes, seeming caught between hurt and anger. “Spoken like a true businessman. Can you really shut it off that easily? Is your heart really that hard?” She took a step back,
into a square of light framed by the gossamer drapes. “I thought we could compromise. Work together.”

Pressure built from the back of his head to the front, a relentless vise of frustration and anger, directed equally at himself and the woman standing opposite him, watching him with dark, wounded eyes. “There is no compromise, Meg. I want all of the technology, not a relatively unimportant part of it.”

Pure anger flashed in her eyes this time, and her breath hissed out between her teeth. “
Relatively unimportant?
NPT is going to be a godsend for women everywhere. No more Byzantine needles poking into their stomachs, sucking up amnio fluid or scraping off a few CV cells. No more spontaneous abortions when the needle doesn’t go in quite right. No more infections or—” She stopped and gritted her teeth. “A
businessman
should be able to see the huge potential for profit.”

Erik swung his legs off the mattress, keeping the sheet over them on a burst of the modesty he’d lost during the night. His pulse pounded with the need for action, for a fight, but who would he fight? The mistake, it appeared, had been his. He’d deluded himself into believing in something that didn’t exist between them.

“I see the potential just fine,” he said between gritted teeth. “However, the prenatal testing aspects aren’t why I tendered my offer. I’m looking at this from another direction.” He reached down to his injured calf and dug a thumb into the tight muscle, trying to relieve the pressure of overuse and stress.

Her eyes followed the motion and an awful sort of comprehension flickered to life. She swallowed. “You want to develop the fetal cells as progenitors, don’t you?”

She made it sound as if he’d just suggested frying a puppy for breakfast.

“Why not?” he demanded. “I’m sure you’ve read the studies. Those very fetal cells you’ve found cruising around in the mother’s bloodstream have been known to migrate to the site of an injury and help with healing. They’re pluripotent—they can grow into any kind of cell type, fix any kind of injury.”

He rose and pulled the sheet around his body toga-style so he could look down at her and gesture at the world outside. “Think about it. With proper development, we might be able to harvest those cells from a mother and use them to fix her paralyzed child’s spinal injury. Better yet, since half of the child’s DNA comes from each parent, those cells could be used to heal either the mother or the father. Another sibling, perhaps. Just think of the possibilities!”

She took a step back, eyes wide in her face. “I
have
thought of the possibilities, Erik. That’s the problem. You see a way to fix yourself. I see an ethical issue right up there with fetal experimentation.”

Knowing those were fighting words, Erik headed to his walk-in closet and grabbed trousers, a shirt and tie, needing the barrier of business clothing. From inside the echoing space, he said, “You’re being
overly dramatic. I’m not talking about combining an egg and sperm, growing it to the sixteen-cell stage in some lab and then performing experiments, on the theory that it’s not a ‘person’ yet. I’m talking about filtering cells out of a mother’s bloodstream and using them to help her, or to help another member of her family.”

“Precisely.” There was an unfamiliar chill in her voice when she said, “But what if there isn’t a child? Take you, for example. It’s unlikely your mother’s bloodstream would still carry your cells after all this time. So what are you going to do, marry someone just to have your child? Pay them? And then once the baby’s cells have been isolated from her blood, what then? Abort the child because you have what you need? Let the mother carry it to term and raise the baby, knowing it’s only alive because you needed a few cells to fix your limp?”

Something iced in his chest. He emerged from the closet with his slacks hooked over his hips and his chest bare, a starched shirt in his hand. “That’s not fair. You want to talk about what else isn’t fair? It’s not right that a high school kid can break his neck playing hockey and never walk again. Not when there’s a way we could help fix him.”

“Help fix
you,
you mean.” There was pity in her expression, and it made him mean.

“Yes, damn it. I want to be fixed. I want to walk without a damned cane. I want to ski again. Jog again. Hell, just get up the damned stairs without
leaning on something. I’ve got the money—why can’t I have the technology?”

Her lips firmed. “Because it’s not right and you know it.”

He turned his back on her, gimped back into the closet and reached for socks. “I know nothing of the sort. And if you think one night of sex is enough to buy me off, think again.”

He braced himself for her burn of anger, for the curses that were sure to come, the curses he’d surely earned.

But they didn’t come. She was silent for a long moment. Too long.

“What, no comeback for that?” He kept the words rough and angry, but inside he already knew what he would find when he stepped back inside the bedroom.

Sure enough, she was already gone.

MEG TOOK ERIK’S GUN from the bedside table, and when she called a cab from the downstairs phone, she had the driver meet her by the front steps.

She was furious, but she wasn’t stupid.

She half expected Erik to come crashing down the stairs to continue their fight. The fact that he didn’t only confirmed what their conversation had taught her. She’d been deluding herself when she’d thought they were on the same page.

Hell, they weren’t even reading the same book.

“Better to figure it out now versus later,” she told herself, and tried to believe in the words. But tears
scratched at the back of her throat. She held herself tense, half hoping he’d come down the stairs, half hoping he wouldn’t.

He hadn’t appeared by the time the cab pulled up.

“Your loss,” she muttered as she punched in the codes that would let her out of the house, out of the place where she’d thought for a few hours that she might have found something special.

“My mistake,” she said, and slammed the door.

She didn’t look back as she climbed in the cab and gave the hospital’s address.

The driver’s eyes flashed with surprise. “You sure, lady? That’s all the way in the city. It’ll take forever with rush-hour traffic.”

“You got somewhere else to be?” She stared through the windshield, refusing to look at the house, refusing to care whether he was watching or not. “I’ve got the money if you’ve got the time.”

“You’re the boss.” The driver pulled away from the house. As they turned onto the main road and headed for the highway, a police cruiser fell in behind them.

The cabbie eased his foot off the accelerator and shifted into the slow lane, but the cop car didn’t pass. It stayed a comfortable few lengths back, just waiting. Watching.

Well, that answered it, Meg thought on a beat of depression, a press of tears. Erik knew she’d gone. He’d leaned on Peters or the local cops to have her followed, but he hadn’t come downstairs, hadn’t asked her to stay.

Either he didn’t care nearly as much as she did or he figured that it was hopeless. That
they
were hopeless.

She was good and angry by the time they hit the highway. How could he have made love to her knowing he had no intention of compromising on the NPT sale? Worse, she thought with a clutch of disgust, he wanted to develop the exact thing she’d been fighting to block all this time.

Yes, the fetal stem cells could be used to help patients, but at what cost to society?

A blip of siren from behind yanked her attention back to the road. The cabbie cursed and flipped on his blinker before easing to the side of the road. “I wasn’t doing anything, you—”

“It’s me,” Meg said. “It’s okay, though. Just see what they have to say.”

The cruiser rolled up beside the cab and the passenger window buzzed down. The cabbie’s window was already at half-mast, so the cop’s words carried over the background traffic noise when he said, “Dr. Corning? We’ll need you to follow us.”

Her blood chilled. “What? What’s happened?”

“I can’t say, ma’am, but Mr. Falco said—and I quote—‘Tell her to turn her bleeping phone on.’”

“Oh, hell.” Meg reached for her purse and rummaged for her phone, knowing Erik likely hadn’t used the word “bleeping” at all.