He intercepted her as she rushed past him in an apparent search for shoes, snagging her around her slender waist and pulling her close.
“Let me go. And for God’s sake, put some clothes on.”
“Relax, Chloe. I’m not going to tie you up and ravish you...at least not unless you ask for it again.”
Her face reddened. “You’re really a jerk, you know that?”
He kissed the tip of her nose. “I have heard that before. But the past half hour tells me you don’t really believe it.”
“Oooh!” she ground out.
“When are you going to get over this irrational fear of your own sensuality? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You should be proud of your capacity for giving and receiving pleasure. Embrace it. Enjoy it.”
“Never,” she ground out.
“Why not?” He stared down at her, genuinely interested in her answer.
“I already told you. I don’t come from the same background you do.”
“Honey, women from every walk of life are equally capable of enjoying sex. Why are you so tense about it?”
“I just want a normal, boring, everyday life. Not a life like yours.”
What the hell was so weird about his life? Okay, so he could run like the wind. And he never slept. And there was the money, of course... Dammit, his life
was
weird. He stated matter-of-factly, “Fine. If you won’t tell me about yourself, I’ll have Novak run a deep background check.”
“No!”
He looked her in the eyes and saw genuine panic. “I want to know, Chloe. If you won’t tell me, I’ll find out some other way. But I’m done with you giving me emotional whiplash. Since it’s clear Denver was not, in fact, a one-time thing, I’m going to have to insist that you share at least a few of your secrets with me.”
“Why?” she all but wailed.
“Because I want to know you. All of you. Not just your body. I want to know what you like. Don’t like. What you think about. What makes you tick.”
“But why?” she repeated.
“Because it’s part of having a relationship. I happen to like you, Einstein.”
She just stared. He couldn’t tell if it was shock or sheer, frozen terror immobilizing her like that. Eventually she thawed enough to grumble, “Fine. Then tell me how it is you can run that fast. How is it you do everything so freakishly fast?”
She
had
seen him running. He turned her loose and shoved a hand through his hair. Now what the hell was he supposed to do? He had a serious security breach on his hands. Maybe if he played it cool she wouldn’t realize just how incredible what she’d witnessed was. Panic squeezed him as he stared down at her, silently pleading for her to not to comprehend what she’d seen.
“That’s what I thought. You want to know all my secrets, but you aren’t about to give up any of yours,” she stated.
He swore under his breath as he marched into the living room to retrieve his clothes and pull them on. They weren’t his secrets to tell. But he couldn’t even explain that much to Chloe. In spite of the earlier chase and the more recent vigorous sex, he really felt a need to work out. Adrenaline was surging through his veins demanding release. And that meant he needed to move. Faster than he could move in her living room. It was a calculated risk to leave her alone. But it would take a brazen killer to break into her place with the lights on and the target wide awake and able to fight back. And he’d be no good to her at all if he didn’t burn off a little of this steam.
She was so damned frustrating. She claimed to want a normal relationship but balked at sharing even the most basic information about herself. It was as if she was so terrified of losing control that she had to hold all the cards between them to herself. What kind of normal was that?
Of course, the one thing he absolutely, positively couldn’t ever give her was normal. Not with his health complications. He was probably stuck taking the stem cell therapies for the rest of his life. Unless, of course, he wanted to die a slow and horrible wasting death from spinal muscular atrophy. Not.
Hell, depending on how their genes matched up, they might or might not be able to have children. The good news was the recessive gene for SMA was reasonably rare.
And then there was his work. It had seemed like a waste to have these incredible physical abilities and not put them to good use helping mankind. He’d never guessed he would take such satisfaction in the work. He and his Code X colleagues were quietly making the world a better place.
However, the constant travel and no-notice crisis responses made a normal home life pretty much an impossibility. It would take a special woman to live with his whacky health issues and whackier lifestyle. Someone who embraced weird. Not a woman who craved “normal” worse than life itself.
He’d finally met a girl he could see himself settling down with for a long time, and he was
all
wrong for her. If this was God’s idea of a joke, the big guy had a
lousy
sense of humor.
He announced from the living room, “I’m going out for a little while.”
Chloe appeared in her bedroom door immediately, looking worried. “I thought you weren’t going to leave me alone again.”
What the hell? One second she was screeching at him to get away from her, and the next she was giving him this kicked-puppy look and begging him to stay? She officially made him crazy.
Reaching behind his waist, he pulled a .38 revolver out of its concealed holster and laid it on the coffee table. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
“Don Fratello said every woman should know how to handle a gun, and he made me take a weapons safety class,” she answered.
“Who’s Don Fratello?”
“The guy from the FBI who hired me. He’s an agent in the financial crimes unit.”
Trent didn’t like the affectionate look that came into her eyes when she spoke of the guy, but at least she knew how to use a gun. He growled, “My friends Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson will keep you company while I’m gone.” He was so jumpy he could hardly control himself as he headed for the door. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”
“You did it again,” she accused. “How do you move that fast?”
“I just do.” And with that lame excuse, he let himself out and pulled the door shut behind him. He waited until he heard the dead bolts thrown home and then raced for the stairwell. He needed a major run in the worst way right now.
Rather than risk drawing attention to himself by sprinting up and down San Francisco’s crowded thoroughfares, he took a cab to an exclusive health club that had private workout rooms for rent by the hour.
He cranked the room’s treadmill up to full speed, which wasn’t anywhere near as fast as he could run, but it was better than nothing. He jogged along at fifteen miles per hour until the jittery feeling left his limbs. Lord, that woman messed him up.
He showered and dressed, then took a cab to the hotel room he’d been using to watch Chloe’s apartment across the street. Quickly, he packed the gear and clothes he would need for the next few days, and fatigue abruptly began to drag at his body. That was how it was with him. He went ninety miles an hour until he hit the wall. And then he crashed like a big dog.
Forcing himself to keep moving, he stopped by a small grocery store and stocked up on food. And then he carried the entire armload of luggage and grocery bags down the street to Chloe’s building.
She let him in as soon as he identified himself, although this homecoming completely lacked the same...enthusiasm...as last time.
“What’s all that?” she asked cautiously.
“Clothes and surveillance gear. And food for the next day or two. Until we know who that guy was that followed us today, I don’t want you to go outside.”
“But my work—”
“You just caught the flu. And you can use the time to study Barry’s files, right?”
She scowled but didn’t argue. As he put away the food, she retreated into her bedroom and sat down in front of her laptop. It was clear she planned to immerse herself in the files and have nothing to do with him for a good long time. Which was just as well. He could hardly focus his eyes.
He moved over to her door and leaned against the frame. “Chloe, I need to sleep for a while.”
“Fine. Take a nap.”
“Uhh, that’s not quite how it works with me. I’m going to take a sleeping pill and crash for the next several hours.”
“Okay,” she replied, distracted, already turning her attention to the columns of numbers in front of her.
She still didn’t get it.
“I’m going to sleep like the dead. Nothing you do will rouse me and don’t bother trying. Keep that pistol close by and be prepared to defend yourself if someone breaks in.”
That got her undivided attention. “You wouldn’t wake up even if someone tried to kill me?” she asked in disbelief.
“Nope. When I go down, I go completely down.”
“Several hours, you say?”
He shrugged. “I might sleep for as much as six hours. I haven’t slept for a couple of days.”
“A couple of days!” she exclaimed.
Rather than try to explain the unexplainable, he backed out her door and headed for his bags and his bottle of pills. He started as her voice came from directly behind him. “What are those? Superstrength Xanax?”
“Something like that.” In point of fact, the medication was a custom blend of powerful sleeping medications and a surgical anesthesia drug. The doctors running the Code X program hadn’t found any other remedy for his intractable insomnia so far.
He popped the pill dry and kicked off his shoes. Chloe came back with a blanket and a pillow for him as he stretched out on the couch. She handed them over, murmuring, “Sweet dreams.”
He plumped the pillow under his head as the medication began to have its effect, and he gratefully sank into its embrace. He replied groggily, “If I dream about you, they will be.”
* * *
As Trent passed out, Chloe retreated into her bedroom and breathed a sigh of relief. Facing him after today’s epic mistake on her living room floor was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. It had been bad enough to have hot sex with the man when she was under the influence. But this time...this time she had no excuse at all. She’d jumped that man like a complete hussy, and she’d been stone-cold sober.
She laid her head down on her desk in humiliation and self-loathing. She was not that kind of woman! In the hippie, free-love world she’d spent her childhood exposed to, she’d seen plenty of people happy to jump in the sack with anybody who came along. She’d always promised herself she would be different. Modest and respectable. How did that old adage go? Square parents raised round children, and round parents raised square children? She was a square, darn it. She was
not
round!
Trent brought out a side of her she’d vowed never, ever to let gain control of her. She was not a captive of passion, was not following in her parents’ disastrous footsteps! She would control her life, and she would
not
cave in to these base desires Trent roused in her.
No more slips. He was strictly hands-off from now on. But a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach warned her the promise was going to be a lot harder to keep than it sounded.
She took a hot shower, attempting to scrub the feel of his hands and lips off her skin with the scratchiest loofah she owned. But it didn’t work. Even after she’d toweled dry, she could feel him on her. It was like he’d branded a memory of his body on hers.
She had to draw a line with him and stand by it. If she didn’t, she stood in real danger of losing control of her feelings, her desires...heck, her entire life! And that wouldn’t do at all. She’d mapped out the life she wanted for herself, and it didn’t include a high-speed surfing bum with no job and hot sex on his mind.
Girding herself to face the monstrous temptation that was Trent Hollings, she stepped out into her living room. He was out cold. As in she could pick up his hand and drop it across his stomach without disturbing him even a little.
Man, those sleeping pills of his were powerful. She scooped up the bottle and did a quick internet search of the chemicals and dosages listed on the label. Dang. One of these pills could drop ten men...and very possibly kill one man. How did his body tolerate them?
She poked around on the internet for information on insomnia. When that didn’t yield anything helpful, she moved on to researching extraordinary human speed. A few articles talked about how world-class sprinters had better quick twitch reflexes than most other humans, but nothing she found could explain Trent’s incredible speed.
The cab had been going well over twenty miles per hour as it pursued Trent. And he’d been pulling away from the vehicle. Which meant he was measurably one of the fastest human beings ever recorded.
Who
was
he? Or more accurately,
what
was he? If only Sunny were back from her honeymoon. Maybe she could shed some light on Trent’s superhuman capabilities. After all, Sunny had been hanging out with Trent and his buddies for the past several months at the Winston compound.
Winston...hmm. That gave her an idea. She searched the internet for all of Winston’s many subsidiary companies. One in particular caught her attention. Winston Computer Research, Ltd. was a small firm run by Jeff Winston personally. Trent was listed as an employee, as were all of the groomsmen in Sunny’s wedding, including Chloe’s new brother-in-law, Aiden McKay.
But what really made her sit up and stare was the list of other staff members. Over a dozen physicians and medical researchers were employed there. What did doctors have to do with computer research?
Using her temporary FBI access code, she poked into the bureau’s records of Winston Computer Research, Ltd. and immediately ran into a firewall declaring the records she sought classified.
Was Jeff’s company working with the government in some capacity? She glanced through her open door to the big man sloppily sprawled, unconscious, on her sofa. Was Trent involved with the government in some way? Was his speed the reason?
A shocking thought struck her. Or was his speed a
result
of working with the government?