Sorcerer: A Loveswept Contemporary Classic Romance (3 page)

“Ms. Polanski, you don’t have to go through with this. We can find someone else, someone with more experience—”

“There isn’t
time
to find someone else,” she said with killing honesty. “Besides, I know this machine almost as well as you do. And I know Einstein like I know my own brother. There’s no one more qualified than I am.” She squared her shoulders and proudly pulled herself up to her full height, which was a good ten inches shorter than his own. “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I’m capable?”

Sinclair didn’t get the chance to answer. A voice came over the egg’s speaker, the familiar Brooklynese of senior technician Sadie Hedges. “Ready when you are, Doc.”

“Doc?” Jillian remarked, smiling.

She had a beautiful smile. He’d noticed it from
the first—with clinical detachment, of course. It was one of the reasons she was so popular with her coworkers, along with her intelligence and forthright honesty. Jillian Polanski had the rare and invaluable gift of making other people feel important, and the project teams she worked on ran more smoothly and efficiently because of it. It was one of the reasons he’d regretted that she was no longer working for him.

A regret that was also due to the fact that he respected her technical skill and her intelligence, and secretly enjoyed their rousing arguments. It had absolutely nothing to do with the incredible dance they’d shared together. Nothing at all.

“I don’t encourage nicknames, Ms. Polanski,” he stated as he pressed the final sensor node to a spot on her jugular just below her ear. “Not from Dr. Hedges. Or from anyone else.”

She blushed, and he knew she was remembering her friend’s reference to Dr. Doom. Heat rose with her color, sweeping across the skin underneath his fingers to the pulse point at the side of her throat. Her warmth swept through his own body, shining through his inner darkness like a lighthouse beacon in the night. He jerked his hand away, startled and shaken by the unexpected warmth, the unwanted intimacy.

He pulled her display visor down over her face, cutting off her sight, and his view of her remarkably expressive eyes. Then he moved quickly to the door of the egg. “It will take me a few minutes to get into
my own harness,” he said more harshly than he intended. “Use the time to reacquaint yourself with the glove and visor controls.”

“Dr. Sinclair?”

He paused at the egg’s entrance, held fast by the poorly disguised uncertainty in her voice. She seemed so young, so impossibly unprepared to deal with the very real dangers of his invention. He gripped the side of the door, fighting an almost overwhelming urge to go back and rip her out of the harness and send her as far away from his simulator, and himself, as possible.

He didn’t, of course. “Yes, Ms. Polanski?”

“I wanted you to know—” She hesitated, her brow furrowing in a rare frown as she searched for the right words. “Well, I just wanted to say that I’m not worried about entering the simulator. I know you won’t let anything happen to me in there. I trust you.”

Trust.
Trust was an emotion unwise people assigned based on other fallible emotional reactions. Trust was something one decided not with the head, but with the heart—an unpredictable area of the body even at the best of times. He’d learned the hard way not to rely on anything that could not be documented, dissected, examined, or cross-checked. It would take something stronger than a pair of doe-brown eyes to make him forget it.

“You can trust whomever you please,” he warned the young woman. “Just don’t forget what the simulator
can do to you. Or that I am the one who created it.”

Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore
, Jillian thought as she opened her eyes and looked around. She was surrounded by a relentlessly gray stillness, like a thick bank of fog that was neither cold, nor wet, nor … 
anything.
The fog’s eerie grayness seemed more like the absence of color than a color itself. The air seemed not so much silent as lacking sound. The whole world seemed defined not by what it was, but by what it was not. If nowhere was a place, she’d found it.
Again
, she recalled with a shiver.

Memories from almost twenty years ago surfaced in her mind. Once again she was eight years old, huddled in the corner of her tiny bedroom, covering her ears to block out the living room shouting match that centered, as usual, around her. As the volume of her mother’s and the latest boyfriend’s fighting increased, Jill pulled her body into a tighter, smaller ball and pressed herself into the hard angles of the corner, pretending with all her childish heart that she was in a place beyond the sound and anger, a place where nothing existed, not even pain.…

“Ms. Polanski?”

She blinked, pulling herself out of the memory as a person pulls off an old pair of boots.
You’re in the simulator
, she reminded herself.
And the long, lean shadow standing beside you is Dr. Sinclair.
In the dimness
she could make out little more than his shape, a silhouette impression. Considering how easily her face betrayed her emotions, she hoped that was all he could see of her.

“Ms. Polanski, are you all right?”

She couldn’t see his expression, but she heard the resonance of concern in his voice. Lord, was he actually worried about her? “Would it matter to you if I weren’t?”

“Of course,” he said brusquely. “If you experienced an adverse reaction to the simulator, it would jeopardize the mission.”

“Naturally,” Jill said dully.
Idiot!
She looked around, forcing herself to concentrate on her unusual surroundings. “Is this the inside of Einstein’s computer?”

“It’s the simulated environment of the inside of the computer,” Sinclair corrected her. “Control, mark the time.”

Before she could ask him how he expected her to accomplish this feat, another, more distant voice answered. “Time marked. Like you asked, I’ll give you updates every ten minutes until the hour’s up. Howya doing, Jill?”

“Fine,” Jillian answered, recognizing the voice of Felix Parker, the boy wonder of the project. At twenty-three, Felix was already working on his Ph.D. in cyberphysics, but his sheer zaniness and puppy-dog friendliness prevented him from being classified as a computer nerd. He also didn’t give a damn what people thought of him, a talent Jill had
yet to master. “Hey, are you the one who came up with this oatmeal world?”

Felix laughed at her unflattering but accurate description. “Hang on, I’m firing up the topology program now. Dr. Sinclair asked me to come up with something a little more normal for your first time in the simulator. Wanted to make you feel more comfortable.”

“He did?” Jill glanced up at the shadow man beside her, amazed that he would instruct his best engineer to basically “waste his time” on creating an environment designed to make her feel at ease. “You did?”

Sinclair didn’t answer. He wasn’t even listening. Instead, his dark profile showed that he was looking past her, at something beyond her shoulder. She turned around—and gasped.

Rolling toward them across the gray landscape was a tidal wave of color as wide as the horizon and as tall as the sky. Rainbow hues battled through its surface, a chaos of light and motion that was at once the most beautiful and most terrifying sight she’d ever seen. “God,” she said in alarm, swinging her gaze back to her companion. “My God!”

“Don’t worry. It can’t hurt you.” Then Sinclair did the strangest thing. He reached out and took her hand, holding it lightly in his own. Jillian knew he wasn’t really touching her, that his hand was an illusion transmitted via the simulator to her mind’s tactile nerve centers. But in an unfamiliar world with a huge, luminous wave bearing down on them at top
speed, she found the human gesture incredibly comforting. She clung to his hand, drawing on his strength and reassurance. Then, raising her own head high, she turned back to face the wave.

Sinclair’s prediction proved right, naturally—she barely felt the wave. It passed over her with only a slight tingle, like the brush of a wayward breeze. But it left behind an entire world.

Suddenly she stood in a field of waist-high wild-flowers vaulted by a heaven so radiantly blue, it seemed to shine with its own light. A stand of tall laurel trees stood off to her left, proud as sentinels, dressed in all the brilliant pageantry of full summer. Beyond them lay a tangled forest, a patchwork of greens so varied, they seemed to be an entire rainbow in themselves. And beyond the forest lay a tranquil valley dotted with neat houses and even hedgerows, simmering in the easy laziness of the late afternoon.

Jill took a deep breath of the sweet-smelling air, awed to silence by the incredible change in her surroundings. The simulator environment was real beyond belief! She raised her free hand to shield her eyes from the bright sun, and discovered yet another surprise. Her surroundings were not the only things that had been transformed by the wave.

Her black bodysuit was gone, replaced by a gown of ivory velvet, its puffed sleeves cut with panels of silver and gold. Seed pearls decorated an edge of her bodice, continuing in an exquisite vine-and-leaf pattern from her high-waisted torso all the way down
her long, flowing skirt. She’d never imagined that a dress could be so beautiful, and gasped again, this time in appreciation and wonder.

Her wonder was cut short by a sharp oath spoken beside her. “Bloody hell, Parker’s put us in a Dungeons and Dragons game!”

Good Lord, he has
, she thought, smiling at Felix’s irrepressible sense of humor. He’d bugged her for weeks to play D & D with him, but Jill had told him truthfully that she didn’t have the time. Apparently her friend had made her a player in spite of herself. She turned to the doctor to explain Felix’s little joke, but the words froze in her throat.

She was staring up at the gleaming helmet of a knight in shining armor.

There had been a time in Sinclair’s life when he would have given anything to wear a suit of armor like this—even a virtual one. As a boy he’d read every book about King Arthur he could lay his hands on, even braving the dusty stacks of his grandfather’s ancient library to find them. More than once he’d received a caning for taking what he later learned was a shockingly valuable volume, but that didn’t stop him. Reading was his greatest pleasure during the years he’d spent living in his grandfather’s elegant mausoleum of a manor house. Sometimes his only pleasure, considering he was the sole child on the immense, isolated estate.

He’d devoured the stories of the Round Table, imagining himself riding alongside those knights, vanquishing villains, slaying dragons, and rescuing damsels in distress. They were wonderful dreams, but he’d paid dearly for every one of them. He’d
become a knight of sorts, but the title had proved to be as empty as the suits of armor that lined the manor’s cavernous hallways. And rescuing a damsel in distress had nearly cost him his soul.

“Bloody hell,” he cursed again, but this time he wasn’t thinking about Parker’s environment. He shoved up his visor—his
virtual
visor, since it, like everything else, was merely a projection from his simulator—and swung his gaze to the woman beside him. “Ms. Polanski, we have only an hour, so we’d better get star—”

The rest of his sentence dwindled into oblivion. Ms. Polanski had disappeared. In her place stood a fairy princess garbed in white and crowned with a circlet of gold. Strands of light brown hair blew across her cheeks, making his fingers itch to follow their course. Her low-cut neckline revealed a tantalizing view of the swell of her breasts, filling his inquiring mind with theories that had nothing to do with the simulator or his mission. Dragging his gaze upward, he ran into more trouble when he focused on the exquisite delicacy of her petal-soft skin, and the unconscious sensuality of her ripe, flower-shaped mouth. A mouth like that could love a man a hundred ways, and make him beg for a hundred more. Childhood dreams crashed headlong into erotic adult fantasies.

“Bloody hell,” he breathed for the third time in less than a minute. “Ms. Polanski, you look—”

“Fifty minutes left,” a disembodied voice boomed.

Parker’s announcement shattered the moment. Sinclair stiffened, all too aware that he’d narrowly missed making a complete ass of himself. He turned away, inwardly cursing his foolishness, and ruthlessly reminding himself that this world, and everything in it, was an illusion. The sun-drenched pastoral landscape that surrounded him wasn’t real. The super-natural beauty of the woman who stood at his side wasn’t real. In a sense,
he
wasn’t real.

But the stab of regret he felt was, unfortunately, very real. “We should get moving.”

“Yes … yes, we should.”

She sounded breathless, uncertain. He frowned, wondering what she had to be uncertain about. Then he remembered that it was her first time in the simulator, and probably as strange to her as Alice’s first trip through the looking-glass. He glanced back at her, willing himself to see beyond the fairy princess to the nervous cybertech beneath. “Don’t worry, Ms. Polanski. Chances are we won’t see a large white rabbit with a stopwatch hopping by.”

“I was more concerned about the Wicked Witch,” she replied, giving him a shaky smile.

Her clothes may have been an illusion, but her smile was not. He’d seen it before—analyzed it, catalogued it, and determined what use it could be to him in his work. But he’d never realized the effect it could have on a man. Deep inside him a buried longing stirred to life. He hadn’t felt this way about a woman in years, not since Samantha—

Samantha!

He spun around, ruthlessly severing the fragile bond that had begun to form between them. “Come,” he commanded harshly. “We’re wasting time.” He stalked through the field, his heavy steps indifferently crushing the delicate flowers into oblivion. Virtual flowers, he reminded himself. This place was an illusion, a projection designed to make internal navigation easier. Life and death were properties of the real world, along with duty and honor and all the other truths he’d been taught to believe in.

Truths, he’d discovered, that were as false as the bright and counterfeit flowers beneath his boots.