Edge of Danger (14 page)
Authors: Cherry Adair
Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #General, #Man-Woman Relationships, #Suspense, #Occult Fiction, #Telepathy, #Women Scientists
Eden didn’t bother correcting him.
“What’s its fuel source?”
“An extremely inexpensive thirty-two-processor distributed control system. It runs asynchronously with no central locus of control.” No. Worse.
Much
worse. She’d given Rex an easily renewable hydrogen fuel cell. All he needed to run for three hours was a cup of water.
“Does the arm need a parallel processor?”
“No. All computing is done onboard.” She’d thought herself so clever to make Rex almost autonomous. Now she was scared stupid. Oh, God. She should have stopped last year when her gut and conscience told her to. She’d never considered herself vain before. But damn it, she’d wanted to prove to herself that all those accolades, all those prestigious science awards, all the fawning and flattery, were as valid today as they’d been ten years ago.
Which proved that she wasn’t nearly as evolved as she thought she was.
No matter what veneer she’d assumed over the years, no matter what she wore, or how many acclaimed papers she wrote, no matter how brilliant her inventions—that fat, geeky, insecure kid still lived inside her. And even though she’d known she could never tell anyone the incredible advances she’d made,
she
would always know how far ahead of the pack she really was. That vanity was about to bite her in the ass.
“How big is it?”
Eden held her hand up over the floor. “He’s the size of a five-year-old.” An almost perfect humanoid robot who could catch a ball and knew his left from his right. Who could consume a glass of water and keep on going like the Energizer Bunny.
Her hand shook as she picked up the delicate bone china teacup. The tea was cold, but she sipped it anyway. English Breakfast. She looked from one man to the other. “The prototype was stolen. There are no backup files. I don’t see how I can help you.”
“How long will it take for you to rebuild the robot?”
Never.
“I can’t.”
“You built it before. You can build it again.”
She shook her head. “No, I can’t. All m—
our
notes were stolen.”
“But you don’t
require
notes, do you, Dr. Cahill?” Gabriel Edge said, his voice cold and hard as he watched her, his hands gripping the high back of the chair. His direct gaze was unnerving. “You have it all up here.” He tapped his hard head with his finger, and Eden felt a chill rush through her body like ice water. He couldn’t know that. He couldn’t possibly know that.
“
You
have a photographic memory, Doctor. And
I
have a fully outfitted computer lab right here. You can reconstruct what was taken.”
Eden laughed. And she made sure it sounded sincere. “You must be kidding! Photographic memory is fiction. I have a
good
memory. A very good memory. But reconstruct, from scratch,
thousands
of man-hours’ worth of intricate and complicated equations and schematics? From memory? Not possible.”
Very
possible, unfortunately, and exactly what she was best at. She was the one in one billion people who actually
could
retain everything she read. She refrained from fiddling with the delicate cup in her hands, and kept her gaze steady. If she hadn’t already emptied her stomach she’d be throwing up again.
Destroy everything. Trust no one. Promise me.
Eden felt like a very small rat in a very complicated maze.
Gabriel Edge was the extremely large cat lying in wait for her at the other end.
“Anything’s possible, Doctor,” he told her. “If you put your
mind
to it.”
Eden looked directly into Gabriel’s eyes. Just why had he put so much emphasis on that one word? Another thing he’d said slammed into her head. Teleport. Cold permeated her insides, and sweat dotted her brow. These men were crazy, and she was damned if she would give them what they wanted. She’d given them as much of the truth as she was prepared to give them. The rest would remain a secret.
She owed Theo that much.
Dr. Cahill had reluctantly allowed MacBain to escort her upstairs to freshen up. Gabriel was grateful that she was out of his range so that he could draw an unrestricted breath for the first time in what felt like months. Christ. He didn’t need this kind of complication in his life. Who could have anticipated this kind of magnetism?
His parents, he thought grimly. If they’d been alive they’d have tried everything in their considerable power to prevent so much as the first encounter between himself and Dr. Eden Cahill.
They, better than anyone else, would have known the ramifications of bringing his Lifemate here. Especially now.
They would have been appalled—
terrified
for him. Hadn’t they experienced exactly what he was experiencing now? And look where their great love had ended. Not even together in death, but buried apart for all eternity. His father on a wind-tossed knoll in his beloved Scottish Highlands, his mother here in Montana, in the rose garden she’d planted as a shrine to lost love.
He was the oldest. He
did
know better than to tempt the Fates this way. If his brothers, Caleb and Duncan, heard about this, they’d be here before he made it to the front door with Sebastian, Gabriel thought grimly. They’d insist on whisking him out of harm’s way. But even they would have to admit that he was out of choices.
Wouldn’t you just know his damn Lifemate would be the one woman who could help him through this latest T-FLAC crisis?
“Think she was telling the truth?” Sebastian’s shoes scraped on the worn stone floor.
The vast entry hall, with its sweeping staircase and unusual and spectacular fan-vaulted, umbrella design ceiling, was hung with thirty-foot-tall tapestries of battles covering the ages. Polished suits of armor lined the walls. The castle was more than Gabriel’s ancestral home. He remembered his parents here. How brief their reunions were. He remembered meals in the dining room, cozy evenings by the fire in the book-lined library. Normally this house, these rooms, the very stones it was built from, gave Gabriel the kind of solace men like him didn’t usually find. But today, the old castle felt like a cage.
“I think she’s lying through her pretty white teeth,” he told his friend grimly, mentally opening the front door when they were twenty feet away. Sunlight flooded the worn ancient stone floor ahead of them, but he still felt a chill.
“Neat trick,” Sebastian murmured. “You psi/spec ops guys have all the cool toys.”
And the burden and responsibilities that came
with
those special powers. Gabriel had never questioned who and what he was. Until today. “From what I observed in the lab earlier, Dr. Cahill has a photographic memory like nothing I’ve seen before. Despite her protestations, I believe she’s mentally retained all her notes and files for the bot. She hasn’t forgotten a damn thing.”
“But the development has taken her years—”
“Six.”
“And you think she was able to retain every step?” Sebastian demanded, “Every zig and zag necessary to rebuild the damn thing? From
memory.
”
Gabriel nodded “Yeah. I do. Dollars to doughnuts, T-FLAC is going to get a call. And we’re going to have our asses in a sling if we can’t destroy the Rx793 the second we know where the damn thing is.”
“But will she tell us how to do it?”
Gabriel thought of her flashing dark eyes, large and expressive, and speaking volumes. He thought of her white teeth biting into her mutinous soft lips. He thought about how desperately he wanted her. And he thought about how, stubborn woman that she was, she was fighting him on every front.
“Yeah.” God help him. “I’ll make sure she does. I also want to know exactly what it was she
didn’t
report to the authorities.”
Sebastian gave a mock shudder. “Give the poor woman a look like that and she’ll tell you anything.”
“Not this woman.” Gabriel stepped through the open door, walking out into the midmorning sunshine. Sebastian hitched his duffel bag over his shoulder as they stopped next to his car, a low-slung black Lamborghini Murciélago parked in the shadow of the east turret.
“My way would be faster,” Gabriel pointed out as his friend slung his bag into the backseat, then vaulted the door. Nice car.
“Maybe,” Sebastian smiled as he put on his sunglasses. “But I’m scared shitless one day I’ll come back looking like something Picasso painted. I’ll pass.”
“Nothing scares you.” Gabriel stroked the glossy black paint on the door absently. He was going to have to go upstairs and talk to her.
Scared didn’t begin to cover it.
The engine started up with an expensive purr. “That brainy woman of yours inside does. What’s coming down the pike does. Yeah. I scare.”
That woman of yours.
If I don’t claim her,
Gabriel wondered, feeling a familiar race of panic,
is she still mine?
He was afraid he knew the answer to his own question. “Ditto.” Any man in their line of work would be a fool not to be afraid. Fear kept them sharp. Fear let them know they were alive. But this—this was different. Way different.
Sebastian put the car in gear. “I’m twenty minutes away. Call if you need me.” T-FLAC headquarters was sixty miles south.
Gabriel slapped his shoulder, a little harder than necessary. “Make sure the highway patrol doesn’t see you.”
“Have to catch me first.”
The sun beat down on his head as Gabriel watched the car until it was nothing more than a speck down the road. He couldn’t delay this any longer. He had to face her again.
Alone.
He broke out in a cold sweat.
As soon as MacBain left the bedroom, Eden dashed into the exquisitely appointed en suite bathroom. Oh, God. She half laughed at her appearance in the well-lit mirror over the sink and vanity. Her face was white. Her hair, as usual, had a life of its own—a cartoon life apparently, as she looked like a woman who’d stuck a finger in an electrical outlet. Once again, she’d only remembered to apply mascara to one eye—her left, by the look of the black half circle beneath it. She washed her face with French-milled, rose-scented soap, dried her face on a handy towel, and appreciated MacBain’s attention to detail when she saw the new toothbrush and her favorite brand of toothpaste next to a row of perfume bottles.