“Who cares?”
“Tell you what,” she said, wriggling against him, rapidly unbuttoning his shirt and squirming out of her own, “I’ll stop with the one liners if you shut up and fuck me. I assume you brought condoms this time?”
“Why yes, I did! They’re still in my pocket from when I went downstairs to get your clothes.”
She felt him, her fingers deftly slipping into his pockets. “Jeez. Are those six boxes of condoms in your pockets, or are you just happy to see me?”
He was laughing and struggling out of his clothes while she kissed and bit and licked everywhere she could reach, and they wrestled together while shushing each other. In moments, they were nude and sliding against each other as if they’d been intimate partners for years. In their haste, they tore through the first two condoms they tried to open.
“Calm down,” Eric said, still laughing, “you’re going to wreck them all.”
“You calm down. Stupid foil thingies—ah!” She pulled one, intact, from its packet and gently rolled it on, savoring his throbbing length. “Hey, neat Ribbed for my pleasure.”
“I live to serve.”
One ear cocked for the vacuum cleaner, she crossed her ankles behind his back as he surged forward. Just touching him was a pure pleasure; he was lithe and muscular, with the broad shoulders of a swimmer. Her hands slipped and slid all over him, groping; she could never, ever touch him enough.
She knew she was ready and he knew it as well. There was no need for anything more, not even words. She arched to meet him as he parted her with his fingers and pushed inside. It was like being entered by an ideal, a dream—a dream hung like a stallion, frankly; she could practically feel him in her throat. He slid and pushed and thrust and she tightened her grip, arched her back to meet him, and for a long while there was only their harsh breathing, the sound their stomachs made, clapping together, and the vrrrrrr-mmmmmmm of the vacuum six doors down.
His hands were in fists on either side of her head and he was panting, groaning, into her neck. They fit perfectly. It was really quite miraculous.
She slid her hands over his shoulders, down his back, over his taut buttocks, marveling at the feel of him, the smell of him, the way he was nearly helpless in her embrace, so intent on having her he’d blocked out everything else. She realized he was whispering her name over and over as he pushed inside her again and again.
She could feel the muscles flexing in his butt as he worked over her, could see the sheen of sweat on his forehead, and over all that, more wonderful than all that, he was still whispering her name.
Renee gently bit his earlobe, and sighed when he shuddered above her. He pulled back, then licked her lower lip and slipped his tongue into her mouth. At the same time, he put his hands on her thighs, spread her apart, and then stroked her clit with his thumb while just below, his cock reared and plunged and took.
The sudden sensation swamped her and she would have screamed, but his mouth was bruising now, possessing, taking, and the only sound that escaped was a muffled moan. And still he stroked and teased until she was shaking, until she was coming, until she saw dark stars exploding before her eyes, until he stiffened above her and stopped breathing for a long moment.
“Oh.”
“That’s it? Oh?”
“How about, oh, God, put it in me again?”
He chuckled in her ear. They were lying on their sides on the carpet, curled up like spoons in a drawer. “I think I’m going to need a few minutes.”
“That’s all right, I think I’m going to need a day and a half.” She sighed and nuzzled the hairs on his forearm. “What a week.”
“Say you love me,” he ordered.
“Babe, I don’t even know you.”
“Well, I don’t know you, but I’m so in love with you I’m sick with it.”
“That’s flattering. Can we compromise and say I love your dick?”
“You have no soul,” he grumbled.
“Eric, can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Why’d you leave the NSA?”
He was silent for a long moment, and then replied, “To be honest, I didn’t want to be a code-breaker or a codemaker anymore. This is going to sound dumb—”
“I’m not surprised,” she interrupted, hoping for a smile.
“Ho-ho. Well, a couple months ago, my neighbor’s husband turned up missing. And she was going out of her mind trying to find him. She was upset, the kids were upset, the guy’s boss was calling every other day—a real mess. The cops weren’t much help—DC is a big place, with a lot of problems.
“So I felt sorry for her and did some digging, and it turned out her husband had been mugged, had his wallet stolen, then been in a car accident. He was OK, but he had his brains rattled pretty good and the hospital didn’t have any ID. Anyway, long story short, I found him. And—well, it was just really satisfying. Reuniting them. I know that working for the NSA means being part of a bigger purpose, but I don’t see anything wrong with being part of a smaller purpose. Not if you can help out a nice lady once in a while. That’s all.”
“Huh. Well, good for you. A lot of people are stuck in jobs they hate. And they never, never change, because inertia is easier.”
“Yes, not everyone is lucky enough to be framed for theft and then fired,” he said cheerfully. “To be continued, hopefully in a proper bed later this evening. I don’t hear the vacuum anymore.”
She started guiltily. Jesus! For a moment—well, for about fifteen minutes—she’d forgotten why they were there. She really was getting Too Stupid to Live.
They dressed in the darkened room and climbed out from under the table, but before she could get to her feet he grabbed her and kissed her on the mouth, a hearty smack. “Say it,” he ordered.
“I love your dick,” she replied obediently.
He sighed and released her. “We’ll talk later.”
“About your dick?” she asked brightly.
“You’re killing me, Renee…” He stepped to the door, but before he could open it, someone in the hall did it for him.
Chapter Ten
Renee would have shouted in surprise, but for the hand Eric clapped over her mouth. So what escaped was, “Gmmph!”
An extraordinarily tall woman was framed in the doorway. She would have been striking in stocking feet, but her pumps and the hair piled on top of her head made her easily over six feet. She was wearing a white lab coat that fell past her knees, cat’s-eyeglasses, and a gold pin of some sort on her left lapel.
Gold pin… wait just a minute.
“Dr. Foster!” Except Eric was still muffling her with his hand, so what came out was, “Dgguh Uzzuh!”
“Renee,” the other woman said, and nodded.
Eric slowly let go of her mouth, then grabbed her hand and tucked it into the crook of his elbow. “Uh… we were just…”
Dr. Foster’s assessing gaze missed nothing.
Renee fought the urge to shuffle her feet and duck her head. She could just imagine what Dr. Foster was seeing: They were mussed, disheveled, and reeked of sex. And to be caught by IQ, of all people! The original Ice Queen!
“Really, Renee.”
“Uh…” She fell back on her trademark statement. “It’s been a crazy week?”
“What in the world are you doing back here? Tell me you didn’t come here to return PaceIC.”
“Uh…”
“And after all the trouble I went to,” Dr. Foster scolded, folding her arms across her chest and looking not unlike a stern schoolteacher. “Disabling the security sensors and slipping it into your bag and telling Dr. Jekell you used your security access to steal it. Then you bring it back?”
“Oh, here we go,” Eric muttered. He tightened his grip on her hand. Good thing, too, because she was suddenly in a punching mood.
“I don’t care if you are bigger than me,” Renee snapped. “I’m kicking your ass all over this conference room! D’you have any idea what you?
??ve put me through?”
“Irrelevant.”
“What?”
“Oh, sorry,” Dr. Foster said coolly. “Irrelevant means unimportant, or immaterial. It’s—”
“I know what it means, IQ!”
“Maybe you could help us out,” Eric panted, restraining Renee with difficulty. “We’re trying to figure out why your boss has gone completely crazy over PaceIC.”
“Ah, so that’s why you’re here. And I just thought you were looking for a convenient place to couple.”
“Our coupling is none of your damned business!”
Dr. Foster stepped back to avoid Renee’s kick. “It is when you do it in the corporate boardroom. I swear, I will never understand why people who are reasonably intelligent… never mind.”
“Did you hear that?” Renee said to Eric. “She called us reasonably intelligent!” She pretended to wipe away a tear. “So touching… but I promised myself I wouldn’t cry…”
“Enough facetiousness.”
“I have no idea what you just said,” Renee admitted.
“If you’re thinking you’ll break into Dr. Jekell’s office and crack open his laptop, you’ll never get into the system, not with all the upgrades he’s forced on us in the last seventy-two hours. Consider yourself lucky I happened to see you on the monitors before anyone else.”
“How could you—”
“I have a feed into my computer station in the lab,” she explained. “It runs five minutes ahead of the feed Security gets.”
“You bitch!”
Foster didn’t blink. “If you’re going to work for a sociopath, it pays to have information before he does. Count your blessings I came ahead to warn you. Now please leave, and be sure to take PaceIC with you.”
Renee restrained herself from saying, “Nyah, nyah, we didn’t bring it, so there!” Instead, she glowered at IQ and worked on prying Eric’s fingers from her elbow.
“Why?” Eric asked.
Foster had already turned to leave, but now she paused and turned back. “He doesn’t want to sell it,” she explained, pushing her glasses farther up onto her nose. “Didn’t you know? The biggest pacemaker manufacturer in the world is in China, and they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Bury PaceIC, let them make the clunky mechanical pacemakers for another ten years, and they’d make it worth his while.”
Renee practically heard the click as everything—finally—fell into place. “So for a pretty penny he keeps the lid on PaceIC?”
“Six billion.”
“Damn!” she and Eric said in unison.
“Per year.”
“That sneaky son of a bitch.” Eric wasn’t entirely able to keep the grudging admiration out of his tone. It wasn’t lost on Dr. Foster, who fixed them both with a freezing glare.
“I didn’t work eighty-hour weeks for six years so that conscienceless bastard could hide my invention from the public. So people who can be cured with a single injection must suffer through an invasive operation that doesn’t always work. So the Jackal can make money.”
Yikes. Renee refrained herself from taking a step back. Foster—the Ice Queen herself!—looked like she was going to spontaneously combust. Her glasses had slid down her nose again, and she batted them back up in a quick, savage gesture. Her hand, Renee saw, was trembling.
She had nice hands, for a lab geek. Long, with the thin tapering fingers of a pianist or surgeon. And why would those shaking fingers make her think of the personnel files in Security? Sure, she read everyone’s files when they were hired, and read them again when she had Random run background checks on them, but why was she thinking about that now?
She was the only fourteen-year-old in my college sophomore advanced chem class.
Sure, Foster was a genius, everyone knew that, but why couldn’t she get the mental image of Dr. Foster’s personnel folder out of her head?
I also knew about her folks.
“Dr. Foster. Didn’t I read somewhere that your folks died of heart failure? Both of them? Like, within a year of each other?”
Instantly, Foster was calm again, almost glacial. The transformation was startling to watch, and Renee felt Eric take her hand again. This time, she let him. She even squeezed back.
Dr. Foster smoothed her hair back with her palms, then stuffed her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. “It doesn’t matter now,” she said, perfectly calm. “If you don’t mind some advice, Renee—”
“Advice from the woman who turned my life into a train wreck? Sure, bring it on.”
“—take PaceIC to my friend Jennifer.”
“Turn it over to the FDA?”
“No, to Jennifer, who happens to work for the FDA. She’s actually quite a good scientist. She has the skills to reverse engineer it and see that an appropriate company—ah—finds it and puts out their own version within the year. Anodyne can still make plenty of money off it, they just won’t be able to hide it for a decade.”
“Well… that seems like a good plan, but… why me? Why didn’t you take care of this yourself? Why wreck my life?”
“It doesn’t seem terribly wrecked,” she said, looking Eric up and down.
Renee ground her teeth. “Well, why not go work somewhere else? Why destroy my reputation just to stay here?”
“Better yours than mine,” she sniffed. “And I still need Jekell’s trust I have more work to do here.”
She neatly sidestepped Renee’s crescent kick. “You don’t have time for this nonsense,” she added emotionlessly. “They’re here.”
Renee stopped in mid windup, just as Eric grabbed her elbow. “Argh, you’re cutting off the circulation. Ease up.”
“Did you say they’re here?”
Renee looked up at him. “After you had that fight with Random, when he knew you weren’t going to help him, you went back to your hotel room.”
“Sure, I had to. Because—”
“Giving Random plenty of time to put a tracer on your rental car. He’d know what it looked like; he probably met you at the airport.”
“Well, yeah, but come on. You’re saying he just drives around with a box full of tracers, so anytime he wants he can just—oh, shit, of course he does, he works for the Prince of Darkness. Shit. Shit!”
“Enthralling. But ultimately boring. Good luck,” Dr. Foster said, and walked out.
“Christ,” Eric said, shutting the door behind her and hurrying to the window. “That’s the most terrifying person I’ve ever met.”
“And she’s on our side. I think. Remind me to track her down and wring her neck later. Stupid, stupid! I should have realized Random would have a way to keep track of you. God, where is my head this week?”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Eric said, peeking through the blinds. “You’ve been distracted. Falling in love will do that.”
She snorted. “Sure. That’s exactly what the problem is. Me, I’m starting to think I deserved to get bounced from Security.”
“Oh, quit it. I had ten years with the NSA and it never occurred to me to put a bugkiller in the rental car, so don’t feel bad.”
“Actually, that does cheer me up a bit. But now what, ace? I mean, no way am I giving PaceIC back now. Which is probably something I shouldn’t share with Peter or Dr. Jekell.”
“No shit. What’s the quickest way out of here?”
“The front door.”
“Besides that.”
“Well… we are only two stories up…”
“Forget it. I’m done with stunts for the day.”
“There’s a private elevator in Dr. Jekell’s office; it dumps us off in the back and we could slip out that way.”
“Fine.” He grabbed her hand and ran out the door and down the hallway. She noticed for the first time that he had buttoned his shirt wrong, and put a hand over her mouth to hide the grin.
“What a day,” he groaned.
“Welcome to my world.”
“What kind of locks do you have on these offices?”
r /> She jogged beside him. Hand in hand! Aww, it was so romantic. If she wasn’t a nervous wreck about Random practically breathing down her neck, she might have taken a minute to appreciate the situation.
But now that she knew what was at stake—the cardiac health of zillions of people!—she felt like she would vomit very soon. Possibly within the next two minutes. It had been confusing, but less frightening, when she just thought Jekell took her for an ordinary thief.
“Renee?”
“Sorry—um, just standard locks. It’s a lot harder to get into the files and the computers than just the doors.”
“Good. Here.” He gently pushed her against the wall, out of the way, then raised a leg and kicked, hard, just below the doorknob. “Ow!”
“Probably should have put your shoes back on after we had sex,” she suggested helpfully.
“I think I just broke my foot.”
Don’t laugh. It probably hurts like hell. Don’t you dare laugh.
She cleared her throat. “Here, stand back, I’ll take care of it.”
“Like Hell. I’m a modern man, but even I’ve got my pride.” He stared down at his bare feet. “All right, we’ll do it together, on three. One… two… three!”
The door flew inward with a satisfying crash and they jumped inside. Renee turned just in time to see Peter Random running straight toward them, and the short, bulky form of Dr. Jekell was right behind him.
She slammed the door shut, but of course it wouldn’t lock.
“The elevator is behind that door, there; it looks like a coat closet. Foster was right, here they come!”
Eric wrenched open the door, already reaching for the buttons, and saw the elevator doors.
Along with the out of order sign taped across them.
Chapter Eleven
“Shit!”
“You say that a lot,” she commented.
“Actually, I don’t. Just today, I guess. What kind of a top executive doesn’t get his personal elevator fixed?”
“The cheap kind.”
He spun away from the doors and got behind Jekell’s desk. He set his weight and began to push it across the carpet. Renee was impressed; the thing was mahogany and weighed as much as a Volkswagen. She moved out of the way just as he slid it against the door, which promptly rattled in its frame.