Under Cover

  “I bet you don’t think I can walk on my hands all the way across the room.”

  Humor hint. “I’m sure you can.”

  “No, really. How much you want to bet?”

  “Two pounds British Sterling. Now—”

  He rose smoothly from behind his table—no desks in here, interestingly enough—and then bent over.

  “No, really, Dr. Scrye, that’s not—”

  “Jimmy, or Jim. Or Scrye,” he said, his voice hollow. His entire head was now beneath the table. “Heck, I answer to almost anything.”

  “A great relief, Dr. Scrye. Now, about these—”

  “Jimmy.” He walked around the edge of the table—on his hands, she observed—and his shirt pulled up, displaying that amazing chest and stomach, damn it. He hand-walked all the way over to her and stared at her legs. “Nuts. I was hoping for a skirt.”

  Was he really? “Ah, beneath the genius façade lurks a pig. How nice.”

  “Hey, after the Jackal, I’m a dream boss. Admit it.”

  “You’re a dream boss,” she parroted.

  He chuckled and flipped to his feet so quickly, if she had blinked she would have missed it. His freckled face was slightly flushed from the blood rush. “So, what’s up, Thea?”

  “Dr. Foster.”

  “Aw, c’mon.”

  “Dr. Foster,” she repeated firmly.

  “Are you afraid if you’re too familiar, you might fall in love with me?”

  “No!”

  “Ouch!” He rubbed his ear. “Jeez, you don’t have to yell.”

  “Sorry,” she said. She could feel her face getting warm. “Can we please go over this data?”

  “Sure, Doc Thea.” He bounded across the office and sat on the couch, which was bizarrely patterned with red ducklings against a background that matched the tile. “Have a seat.” He patted the cushion beside him expectantly.

  She glanced around the office, but there was nowhere else to sit except on one of the giant beanbags, and she wasn’t sure her dignity would survive it.

  She sat gingerly beside him. “Thank you. My team has pulled all the back data on Faskin, and of course there’s really only one problem, but so far it’s been rather insurmountable.”

  “You can’t get the artificial skin to take.”

  “Correct.”

  He was staring at her. His intense, green-eyed gaze was almost hypnotic. His eyes were the color of antique glass, the color of a perfect emerald, the—

  “Can you do it? That’s all I need to know.”

  “What?”

  He snapped his fingers in front of her face, and she flinched. “Helloooooo? Can you perfect Faskin?”

  “Yes,” she said without hesitation. “Eventually.”

  “Eventually two months? Eventually sixty years? Help me out, here.”

  She chewed on her lower lip. “Possibly by the end of the year. I have a few ideas…”

  “Good. Whenever you think stuff up, the world changes.” He touched her hand so quickly, she wondered if she’d imagined the sensation of his skin on hers. “It’s one of the coolest things about you. Sooner would be better, of course.”

  Her hand tingled—annoyingly—where he’d touched her. “What?”

  “Thea, d’you think you can pay attention for two seconds? I said, ooner-say would be etter-bay. I want Faskin to be trial-ready by the end of the quarter.”

  “I’m well aware of your insanely tight timeline. What I’d like to know is why?”

  “Because.” He bounded up from the couch, scooped up a stack of Legos, and tossed them to her without looking. She caught it neatly in one hand and examined it. Eight inches of red, white, and blue Legos in concentric stripes. Cute. “Because because because because beeeee-cause! Because of the wonderful things I does!”

  “Stop that.”

  “I’ve been told I have a lovely singing voice,” he said, sounding hurt.

  She refused to be distracted. “Why really?”

  “Money, of course,” he muttered, prowling around his table like a flame-haired panther. “Moneymoney money.”

  She fiddled with the Legos. “But you’re already rich.”

  “Hey, Thea, get lost, willya? Go invent something amazing or, better yet, fix Faskin.”

  She slowly stood, and frowned at him. “If you don’t want to tell me, that’s fine, but you needn’t act like such a brat.”

  “You’re a brat,” he snapped.

  She tossed the Legos at him. He snatched the small sculpture out of the air and stared at it. “You have made a DNA helix,” he observed, “out of my American Patriot Lego set.”

  “Simpleton,” she muttered, and turned to leave.

  “I know you are!” he yelled after her. “But what ami?”

  Chapter Five

  “Heads up,” Marshall muttered. He hurried across the room, his Jelly flats clacking against the tile. “Here come the Christians. Or the lions—I forget.”

  Thea stifled a sigh. In an attempt to garner good publicity after the havoc the Jackal wreaked on Anodyne, PR had been arranging tours throughout the facility all week. As head of BioSecurity, she was obliged to narrate.

  The head of PR, Giselle McKenzie, stuck her head through the doorway and herded Marshall away with a frantic waving motion.

  “What?” Marshall said innocently. “Is my slip showing?”

  “You certainly do not have to leave,” Thea said coolly, withering McKenzie with a glare.

  “No worries, Chief. I need to touch up my makeup, anyway.” He disappeared in the area of the restrooms. Thea had no idea which one he used, even after years of working with him. She certainly wasn’t going to ask.

  The tour—a baker’s dozen of suburbanites—followed McKenzie into the lab. As always, laymen looked disappointed at just how ordinary a working lab appeared—sort of like an industrial kitchen, except with more expensive appliances.

  “This is Dr. Foster,” McKenzie was babbling, “our head of BioSecurity. Dr. Foster, maybe you could tell us what your team is working on right now?”

  “Maybe,” she agreed.

  Silence.

  “Um… now?” McKenzie asked, and Thea was amused to see her Adam’s apple bob as she gulped.

  “Certainly. Right now we’re working on perfecting artificial skin.”

  “Like for cyborgs?” the mop-haired son of one of the suburbanites asked eagerly.

  His bangs were so long she couldn’t see his eyes, but she admired his stark T-shirt, black with white lettering: FUCK OFF, PUNK I need one of those, she mused.

  “Like in the Terminator and stuff?”

  “Like for burn victims,” she corrected patiently.

  “Don’t they have skin grafts for that?” another member of the group asked.

  “Yes, but it’s a poor technique. It takes several surgeries, and it’s excruciating for the patient. Also, the risk of lethal infection is very high. With artificial skin, we could eliminate that. However, the human body is a formidable matador when it comes to fighting off invaders—in this case, artificial skin.”

  “A formidable what?”

  She ignored the interruption. “Burns are catastrophic. And if you have burns over more than fifty percent of your body, there isn’t enough healthy skin left to prevent infection or to cover the wounds. Without skin, death is inevitable.

  “As recently as five years ago,” she continued, “doctors would calculate a burn victim’s survival rate by adding his age to the percentage of his burn. It was a heartless equation, but one that nearly always worked. Burn victims essentially die of starvation, because their strength runs out—fighting infections and such—and they waste away.”

  “This is fun,” mop-head commented. “I’m so glad you brought me, Mom.”

  The woman beside him slapped his arm, but Thea smiled. “Hope endures,” she said. “If we put the puzzle together—if we unlock the key to Faskin—it will make a gigantic difference. No more cadaver skin grafts—”

>   “You cut skin of dead bodies and put them on burn victims?” another member of the crowd—this one a young woman in her early twenties—gasped. “That is just so ewwvvww!”

  “We don’t anymore,” Thea sniffed. “It’s not practical. Again, that’s where Faskin comes in. After all, if a starfish can grow a new arm, and a lizard a new tail, the human body should be able to be encouraged to grow new skin.”

  “So Faskin isn’t actually skin?”

  “It’s a chemical that encourages growth of the epidermis and dermis. What grows is virtually identical to your natural skin, and your body can’t tell the difference. No rejection. No infection.”

  “So… it’s like cloning your own skin?”

  “It’s like cloning the way a Big Mac is like a sirloin steak,” Thea said kindly. “Very little resemblance, actually. It’s technical.”

  “How long have you been working on Foreskin?”

  “Faskin. Seven years.”

  “Why so long?”

  “The previous management had little interest in the project,” she replied. “There’s very little market demand for this sort of thing. The profit potential is small. Most biotech firms are looking for the next Viagra.”

  A few giggles. Thea remained a stone. She thought it was utterly ridiculous that most insurance companies covered Viagra while denying coverage of birth control pills. And what a waste of time! Erections for octogenarians? With leukemia in the world? If that had been her lab …

  She caught sight of Jimmy Scrye standing at the back of the room. His arms were crossed over his chest and he was dressed in knee-length denim shorts—in winter!—loafers without socks, and a dark green polo shirt. In place of a preppie alligator over his left breast, drop dead was carefully stitched in red thread. No one in the tour group glanced in his direction.

  They probably think he’s the janitor, she thought, amused.

  “To wrap things up, Faskin will change everything,” she said, trying not to glance at her watch.

  She enjoyed educating people, but she’d declined a professorship because it would take her out of the lab too long. “And not just by lowering the death rate, although that’s a very important consideration. It will also dramatically reduce scarring, reconstructive surgeries, and painful grafting. Thanks to Faskin, not only can victims of severe burns be saved, but their skin will look virtually normal.”

  She stopped talking and turned back to her table. The small tour group—at first startled at the abrupt end of the speech—clapped softly. She turned back around, blushing, and said nothing.

  A head taller than everyone in the crowd, Jimmy smiled at her. She smiled back before she could stop herself.

  Chapter Six

  “Thea, darling, I’ve wanted you from the moment I memorized your personnel file.”

  “Really?”

  He was crawling across the table, moving like a big, red-headed panther, knocking over burners and clipboards and charts as he came. The clatter was enormous. “Of course! Why do you think I bought this goofy little biotech firm? To get closer to you!”

  “I’m relieved to hear you say that,” she said, as he pounced on her and bore her to the cold tile. Interestingly, although she smacked the back of her head when they landed, it didn’t hurt. “I’m afraid I’m getting a crush on you, and I’m too old for that sort of thing.”

  “This isn’t a crush, baby,” he murmured, his breath tickling her ear. “It’s true lurrrrrrrrrv.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, shivering as he chewed on her earlobe. “We barely know each other.”

  “Never doubt it, Thea. We were made for each other. We complement each other perfectly. Also, your numbers on this are completely fucked up.”

  “What?”

  Jimmy snapped his fingers in front of her face again. How she hated that! “My God, you must be the first Nobel-qualifying scientist I’ve ever known who has ADD. I said, your numbers are completely fucked.”

  Not again! Damn it, damn it, damn it!

  “I know that,” she snapped, yanking the clipboard away from his hands. She noticed her own were shaking. She hardly ever daydreamed, and now she couldn’t seem to stop. And about Jimmy Scrye, of all people! He was loud, he was annoying, he was brash, he was… really well built. “It’s just preliminary data.” She took a deep breath and forced calm. “I think the results themselves are actually quite promising.”

  “I agree—I guess. I mean, chemical biology is not my strong point. Also, you’ve got the handwriting of a serial killer.”

  “I do not!” She checked it to be sure. Was that “random fluctuation” or “ransom fatuation”?

  He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up in all directions. She ignored the urge to smooth it back down. “Anyway, this stuff looks good, but what good is skin that disappears after a day or two?”

  “It’s a step in the right direction,” she said stiffly.

  “Sure it is. ‘Hi, I’m John, it’s nice to meet you… whoops! There goes my skin.’ “

  Her team, which had been carefully pretending not to listen to their conversation, muffled giggles. She glared at their backs.

  “We’ll do better,” she said grimly, fighting the urge to hit him over the head with her clipboard.

  “Hey, don’t get me wrong, you guys are doing great.” He braced his palms on the table and then jumped up. He crossed one ankle over his knee and she noticed again he wasn’t wearing socks. “I’m just anxious to get this done.”

  “Why?”

  “Mind your own beeswax. I wish I could help, but this isn’t my field.”

  “You can help by staying out of the lab,” she said.

  He winked at her. “Ah-ah-ah! I have to keep an eye on my property.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she nearly yelled.

  He leaned back. “Jeez, stop with the yelling! What d’you think it’s supposed to mean?”

  “Can we get back to work, Dr.—”

  “Ah-ah-ah!”

  “Jimmy,” she said, her shoulders slumping in surrender.

  “That’d be swell. Hey, have supper with me tonight. We’ll talk about what else you need for Faskin.”

  “I can’t,” she replied, ignoring the way her heart rate jumped. “Tonight is the team potluck. Marshall is hosting.”

  “No, I’m not!” Marshall shouted from the other side of the room. “I have to cancel. I have—uh—”

  “Mono,” Jessica supplied helpfully.

  “Right! I’m uber-contagious.”

  “We can’t go, either,” Jack added. “We’ve all got mono.”

  “Too much kissing during coffee breaks,” Marshall said seriously.

  “Super!” Jimmy said. He turned to her. “Pick you up at six?”

  “All right,” she sighed. Jimmy smacked her on the shoulder in a comradely way and then jumped off the table and bounded toward the elevators. She turned slowly to look at her team, who was once more deeply engrossed in their work. “Traitors.”

  “Thea’s got a date with the boss! “Jessica squealed.

  “Hush up.”

  Chapter Seven

  Jimmy parked outside Thea’s trim condo and took a deep, steadying breath. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, then forced his fingers to loosen.

  “OK,” he muttered. “Be calm. It’s just dinner. Just… mellow out, for the love of God.”

  Easy to say. Quite a bit harder to do. It was bad enough that his top scientist was walking around in a world-class body. Bad enough that he needed her desperately on a ridiculous number of levels: physically, emotionally, and practically. Worse, much worse, that she clearly didn’t care for him.

  There was something about her… As soon as she walked in the room, his mouth just ran away from him. He babbled in a constant, inane attempt to get a reaction. Any reaction. It had always been that way. Nobody had believed his IQ test results at first. He was such a goofball, the de rigeur class clown, with such poor grades the
school had made him take the test three times.

  Putting his strong—insane!—attraction to Thea aside, he had trouble concentrating when he allowed himself to imagine she’d perfect Faskin. God, what if she actually pulled it off? Everything could change. Everything.

  The irony: He had been able to do just about anything he put his mind to, but his brain wasn’t wired for biochemistry. That is, he could do it, but not nearly so quickly or so well as Thea Foster. She was in the top ten of her field. He wouldn’t have made the top three hundred. Thus, the acquisition of Doc Thea and, incidentally, Anodyne.

  “Stop sitting in here thinking,” he said aloud, “and get your ass up to her door.”

  Good advice! He opened his car door and tried to jump out, remembering too late that he hadn’t unbuckled his seat belt. He’d moved so quickly, the damned thing had a stranglehold around his neck.

  He wrestled with it for a few seconds and finally freed himself. Within seconds, he was ringing Thea’s doorbell.

  She opened the door at once. “Good evening.”

  She was wearing a black sheath, knee length and sleeveless, that showed off her lush figure to perfection. No stockings, and her toenails were painted dark red. Her hair was loose and flowing past her shoulders in a gorgeous dark river. She was wearing lipstick that matched her toenails, which made her complexion look even more luminous.

  “Buh,” he managed.

  She seized him by the lapels and yanked him inside, then slammed the door.

  “Wha?” he asked.

  “Never mind going out,” she told him. She was blinking so rapidly, he wondered if she had a nervous tic. Two dots of high color had appeared on each cheekbone. “I have ordered a pizza. I’m going to get you out of my system so I can focus at work.”

  “Huh?”

  She kissed him so hard, his toes curled. He brought his hands up to press her closer, touching her smooth skin and marveling at the delicacy of her arms. She was so tall, such dainty limbs were a surprise.

  She broke the kiss, leaving him gasping like a trout out of water, and pulled him by the tie. He followed her, shrugging out of his jacket. “So,” he said cheerfully. “What kind of pizza?”