Tempt Me (20 page)

“Willem, if I may?” At Willem’s affirmative nod, Claudette rose. As she made her way to the front of the room, a picture and resume filled the large screen.

She recognized the candidate. Not a cosmologist, astrobiologist, or a theoretical physicist this time, but a diplomat...one with unimpeachable peacekeeping bona fides. Three years ago, Torsten Boateng’s negotiations with vicious Somalian warlords had been instrumental in allowing food and medical aid to reach previously inaccessible areas of sub-Saharan Africa.

“Torsten Boateng,” Claudette confirmed, her cinnamon-and-sugar bob swinging as she pivoted to face them. “Graduate of Yale and Yale Law. Rhodes scholar, with graduate work in history and economics. Multiple diplomatic assignments, primarily in Africa. He now works as a troubleshooter for the United Nations.”

As Claudette hit the high points of Boateng’s public and not-so-public accomplishments, Woolf stared stonily at the screen, saying nothing. There really wasn't much he
could
say. It was rumored Boateng had been on the shortlist for the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

She sent a text to Lukas:
Nicely played.

Two seats down, Lukas glanced down to his own lap and read. One corner of his mouth quirked in acknowledgment.

Elliott steepled his fingers together, a pose he adopted when deep in thought—a complete ruse, because there was no way that he, Claudette, Lukas, Scarlett, and probably Jack hadn't already talked the pros and cons of Boateng’s candidacy into the ground. He wouldn't have been presented as a candidate otherwise. “His government and intelligence contacts could be very useful to us in the event our existence is revealed to humanity.”

Well, that was all well and good, but did Boateng have enough of a scientific background to accept even the possibility of their existence? What did they know about his spiritual beliefs? She’d ask Lukas after—

“Bailey?” Elliott said. “Something to add?”

Every member of the Underworld Council looked at her expectantly. The heat vents chose that moment to take a break, and the silence was absolute.

“Please.” Woolf waved a sarcastic hand. “We await your subject matter expertise.”

Lukas straightened in his chair. “You’re out of line.”

“Gentlemen...” Claudette tried to calm things down with her powerful siren’s voice.

“This is the first proposed candidate who doesn’t have a cosmology, astrobiology, or theoretical physics background,” Bailey quickly interjected. “Is there anything in Boateng’s background that indicates he’d accept even the possibility of your existence?”

“Good question,” Claudette responded. “Spiritually, he identifies as agnostic, and throughout his career, he’s demonstrated an ability to suspend judgment until he assesses all available data,” Claudette responded. She suddenly smiled. “One moment, please.” She strode back to her place at the table and retrieved something on her laptop with graceful taps of the keys. “May I?” she asked Willem.

Willem passed control of the meeting to Claudette. A couple of seconds later, the professional headshot and resume blinked away, replaced with a different picture: a younger Boateng, boarding a plane, carrying a copy of Sagan’s
Pale Blue Dot
.

Bailey bobbed her head in acknowledgment. An interest in the work of the person who’d previously held the position was a damn good start.

Claudette sat down. “He appears to have the mix of skills, experience, and gravitas we require.”

She nearly snorted. If gravitas was a job requirement, she was safely out of the running.

“Are there any other concerns or reservations to discuss at this time?”

At this point in the proceedings, Krispin Woolf usually pulled an obscure procedural delay out of his back pocket.

No objection came. “The candidate advances,” Willem said.

The tension in the room noticeably dropped, and the heat vents kicked in again with a heroic huff. Other agenda items passed in a blur, until Lorin presented an update on the items she and her bondmate Gabe Lupinsky had discovered at the Isabella archaeological site last summer. Preparations for the upcoming dig season were underway.

“Are there any updates about Paige Scott?” Elliott asked Lukas.

Last summer, a grad student had disappeared from the dig, along with a mysterious vamp Lorin suspected of having used Paige to gain access to the site. The guy had attacked Lorin, holding an otherworldly weapon to her head that had singed her skin on contact. She'd kicked away the weapon and had been fighting for her life when Gabe had tipped the balance, shifting to wolf form and shredding the vamp's calf with his teeth. The vamp had been bleeding like a stuck pig when he and Paige had evaporated like smoke, disappearing right before their eyes.

“No news,” Lukas said curtly. “We're still looking.”

At her side, she heard Lorin sigh in frustration.

Bailey surreptitiously eyed her tall, sturdy form, casually clad in jeans, suede boots, and a many-pocketed canvas field jacket. An exotic scarf, an explosion of color, draped around her neck in casual loops, but she made no attempt to hide the scars that the vamp’s weapon had seared into her skin. She carried more muscle than Rafe’s usual lovers, but she definitely shared their supermodel height, long hair, and killer cheekbones.

What the hell was Rafe doing with
her
?

“Gabe confirmed that the weapon we recovered is made out of the same alloy as Pritchard’s—as
the
—lockbox,” Lorin corrected herself. Though the evidence was tantalizing, no one was quite ready to conclusively state that the unusual box Lorin had excavated last summer belonged to Noah Pritchard, pilot of the legendary, doomed
Arkapaedis
, whose crash, according to their oral histories, had marooned their ancestors on Earth in the middle of a brutal Minnesota winter.

The piece of the puzzle that just might connect the dots? The tech unit—but not if she couldn’t figure out how to crack the damn thing.

Wyland rose. They were up.

He quickly and succinctly gave his archivists report. The preservation and digitization project he was spearheading was behind schedule. Most of her work on the project—estimating storage needs, and building out and securing the infrastructure—was complete, but the capacity calculations needed monitoring and occasional fine-tuning. While he described the painstaking care the preservationists were taking as they worked with the fragile, priceless documents—some nearly a thousand years old and largely written by Valerian—she considered the tech unit. Sleek and sexy as anything you could buy at the Mall of America’s Apple Store, it had been found in the lockbox, buried underground, resting next to wild rice kernels dating back almost three thousand years.

Three thousand year old digital data. What a glorious mind-fuck. How could she even begin to verify the data’s age? Would she even recognize a date notation if she saw one? In terms of file structure, did the thing even use bits and bytes? Ones and zeroes? It was an unparalleled opportunity to assess the efficacy of digital as a long-term storage medium, not that she’d ever be able to publish her findings—

“Bailey?”

“Yes?”

“Could you talk about your idea for accessing the tech unit?” Wyland asked. “It’s...rather ingenious.”

Remaining seated, she described the high points—haul a bare-bones research lab to a geographic location so remote there’d be nothing for the tech unit to latch onto, no ambient technology for hundreds of miles. “I'm thinking of Alaska, the Arctic Circle, northern Canada,” she said. “The idea is not fully fleshed out yet, but—”

“That
is
ingenious,” Lorin said. Lorin and Gabe had been there, working with her, when the tech unit had latched onto Sebastiani Labs’ network despite her careful precautions.

The admiration in her voice was a comforting balm. Bailey gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I was up at a cabin in northern Minnesota a couple of weeks ago, and we lost electricity for a couple of days. No electricity meant no internet, conserving battery power, working on paper...” And it had been quiet, so quiet. Being cut off from the outside world, from all its chatter and distraction and interruption, had soothed her thrashing brain, quieted the static. She’d focused deeply and well for the first time in recent memory. The ice and snow, the crackling fireplace, and Rafe, stretched out on the couch, not hiding his hunger as he drew her...Smothering a sigh, she focused on the matter at hand. “I started thinking about ways to build out a mobile lab that was completely self-contained, unconnected to the outside world, away from technology’s reach.” She shrugged. “Sometimes, to move forward, we need to turn back the clock.”

She looked around the table to see people’s reactions. Wyland, though not smiling, looked satisfied and pleased. Krispin Woolf’s face was blank, but his eyes were burning. Pissed off as usual. Lukas took quick notes on the pad in front of him.

If Lukas was already in logistics mode, it was as good as a provisional ‘go.’

Then questions flew bullets.

“Far northern hemisphere, that means working in the summer,” Claudette said. “It's January now. That's a tight timeline for such a complex project. You
are
thinking this summer, right?”

She nodded. Yeah, Rafe would probably have moved on by then.

“Budget?” Jacoby inquired. “Who’s heading this up?”

Elliott stepped in before anyone could respond. “Cross-functional project, funded by the Council and Sebastiani Labs. Security and Technology has the lead, working with Physical Sciences and Archiving to flesh out the plan. Any objections?”

No one spoke.

“Willem, please put this at the top of the agenda for next month’s meeting.” Elliott gave her an approving nod. “Nicely done.”

She nodded back, proud but barely holding back a tired sigh. One more fast-track project, one more plate to keep spinning and not let fall.

As Willem pulled up the presentation for the next item on the agenda—ugh, financials—Lorin scooted her chair closer. “Who's we?” Her eyes danced with amusement.

“What?”

“You said, ‘we lost electricity.’ Who’s ‘we?’ Were you there with Rafe, by chance?” Lorin nudged her with her elbow. “Very romantic.”

At her furious blush, Lorin’s smile grew.

Though she didn't feel like she needed Lorin’s approval to sleep with Rafe, she wondered if she'd just received it.

She sat back in the big leather chair, tuning out the discussion of balance sheets and investment performance so she could focus on Project Arctic Circle. So much work to do, in so little time—and at the same time Wyatt and his crew were swarming over Sebastiani Labs’ network like ants at a picnic.

Christ on a cracker, what had she done?

What she needed to do—no more, no less. Straightening, she wrote “June 1” on the pad in front of her. Circled it with hard strokes of her pen.

Her relationship with Rafe now had a nice, tidy end date. Though time was at a premium, she would enjoy what little remained.

With a vengeance. 

***

“T
hank you, thank you, thank you!” Antonia hugged the tablet Rafe just handed her like it was a long-lost lover instead of a digital gadget she’d not seen for several days.

“You’re welcome.” He’d leave it to Bailey to deliver the lecture. Speaking of lovers...”Is Bailey around?” He’d gotten a lot of work done since they’d seen each other last, but exchanging the occasional harried text wasn’t cutting it anymore.

Antonia smiled knowingly. “Come on back.”

He followed her through a maze of cube walls to the back corner, to an unmarked steel door that looked strong enough to survive a good-sized nuclear blast. Antonia slapped her hand against the security pad mounted at the side of the door. He heard a very quiet chime, followed by a louder click as the heavy door’s lock disengaged.

Antonia held the door open, but didn’t enter herself. “I think she’s still asleep,” she whispered. “Don't do anything I wouldn't do.”

Evil little imp.

A bump of lust elbowed him forward, into a room that was unquestionably Bailey’s domain even if he couldn’t see her yet. Computers dominated the décor, racks and stacks of them, their tiny lights blinking red, amber and green. Over a dozen monitors squatted on tables, and flat-screens hung on the walls, as precisely positioned as museum paintings. Over in the corner, she’d made herself a snug little dorm-like den, with a futon piled with blankets, a small side table, and task lighting. The room smelled like warm plastic, reams of paper, and stale pizza, overlaid with an oddly pleasant metallic sting he’d come to associate with her signature emotion: intellectual curiosity. Sometimes, he thought he could smell her very thoughts, feel them snap, slice and spark.

There was a soft snuffle from the futon, and the pile of blankets suddenly shifted. He grinned as Bailey turned over, revealing a sleep-lined face and a shock of blond hair. A tiny pair of reading glasses he didn’t know she wore slipped to the floor.

Stepping around accordion-pleated green and white striped paper, a sleeping laptop, a white Styrofoam clamshell, and a can of Diet Coke, he made his way to the futon and knelt at her side. She snuggled more deeply into the blankets, tucking her injured left hand under her chin.

She was pale, so pale, and there was no disguising the dark circles under her eyes. Picking up the tiny glasses, he set them on the table, on top of two invitations: one for a wedding, and the other for his gallery show. The half-empty bottle of Pepto-Bismol bumped up against the invitations must be responsible for the chalky pink residue staining her chapped lips.

Damn it.

Leaning over, he kissed it away—softly, so softly—before quietly standing up. No matter how badly he needed to kiss her, she needed sleep more. He lightly stroked the hair at her temple, the whisper-soft touch completely at odds with his growing anger. When was the last time she’d seen sunlight? Had she left this room since they’d seen each other last, or had she been holed up here like a rat in a cage?

His brother was about to get served an extra-large piece of his mind.