“I can’t remember.”

It almost broke Nick to see her holding herself as though she was the only person she’d ever been able to depend on. It was enough to propel him forward and hold her.

She was shaking. Maybe they both were, and he boosted her up onto the waist-high counter and let her cling. Let himself soothe.

Three days ago, Dr. Genie Watson had been nothing more than a woman whose reputation for utter brilliance and cool standoffishness was hard to deny.

Now, in just seventy-two short hours, Genie Watson had become so much more to Nick. And he couldn’t seem to stop himself from touching her. Wanting her.

He couldn’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t take advantage of her. She was scared, vulnerable. And he was her protector.

“Nick,” she whispered, breaking in to his thoughts, “I know that this will be over soon, that they’ll find this guy and things will go back to the way they were before. So will you do me a favor and kiss me? Just once, so I know what it’s like?”

“Genie, I—” Shouldn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t.

Will.

Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,

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Denise O’Sullivan

Senior Editor

Harlequin Intrigue

Dr. Bodyguard
Jessica Andersen

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, Jessica is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love—writing. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares will a small menagerie of animals and a hero named Brian. She loves to hear from readers. You can write to her at P.O. Box 204, Voluntown, CT 06384.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Genie Watson—When the brilliant scientist is brutally attacked and several “accidents” occur in her DNA lab, Genie must turn to co-worker Nick Wellington for protection, even though he’s just the type of man she has vowed to avoid.

Nick Wellington—Caught between an ingrained need to protect and a learned distrust of smart, opinionated women who hog lab equipment, Nick fights to save Genie even as he struggles against his growing desires.

George Dixon—He and Genie had once shared a relationship. Now they share a restraining order. How far will he go to get her back?

Richard Fenton Sr.—The aging tycoon is putting financial pressure on Genie to disclose confidential genetic information. Could he be putting another kind of pressure on her, as well?

Richard Fenton Jr.—Heir apparent to his father’s fortune, he will do anything to insure his future.

Stephanie Alberts—Genie’s clinical coordinator has had terrible luck with men, but she thinks she’s found a keeper this time. Or is he just using her?

Roger Strait—Is the salesman from Petrie Pharmaceuticals really Steph’s dream come true?

Leo Gabney—One of the top administrators at Boston General Hospital, Leo will do anything to keep the hospital on track. Anything.

For Brian,

who only winced a little

when I announced I was quitting the lab

to write romance novels.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

“Wellington? Darn it, Wellington, are you in here?”

Genie shoved at the revolving door and squinted into the research lab’s darkroom, trying to pick out her irritating co-worker’s broad-shouldered silhouette. She stepped inside, fumbled for a switch and heard the ultrasonic whine of warming red lights over the rumble of machinery. “Because if you’re hogging the developer again when my name is clearly written on the sign-up sheet, I’ll—”

A blur of motion swept across the faintly red darkness. “Dr. Watson?”

“Wellington, I—” But it hadn’t been her floormate’s voice. “Who—”

The stranger’s hand clamped over her mouth. His hard, hot arm latched on to her ribs and crushed her back against his body. She opened her mouth to scream and tasted the powdered latex of a lab glove. Only a muffled whimper emerged.

“Shut up.” His voice was uneven, his breath sour and his silhouette black against the bloody red lights. “Just shut up, slut-doctor-whore. Ruin a man’s life and think nothing of it, will you?”

Genie screamed against the glove, thrashed and tried to elbow her captor in the ribs. He cursed and shoved her against the waist-high counter that circled the room. A starburst of pain sang as her hip smacked against something square and solid and red-black.

His heartbeat pounded against her shoulder, quick and scared—or was that hers?—and he thrust against her backside and growled over the clanking hum of the X-ray developer. She tried to wrench away and he pressed harder, pushing her against the counter as she flailed her hands against the warm, red-black air.

She was trapped. Powerless. And her office, safe and bright, wasn’t twenty feet away.

“Thought you were safe in your ivory tower, didn’t you?” The whisper slid across her skin as his hand cruised up to cup her breast and pinch her nipple through the starched lab coat. “Thought you could take her away from me and I’d do nothing?”

Genie felt her soft leather shoes slide on the linoleum floor as the sharp scent of spilled developer chemicals and madness stung her nose and tears burned her eyes. Shaking her head, she tried to say, No, no! Why are you doing this? I help people. I don’t take them away! But her struggles only excited him more and he tightened his grip.

“We’re smarter than you think, Doctor. We figured out what you and the old man are up to. And we’re going to stop you. Permanently. But first…”

He shifted his grip, his intent clear. Oh, God! Genie squealed and kicked backward but encountered only air. Her attacker chuckled and ground her harder against the sink. She whipped her body from side to side in an effort to loosen his hot, trembling arms while her hands groped wildly for a weapon. Something. Anything.

Her grasping fingers glanced off a pair of bandage scissors and sent them spinning to the floor.

Oh, God!

She flailed, straining against his superior strength and trying for the freedom she knew was only a few feet away. Then at the last possible moment, when she heard the rasp of his zipper and felt his cruel, groping hand on her body, Genie touched something else with a straining fingertip.

Something heavy.

Something cold and metal and sharp-cornered.

As his hot fingers slithered up her leg beneath the sensible gray wool skirt, Genie screamed against the impersonal latex glove, grabbed the metal thing and swung it over her shoulder with all her might.

There was a sickening thud as it connected. A bitter curse. Warm wetness sprayed her cheek and the hand fell away from her mouth. She was free!

Then she saw a quick movement of black shadow against the unholy red light.

Pain exploded in her head.

And she saw no more.

“DR. WATSON? Dr. Watson?”

At first the voice reminded her of the loudspeaker at St. Agnes, where she’d done her residency. Dr. Watson. Paging Dr. Watson. Dr. Watson to the NICU.

She’d hated the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, full of sick babies, some born with genetic disorders. For many of the tiny lives in the NICU the cures were few, the costs high, and the bright spark of consciousness too quickly snuffed. Like Marilynn. Poor, dear Marilynn. Genie shuddered and tried to slide deeper into the beckoning blackness.

But the voice wouldn’t allow that. “Dr. Watson? Genie? Come on now, wake up.”

She must be dreaming. She heard the rubba-thump, rubba-thump of the light-proof revolving door and wondered what the light lock was doing in her bedroom.

“Genie? Can you hear me?” For that matter, what was a man’s voice doing in her bedroom? The last time that had happened the voice had belonged to the cable guy, and he’d been whiny and had a hanging butt crack the size of a Smithfield ham.

“She’s unconscious. And look at all that blood.” Another voice murmured agreement as the first one said, “Where the hell are the paramedics? The genetic research building is part of Boston General, for chrissake. The E.R.’s right down the street. What’s taking them so long?”

Frustration edged the tone, but the voice was still nice-gruff and interesting, without the nasal twang of Boston. His voice made Genie feel warm and fuzzy and she wanted to snuggle into the sound and bring it with her to the safe darkness.

“Genie? Can you hear me? Open your eyes, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart? She liked that. She hadn’t been anyone’s sweetheart in a long, long time. Not since her father died.

Her eyes remained stubbornly closed when she ordered them to open, but her head began to hurt like hell as if the act had alerted thousands of anxious neurons that she was conscious and ready for pain.

Rubba-thump, rubba-thump. The sound of the revolving light lock magnified the throbbing behind her eyes and she began to feel the hard, cool floor beneath her. This wasn’t her bedroom and, oh, she was beginning to hurt.

A new voice, excited. “The police and the paramedics are here.” An audible gulp. “Is Dr. Watson going to be okay? That’s an awful lot of blood.”

“I don’t think it’s all hers. I hope to hell it’s not.” She could feel her anchor move away. With a monumental effort she cracked open her eyes and made out a blurry man-shape against the bright, stabbing light.

“Don’t leave me. Please.” Was that pitiful croak really her own voice? It must have been, because she heard him crouch down beside her, felt him take her hand—

And she slid back into the warm, blessed darkness, taking his presence with her. Feeling safe.

“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED, Nick?” Leo Gabney looked as though he wanted to yank at his hair as he paced the moss green waiting room at Boston General’s E.R. Instead he pulled a soggy handkerchief from his back pocket, wiped it across the top of his glistening scalp, turned and marched back the way he had come.

Nick watched his boss pace and didn’t say a word. He’d screwed up, that’s what happened. The developer room was across the hall from his office, for God’s sake. He should’ve known something was wrong. He should’ve been quicker, smarter. Better, said the Senator’s voice in the back of his head, and Nick twisted his lips in rare agreement.

He’d been annoyed when Jill had told him she hadn’t developed yesterday’s DNA sequencing because the darkroom was still being used. He’d said something pithy and rude about the one-step-holier-and-a-heck-of-a-lot-smarter-than-the-creator M.D., Ph.D. he was forced to share lab space with and had ignored the Occupied—Please Do Not Enter sign on the darkroom door. He’d simply barged in, intent on giving Dr. Genius a piece of his mind.

The red lights had been on. He’d expected that, since only an idiot would handle autorad film in white light and Dr. Genius was anything but an idiot. But he hadn’t expected the little room to be torn apart, with film cassettes opened and scattered willy-nilly and the developer’s guts strewn about like spaghetti.

Then he’d stepped further into the room and his foot had slipped on something dark. Something trailing. A black ribbon that led directly to the crumpled lab coat under the sink. He’d flicked on the fluorescents and the red of the dark lights had become a patchwork of macabre crimson splashes on the floor and walls.

Blood. Lots of it. And the motionless body of his archnemesis, Dr. Eugenie Watson, M.D., Ph.D.

“Gentlemen?” The strange voice echoed in the E.R. waiting room and Nick shot to his feet. It wasn’t the cops this time. It was a doctor in bloodstained greens.

It was too soon. They couldn’t possibly have stopped all that bleeding in so little time. She must’ve died.

Genius Watson was dead.

Nick remembered that he’d been rude to her that morning in the elevator, more out of habit than any real rancor, and perhaps also because for one brief moment he’d thought she looked nice in the soft gray wool skirt and high-buttoned blouse. Pretty. Touchable.

When a man started thinking of gray wool and lace collars as sexy, he needed to get laid. Fast. Or so he’d thought at the time. Now all he could think was that he’d do anything to go back in time and murder the guy in the darkroom for trashing their experiments and injuring Dr. Watson.

Killing her?

He had a sudden, sharp image of Watson’s bloody hand lying in his as they rode to the hospital in the shrieking ambulance. She had begged him not to leave when she should have been cursing him for not finding her sooner. How had he not known something was wrong? He’d been sitting in his office wrestling with that damned journal article. How had he not sensed something? Heard something?

“Is she—” Even Leo Gabney, the most insensitive man Nick had ever met, was unable to finish the question.

“Eugenie Watson is one tough lady.”

Nick glanced quickly at the doctor. “Then she’s—”

“Going to be fine.” Apparently the doctor was familiar with this fill-in-the-blanks form of conversation. “She has a whopping headache and a few stitches to close up the laceration across her eyebrow, but there’s no indication of more serious damage.”

“But what about—”

“The blood?” The doctor grinned. “Very little of it was hers. Her attacker must’ve been a mess when she was through with him. I’ve discussed it with Detective Sturgeon and he’ll put area hospitals on the lookout.”

Nick thought about the panty hose torn half off her body. He hated to ask. “Was she—”

The doctor shook his green-capped head. “No evidence of further sexual assault. I’d say she changed his mind by fighting back.” Both Nick and Gabney relaxed marginally. The doc continued, “But we can’t be sure exactly what happened. She doesn’t remember anything about the attack, which isn’t surprising if you consider what a horrible experience it must have been. The brain has its own way of protecting itself.”

“She doesn’t remember anything?” Nick spun toward the new voice, having not realized that Detectives Sturgeon and Peters had entered the room. Sturgeon was sucking one of the peppermints he’d been working his way through ever since he’d arrived at the lab on the heels of the paramedics. His sallow cheeks, moving in and out with each peppermint suck, made him as if he should be behind glass at the Boston Aquarium rather than at the helm of a major investigation. “Is she conscious?”

The doctor wasn’t intimidated by Sturgeon’s scowl. “She doesn’t remember the attack, and she’s conscious now but not in any shape to answer questions. You’ll have to wait.”

Then, just as Nick was coming to like the doctor, the guy said, “You can make do with this gentleman. He found Miss Watson.”

The cops turned with identical fishy looks and Peters flipped to a new page on his pad. “And your name would be?”

Nick sighed. “Dr. Nicholas Wellington the Third, Ph.D.”

Sturgeon raised an eyebrow. “Any relation to the Nicholas Wellington that ran for president a few years ago?”

Feeling that helpless mix of guilt and anger that always came with thoughts of the Senator, Nick nodded. “He’s my father.”

“I’M FINE.” Genie batted at the nurse’s hands and shooed the blood-pressure cuff away. “I’m a doctor, I should know when I’m okay to leave, don’t you think?” The nurse rolled her eyes and glanced at a nearby man in green scrubs as if to say Not frickin’ likely. The frazzled intern who grinned in reply didn’t look a day over fourteen.

Genie winced at the unkind thought. She hadn’t been much older than that when she interned—a fact her colleagues never let her live down. She was the last person who should be complaining about her doctor’s age, particularly when he was agreeing with her.

“That’s correct, you’re perfectly fine. Now.” He paused for emphasis. “But you know as well as I do that after a concussion of such severity you should be monitored for at least the next twenty-four hours in case there is additional swelling of the brain.”

She hated how he said “the brain” as if it belonged to someone else. It was her brain damn it, and it had no right to swell without her permission. Since she hadn’t given it permission to get any bigger than it already was, she should be able to go home.

But the fourteen-year-old intern remained firm. He crossed his arms over his weedy chest and frowned. “The only way I’m going to release you is if there’s somebody with medical training to observe you. Do you have any colleagues you could call? Any friends that could help you?”

Genie opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. How pitiful it sounded to say, “No. There’s no one.” But it was true.

Sure, she had acquaintances. She chatted with the elderly Chinese lady who cleaned the lab each night and she knew the names of all the grandchildren in the pictures that lined Ben’s desk at the security kiosk. And she had colleagues that she nodded to in the halls and smiled at in the lunchroom.

But there was nobody to call and say, “I’ve got a concussion. Will you come stay with me so I can sleep?”

Nobody.

Inexplicably, a low, intimate voice floated through Genie’s mind. She didn’t clearly remember anything after hearing the rubba-thump of the darkroom door behind her when she’d gone to develop the day’s films, but she did have a sketchy recollection of a comforting presence in the ambulance. She remembered a large, warm hand holding hers and a gentle voice saying she was going to be okay.

She assumed it had been a paramedic, and made a mental note to thank him for his excellent bedside manner—though with the way her bruised brain was working, it could be a few weeks before that particular note surfaced.

The nurse and the young intern left in a swirl of white and green, and when the door swung the other way, it revealed the face of Genie’s least favorite administrator.

She tried to summon a convincing scowl, one that would soothe the worried look on his face. “Jeez, Leo, don’t I rate anyone better? Couldn’t they have sent Hetta from personnel or Louie from accounts payable? Even one of Dixon’s goons. Anyone would be a better deathbed visit than you.” Though she didn’t like him much as an administrator, Leo was one of her favorite acquaintances and he smiled at her feeble snarl.

“Nope, everyone else already had plans. Since neither you nor I have a life, we were unanimously chosen for the roles of visitor and visited.” He tried to grin, but it faltered and his hand trembled as he wiped a handkerchief across his sweating head. “Jesus, Genie. I… I…” He couldn’t finish, just shrugged, and she wondered if he had been the one to find her in the darkroom.

She’d seen the bloodstained lab coat before the police had taken it away, but when she tried to imagine the attack, her mind slid away and showed her other things instead. Fields. Butterflies. Flowers. The hazy shape of a man holding his hand out to her.

Since Genie’s greatest source of pride was her well-ordered, methodical mind, she did not like this open rebellion and planned to make her brain behave at the earliest possible moment. But to do that, she had to go home. She’d never get any peace at Boston General. There would be candy stripers trying to cheer her up until she wanted to throttle them, doctors shining lights in her eyes every five minutes to make sure she wasn’t in a coma, and that big woman nurse with the mustache and the sponge baths…

She had to get out of here.

“Will you take me home, Leo?” It was worth a try, but even before the words were out, he shook his head.

“No. No. I don’t think that’s a good idea, Genie. You’re pretty banged up.” He paused and she could read the words, Although it could’ve been a whole lot worse, in his gaze. “No. I think you should stay right here and let the doctors look after you while the police find whoever did this.”

Genie didn’t want to think about who had attacked her. Even the word police made nausea swirl higher and sweat bead. She didn’t want to think about being attacked. Not here, not now. She needed to go home.

Needed to be alone so she could fall apart in private.

She frowned to keep the tears away, but the movement pulled at the stitches on her forehead and made her headache worse. “Then go away. I don’t want any visitors unless they’re going to take me home.” She stopped Leo on his way out. “Hey. Can you find the guy that rode with me in the ambulance? I want to thank him.”

Leo looked surprised. “You do? But I thought you didn’t…” He trailed off, then shrugged. “Okay, I’ll go get him.”

“He’s here?” Didn’t paramedics hang out at fire-houses? Or in ambulances? She thought so, though her E.R. experience was limited to a quick three-week rotation and taped reruns of the popular television show.

“Yeah, right outside. He’s been waiting around to make sure you were going to be okay. He was real worried about you.”

“Then send him in and go away, Leo.” The administrator headed for the door and Genie called after him, “And, Leo? Thanks for coming. Thanks for looking upset.” Even though he was probably more concerned about lawsuits and PR nightmares, it was nice to think that someone cared.

When he was gone, the nausea subsided and was replaced with a warm, fuzzy feeling Genie thought might be due to the little pill Nurse Walrus had given her a few minutes earlier. Her mind drifted.

She needed, she thought irrelevantly, to get a life. If nothing else, this…incident had brought home the fact that she’d let important things slide while she’d pursued her medical degree, then her Ph.D., becoming the youngest Primary Investigator that Boston General had ever seen.

She made another mental note. Make a few friends. Go on a date. Her lips curved. A date? With whom? The pool of eligible men at Boston General was pretty shallow. She certainly wasn’t dating George Dixon again—been there, done that, got the restraining order—and most of the other researchers she knew were either ancient, married or—as in the case of the handsome antichrist she shared lab space with—egocentric jerks.

At the thought of her worthy opponent, something niggled at the back of Genie’s brain, but the rumble of Leo’s voice in the hall diverted her and she thought that her paramedic must be pretty inefficient if he waited for each of his patients to wake up. Or else he’d picked up on the same weird vibrations she’d felt run up her arm when he’d been holding her hand in the ambulance.

She plucked at the overwashed sheet and wished she were wearing something other than a hospital johnny. Wished she had a comb and a mirror. Wished she hadn’t run out of laundry and been forced to scrounge in the back of her underwear drawer. Her heart sank at the thought of her colleagues at Boston General seeing the zebra striped satin panties and matching bra her mother had optimistically sent from Paris.

Never mind what the paramedic thought, she could just imagine the talk in the doctors’ lounge. Hey, did you see what Watson was wearing when they brought her in? Whoo-whee. Hot stuff for such a cold fish.

Genie didn’t want to be hot stuff. She didn’t want to be a cold fish. She just wanted to be—

The door opened. She glanced over to thank her paramedic and perhaps, since there was no time such as the present to work on her new resolve, ask him if she could buy him a drink. But instead her heart gave an unsteady thump and all that came out of her mouth was a startled, “Beef!”

The big blond man at the door stopped, looked intently at her, and a slow, sexy grin creased his face. He nodded and said in a disturbingly familiar drawl—one that could even be called nice if she stretched it—“Genius.”

And the battle lines were drawn. Again.

He knew she hated the nickname that had plagued her since she’d skipped fourth and fifth grades, landing smack in junior high at the age of eight. He called her that to bug her, the same reason she called him Beef to his face when the other women did it behind his back.

Nicholas “Beef” Wellington the Third. He might think the nickname was a culinary reference, but the women knew better. They called him Beef as a tribute to his masculine physique, a testimony to his hunkiness and grade-A buns.

Except for Genie. She called him Beef because she knew it irked him and because he was everything she was not—gorgeous, popular, wealthy and well-connected. And sexy. Had she mentioned sexy? He was also sloppy and easygoing, and for the past several months, Leo had forced her to share her precious lab space with him. Her equipment.

Practically her life.

Dr. Genius Watson and Dr. Beef Wellington. They were opposites. Thesis and antithesis. Matter and antimatter. Genie figured that over time they’d either cancel each other out or repel each other into different universes.

She was betting on the latter.

“I was expecting somebody else,” she said. “A paramedic.” Please, she thought, let it have been a paramedic.

Beef Wellington crossed the room in two ambling strides. His lab coat was unbuttoned and the weight of the ID badge, radiation monitor and pen collection in his left breast pocket pulled the coat askew to give her a quick glimpse of the tight, perfect chest and flat stomach beneath the worn T-shirt. There were rusty stains on his sleeves and on the faded jeans that showed through the gap in the white coat.

His dark blond hair had outgrown its midsummer buzz cut and drooped across his forehead and ears as though it couldn’t bear to be away from his face with its wide Viking cheekbones and slashing blade of a nose.

He leaned close and Genie could smell him, a combination of warm soap, acrylamide gel and male musk. He practically oozed pheromones. “Why do you need a paramedic? You sick or something?”

He seemed to have conveniently forgotten that she was lying in a hospital bed with stitches and a concussion. From the way her heart was tap dancing in her chest, she wouldn’t doubt a touch of arrhythmia, too.

She started to frown, then winced instead. “Never mind. Why are you here? Wasn’t it bad enough the administration inflicted Leo on me? They had to send you, too? Why? So you could gloat about having my equipment to yourself for the rest of the day? I think I’m feeling sicker by the minute.”

“Leo said you wanted to see me.” Wellington’s icy-blue eyes flashed as he said the name. Genie wondered fleetingly what the administrator had done to earn his ire this time—besides making him share lab space with a woman he couldn’t stand, of course.

As her hope that she hadn’t actually held Wellington’s hand started to crumble, Genie tried one last time. “Nope. I wanted to see the guy who rode here in the ambulance, to thank him. Leo said he was waiting outside. Did you see him?”

In the sickly hospital light she thought she saw the big man flinch. He nodded with a ghost of his usual grin. “Yeah. Sorry to ruin your day, Genius, but that was me.”

If she hadn’t been afraid it would attract the attention of the big, mustachioed nurse, Genie would’ve groaned. Wellington? Beef Wellington had held her hand all the way to the hospital? And she had liked it? Had vibrations?

She muttered, “I think I need another CAT scan,” and pulled the covers up over her face.

His dry chuckle sounded in the room and her stomach gave a little flutter. Probably from the concussion. “No you don’t. Dr. Murphy says you’ll be fine with a little rest. You’re just embarrassed that you begged me to hold your hand and ride with you.” His voice, mellow and warm, dropped a conspiratorial notch. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”

She spluttered and yanked the covers back down, squinting in the overbright light. “I never begged.”

“Suit yourself, Watson.” Nick moved around the room with purpose, locating her clothes on a nearby stool and holding out the gray wool skirt that she never wanted to see again as long as she lived. “Get dressed, the doc says you can go home.”

“I can?” Genie couldn’t look at the skirt so she focused on his eyes, which were a warmer shade of blue than she remembered. Melting ice rather than a glacier. “He changed his mind?”

“Not exactly.” Wellington looked down and noticed that the skirt was stiff with dried blood. He dropped it back on the pile and wiped his hands on his stained lab coat. “Never mind that. You can wear a blanket out. Want me to help you?”

“No, thank you.” She didn’t want his help. She didn’t want his presence. She particularly didn’t want him to see her zebra undies through the mile-wide slit in the back of the johnny.

But when she sat up, the room spun sickeningly and the honey rice cake she’d scarfed down between experiments that morning threatened a return visit.

“Easy there. I’ve got you, you’re okay.” His hands were steady on her shoulders and she sagged forward against his solid chest until she could feel his heartbeat against her cheek.

Suddenly her head didn’t hurt so much anymore.

“I want to go home.” She didn’t care that she was whining, that there were tears in her voice. She wanted her condo. She wanted a shower. She wanted to be alone when the tears came.

“I know you do. We’re going.” His voice rumbled against her cheek and the room spun again as he gathered her, blankets and all, in his arms and lifted her as though she weighed no more than her kitten. She closed her eyes and pressed her face in the hollow between his jaw and shoulder, where the smell of soap and musk was strongest.

“Are you taking me to a cab?” She didn’t think she had the strength to get herself out of a taxi and into her condo, but if that’s what it took to reach her own bed, she’d find a way—even if it meant crawling up the stairs on her hands and knees with her safari underwear shining like a striped beacon out the back of the hospital johnny.

She thought he smiled, heard a thread of laughter in his voice as he replied, “You’re not getting rid of me that easily, Genius.” The automatic doors whooshed open and she felt the change as they escaped from the hospital into the night air, crisp with fall in New England even through the funk of nearby Chinatown. “I’m taking you home.”

THE WATCHER SAW A BIG MAN in a doctor’s coat carry Dr. Watson past a row of busy ambulances toward the garage. She was wrapped in a blue blanket and from his vantage point deep in the darkness of a recessed stairwell, the watcher imagined her naked. He throbbed with frustration as he imagined what might have been. It should have been a warning for her. A pleasure for him.

His fingers rose to touch the neat bandage above his ear as desire turned to anger. The bitch had hurt him. She was going to pay for that.

Before, he’d merely wanted to stop her.

Now, he was going to end her.

Chapter Two

Nick left the blanket-wrapped woman asleep in his Bronco and unlocked the door to her home with keys he found in her practical canvas handbag. He started to make a quick check of the place, then slowed down as surprise rattled through him.

He wasn’t sure what he’d expected Genie Watson’s home to look like, but it sure as heck wasn’t this.

At work, Dr. Genius was a petite woman, maybe five-four tops, a hundred pounds or so wet, with middling brown hair always pulled back in some twisty thing and a penchant for wearing shapeless clothing in shades of brown, black and beige. Nick had always thought that her eyes, big gray pools framed by thick lashes and high, sculpted cheekbones, were her best feature.

Now, having seen—and felt—firsthand how well she filled out those surprisingly bawdy underthings, he might have to reconsider.

He would have figured her living space to be along the same lines as her wardrobe—conservative, boxy rooms with sensible furniture decorated in shades of gray and brown, maybe with a touch of navy added in a wild moment that had since been regretted. He never would have pictured the spacious two-bedroom condo tucked into the eaves of an elegant Victorian only a few blocks from his place.

The four rooms on the first level flowed into each other like water, a river of golden wood floors, white trim and pastel walls. The huge windows were high and arched, topped by semicircles of abstract stained glass, and he imagined that daylight would splash crazily across the bold Indian rugs, the comfy, jewel-toned furniture and the dizzying array of dust collectors.

If Watson’s constant complaints and annoying little memos hadn’t told Nick everything he needed to know, her condo would’ve done the trick. The place practically screamed “a high maintenance woman lives here,” and Nick’d had enough of them to last a lifetime and then some. In fact, he thought as he looked around again and scowled at the pretty stained-glass lamps, Lucille probably would’ve like this place—if it’d been three times bigger and ten times the price.

Well, he thought, no matter. He was here out of kindness, not interest, so it shouldn’t matter to him that Watson was high-maintenance. He wasn’t in the market for a relationship, and if he was, Genius Watson would rank somewhere around fifth from the bottom on the list of women he knew—with the ninety-year-old grandmother at the Chinese Laundromat right above her.

Scowling at the direction his thoughts had taken, which could only be excused by the bizarre events of the day, he returned to the Bronco to retrieve Dr. Watson. She didn’t wake up when he carried her in and placed her on the plush cushions of an oversize couch, and he wondered fleetingly whether he should rouse her. He was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to let a person with a concussion sleep all night.

It was too bad he hadn’t thought to ask the fresh-faced intern for Watson’s care-and-feeding instructions, but since the doctor wasn’t going to spring her unless she’d had a medically trained observer to stay with her for at least twenty-four hours, Nick had snarled, “I’m a doctor. I’ll watch her.”

Well, he was a doctor. But courses in what to do after a concussion hadn’t been required in the Biochem Department at M.I.T.

He could’ve left her where she was, but he remembered the day he’d broken his wrist in a Little League game. His parents had been at a fund-raiser, the nanny had been on vacation, and a private nurse wasn’t available until the next day. So he’d stayed in the big hospital bed in an empty room far away from the rest of the children. He’d been ten years old. He’d been alone. And he’d hated every minute of it.

High-maintenance, memo-writing Genius Watson might not be his favorite person on a good day, but this counted as anything but a good day. His mind blinked to the sight of her in the developer room and his gut twisted. After an experience like that, even if she couldn’t remember most of it, she deserved to spend the night in her own bed if that’s what she wanted. From his eavesdropping in the hallway, he’d gotten the idea that she was firmly set on going home, so here he was, in a pretty condo with an even prettier woman asleep on the couch.

How had he overlooked Genie Watson’s beauty before? Even with a rainbow of bruises marring her jaw and a line of stitches crawling across her right eyebrow, she was lovely. Her narrow, bruised hands rested beneath her left cheek and her even breathing tugged at a ringlet of her hair that had fallen from its customary twist. The surprisingly rich brownish-bronze glittered as it rippled over the patchwork quilt he’d found on the back of the sofa and thrown over her.

Nick supposed that he might have missed appreciating the delicate bones of her jaw when it was clenched in irritation because he’d forgotten the wipe tests again. He might not have noticed the pouting fullness of her lips when they were flapping at him for spilling stain on the UV projector or running the sterilizer too hot. But as Nick looked at Genius Watson now, he wondered how he ever could have dismissed her as ordinary. How he could have failed to look beyond the prickly gray wool and scratchy lace collars to see the woman beneath. Because, Lord, she was beautiful when she was unconscious.

It was too bad she’d wake up eventually.

“Wellington?” Her soft voice jolted him back to reality. He’d been so busy staring at her, he’d missed that her eyes were open, cloudy with fatigue and pain. “Why are you still here?”

He shrugged and tried to choke down the hot ball of…something that rose when she sat up on the couch and the quilt drifted down to her waist. The hospital gown slipped far off her shoulder, down to the creamy up slope of a breast the likes of which he never would have imagined hid beneath those awful clothes. She shifted again and the material dipped lower, baring the faintest hint of darker, nubbled flesh—

Get a grip, Wellington! The voice didn’t sound like the Senator now, it sounded like a slightly hysterical version of Nick’s own. That breast is attached to Genius Watson. Remember her? The most overbearing, overbright, annoying female you’ve ever had the misfortune of sharing lab space with?

The voice was right. He had to get a grip. He shook his head to clear it. The incident that afternoon must have shaken him more than he’d thought. That was the only rational explanation for his sudden interest in Dr. Genius’s breasts.

“I—” He cleared his throat. “I had to promise the doc I’d stay, so you’re stuck with me for the night unless there’s someone else you’d rather I call.”

She closed her eyes in pain, or perhaps annoyance. “No, but that doesn’t mean you have to stay. Thanks for the ride home, but you can leave now. I’ll be fine by myself.”

Nick settled himself on the wide marshmallow of a love seat opposite her couch and linked his fingers behind his head. “I don’t blame you for wanting some space, but I’d be going back on my word if I left you alone.” He crossed his legs at the ankles. “Either I stay or you go back to Boston General. Got it?”

She frowned. “I said I’ll be fine, Beef. I don’t need your help.”

“Nick,” he corrected, ignoring the rest. “You call me Beef tonight and I’ll take you back to the E.R. and tell the doctor that you seized and I think you need every sort of invasive, embarrassing test imaginable.”

“Fine. Nick. Whatever.” She gave in with ill grace, struggled to her feet and swayed. “I’m going to go take a shower.”

He held a hand out to steady her. Should’ve known she’d be a difficult patient. She’d never made anything easy for him before, why start now? He’d probably have been better off leaving her in the hospital. But no, as he watched her shiver in the warm, cozy living room, he knew he couldn’t have done that.

Growing up, he had learned early and well that it was up to him to protect the people around him. And if ever in his life Nick had seen someone in need of protection, she was standing right in front of him, trying to look tough and self-reliant even though the kitten skulking behind the television could probably have knocked her over with one tiny paw.

Ever the politician’s son, Nick chose his words carefully. He couldn’t very well help her if she kicked him out on his ass. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. What if you black out and hit your head again? Then it’s back to the hospital and Nurse Mustache for sure.”

She shuddered and he saw a flash of vulnerability beneath the prickles—a confused, hurt woman looking out through Genius Watson’s bruised eyes—and the image only strengthened his desire to help. “I need a shower, Welling—uh, Nick. My brain may not be telling me what happened today, but my body remembers.” She rubbed her arms and he noticed a series of marks on her shoulder, near her throat. Four bruises the size of a man’s fingers.

He felt the anger boil low in his gut and hated the fact that an intruder had come into the lab and he hadn’t done a thing to stop it. He should have sheltered the people he worked with. He should have been smarter. Faster. Better.

Genie shivered again, and Nick gave in to the urge to soothe. He touched her bruised cheek with the back of his hand, was surprised by the quick jolt that ran the length of his arm at the contact, and was even more surprised when the visible outline of a taut, peaked nipple showed through the thin hospital robe, mute testimony that she’d felt it, too.

Whoa there, he thought, trying to quell the quick thump of his libido. Protect, remember? Protect, not ogle. You don’t even like her. And besides, she’s had a hell of a day. Leave her alone. Figuring that his conscience had a point there, Nick took a deep breath and willed away the surprisingly compelling image of Dr. Genius wearing nothing but a lab coat. “Well…”

She frowned and the hurt moved to the back of those pretty gray eyes. “Don’t give me grief on this, Wellington. In case you’ve forgotten, someone broke into Thirteen today and…ruined the developer.” Her eyes darted to the shadows near the kitchen and she tapped her temple. “Whoever did it is up here— I saw him. I heard him. And I don’t remember any of it. I need to remember it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a shower and I’d like a little privacy.”

She tried to brush past him, but her grand exit was ruined when she wobbled on the first stair. Cursing under his breath, Nick grabbed her elbow just as she was about to lose her balance and half carried her up the stairs.

GENIE DISCOVERED THAT Wellington’s version of privacy was far different from her own when he helped her into the shower, pulled the see-though butterfly curtain closed and waited for her to pass out the hospital johnny and the zebra underwear.

Her hands were shaking when she finally pointed the nozzle at the tiled wall while the water heated. She could see him standing by the sink, his broad shoulders and narrow hips made wavy by the plastic curtain, and she wondered what it was that she felt when he came near her. What were those warm vibrations that ran through her at his touch and made her snarl? Concussion, or something else?

Something impossible that jittered in her stomach and confused her. She, who was never, ever confused.

It had to be the circumstances, she told herself. She was still shaky, that was all. She’d been attacked—there, she’d said it—in her own lab. She could be excused for being shaky.

A tear cruised down her cheek and she didn’t bother to brush it away.

When the water was hot, she turned it toward her chest, careful to keep the stitches dry. She’d wash her hair later, but for now she let the heavy stream of water beat down on her breasts and belly, washing away her attacker’s unremembered touch and easing the soreness of the angry bruises at her hips and breasts.

As she touched one of the black marks, she asked her brain, What happened? Who attacked me? Why? What had he hoped to gain?

Genie frowned in concentration and her temples throbbed as her mind bounced up against an implacable barrier.

It was no use. Frustrated and achy, she muttered a curse and looked through the rising steam. She couldn’t concentrate with Wellington in the room. He was too distracting. Took up too much space. “You can leave now,” she said, her voice echoing in the tiled bathroom. “I’ll call you if I have any trouble in here.”

She saw his masculine outline, blurred by the moist air and the ridiculous shower curtain, shift from one foot to the other. “Are you sure? You’re not feeling dizzy or anything?”

What would he do if she were dizzy? Get in the shower and hold her up? Scrub her back? Wash her hair?

Protected from fear by the web of amnesia, her brain chose that moment to prod her with a mental note. Get a date. Suddenly, Genie could smell acrylamide and musk over the delicate perfume of Parisian soap, and she had a quick, improbable fantasy of Dr. Nicholas Wellington naked in the shower with her, his large, blunt fingertips massaging her scalp and taking the ache away. She imagined his big hands working in maddening circles, moving down her neck, across her shoulders, and down… She started to feel dizzy, but not in the way he’d meant.

He would press himself against her backside—

And push hard, grind against her in the bloodred light while the developer clanked and groaned so loud that nobody could hear her muffled screams.

“What is it? Genie, what’s wrong? Do you feel faint?” She must have made some noise, because suddenly he was in the shower holding her tight while the water blasted them both, quickly plastering the clothing against his hard, sculpted body.

He pulled the butterflies closed, making the shower into a warm, safe nest lit with bits of reflected color. There were blue butterflies, Genie saw as she stared at them rather than at the man who held her, and green and yellow ones that shone through with bright, warm light.

Not red and black. And the roar of the water pounding down on them was the shower, not the X-ray developer. But she was still cold. So cold.

“Genie!” His voice was sharper now, demanding an answer, bringing her back through the red-black mist. “Are you in pain? Do you want to go back to the hospital?”

“No,” she managed to get out through chattering teeth, grateful for his arms around her, grateful when he turned the water even hotter to ease the chills that gripped her. “No, I remembered a little of what happened. Just a quick flash, that’s all.”

“That’s enough.” His words were clipped, but his eyes were steady when she looked up into them. His hands were gentle on her body as he seemed to wrap himself around her until she felt a little warmer. A little safer. He rocked her back and forth until her trembling eased a bit, and said quietly, “I’m sorry.”

Lulled by the feel of the man against her, it took a moment for Genie to register the words. Then she said, “For what? You didn’t grab me in the darkroom. Even you wouldn’t go that far to get time on the sequencer.” She’d meant the last as a weak joke, but fell silent when the words came out sharp, bitchy, the way they always did when she tried to talk to Beef Wellington, thirteenth floor hunk.

No wonder he hated working near her. She couldn’t even say good morning without sniping at him. Get a life, her brain reminded her.

Yeah, easy for it to say. It was just too bad for her that of all the classes she’d aced over the years, she’d missed Get a Life 101. It had probably conflicted with calculus.

They stood there for a moment and Genie tried to frame an apology in her mind—one that sounded if not friendly at least less nasty. She shifted away from him, hoping that distance would bring more clarity to thoughts that seemed steeped in his heady scent. Instead the motion dragged the tips of her breasts across the wet material of his T-shirt and she froze as she became intimately, acutely aware that she was naked and he was not.

The small space within the butterfly curtain grew warmer and her breasts suddenly felt harder and softer at the same time, heavy with an unfamiliar, pulsing ache.

Over the pounding rush of the shower, she heard Wellington take a sharp breath. She looked up into his face and froze, mesmerized by the play of color and light across his features. The tendons of his strong neck stood out sharply beneath the slick skin of his throat, the muscles of his jaw rippled as he swallowed hard, and she wondered what he was thinking.

Was he wishing that he were anywhere but in the shower with Genius Watson? Was he thinking that his good deed for the day had turned into more of a project than he had planned? Was he thinking of the ride in the ambulance? Of the blood on her gray wool skirt and what might’ve happened if she hadn’t fought back, hadn’t been lucky?

Her eyes traveled up from his throat, slid across the wide planes of his cheekbones and up the aggressive jut of his nose to his eyes, which glittered through the steam like chunks of pale blue topaz. She wondered if maybe, just maybe, he was thinking the same thing she was thinking. Feeling the same things she was feeling.

Suddenly the events of the day didn’t seem quite so unbelievable in the face of another incredible fact.

She was naked in the shower with Beef Wellington. She, Genius Watson, who in college had been voted by one mean-spirited fraternity as The Most Likely to Die a Virgin, was standing in the shower. Naked. With Nicholas Wellington III, the most popular, eligible, drop-dead gorgeous man at Boston General Hospital.

The wet material of his T-shirt grazed the hard tips of her breasts when he rasped in another breath and his soaked jeans were rough against her thighs and belly. She felt a liquid throb, warm and low, and her lips tingled with a phantom imprint as though he had kissed her already.

He sucked in a third breath as though filling his lungs was the most important thing in the world, then slid his hands up to cup her shoulders and Genie thought, He feels it, too. He’s going to kiss me. Her belly churned with a dizzying combination of anticipation, painkillers and delayed shock. She felt his fingers tighten, saw the muscles beneath the wet T-shirt ripple, let her eyelids drift shut…

As he gently but firmly pushed her away, his eyes glued to the nearest butterfly, he growled, “Since you seem okay in here, I’m going to head downstairs and dry off. Yell if you need my help.” He practically leaped out of the shower and was gone.

Genie sagged against the cool bath tiles and pressed both hands to her burning cheeks once she heard the bathroom door shut in his wake.

What had just happened here?

You almost jumped Nick Wellington, that’s what happened, her brain supplied as her heart stopped pounding from excitement and started thumping from sick, horrified embarrassment.

What had she been thinking?

She shook her head as the blasting inferno of—lust? desperation? mental instability? delayed reaction?—slowly cooled and left her feeling nauseous. She hadn’t been thinking, which just showed what a terrible day it had been. She always thought first and acted second—it was the secret to an ordered, controlled life. A scientist’s life.

A safe life.

Genie knew from experience that when she thought through her actions she didn’t make mistakes. Didn’t do stupid things. Didn’t end up climbing out the third-story window of a house on fraternity row with her teeth chattering as sleet cut through her ripped shirt and slicked the rose trellis beneath her numb fingers.

Pressing her bruised cheek to the tile, she made a small sound of pain and frustration. Why could she remember every detail of that one humongous miscalculation during her college career and not a thing about this afternoon in the lab? Remembering her single date with Archer—gorgeous, popular, wealthy Archer—did her no good. It hadn’t helped back then and it served no purpose now. But remembering what had happened in the darkroom was important. It could help Detective Sturgeon find the man who had attacked her. Could help hospital security figure out how he had gotten onto the locked thirteenth floor of Boston General’s Genetic Research Building.

Might prevent it from—dear God—happening to someone else.

“Tell me!” she ordered her brain, and tried to fight through the layers of defense to that blank place at the back of her mind. “What happened, damn it? Who was it? Why?”

The fingermarks on her hips and breasts throbbed in time with her heartbeat, in time with the pounding of her head, but the blanks remained stubbornly blank except for a gentle California drawl and the phantom press of a man’s fingers.

She closed her eyes and knew why Archer was suddenly vivid in her mind after more than a decade had passed. Her brain might not be willing to show her what had happened in the darkroom, but it wanted her to remember that she’d been stupid about men before. Really stupid.

“I get it, I get it,” she muttered. “Wellington’s out of my league. You think I don’t know that?” She reached for the bar of expensive soap her mother sent her each month from Paris in an attempt to forge the connection they’d never managed when they lived on the same continent. “Besides, I don’t even like him.”

But she knew, as she slicked the soap over her breasts and down again, that for the first time in a long, long while she was lying to herself.

NICK PULLED A BEER out of the fridge—who would’ve guessed Dr. Genius drank beer?—and drained half of it while he stood at the sink and waited for his hands to stop shaking with a potent combination of lust and self-loathing.

What had he been thinking?

The answer was obvious. He hadn’t been thinking. At least not with his brain. He closed his eyes and swore while the feel of her rocketed through his system and set off every warning buzzer in his body.

In a hundred years or so he might get past seeing Genie Watson lying in a pool of blood next to the smashed developer. But he was never, ever, going to forget the sight of her naked body, wet with the shower and glowing with reflected butterflies that filtered through the plastic curtain. And the feel of her. He cursed. It had taken every ounce of willpower he’d possessed to set her aside and to leave the shower while he still could. And it had been a close call at that.

He’d almost kissed a woman who’d been sexually attacked not eight hours earlier—that knowledge was enough to make him feel like a jerk. And the fact that the woman in question was Genius Watson…well, that was just downright scary.

Hadn’t he learned anything from Lucille?

He chugged the rest of the beer in self-defense and it went straight to his head, reminding him that he’d been too caught up in DNA sequencing to eat lunch and he’d spent dinnertime in the E.R. waiting room.

Since he absolutely wasn’t going to follow up on any of the irrational suggestions his hormones were sending him, he decided to cook.

Food was the next best thing.

He heard the water being shut off upstairs while he peered into her refrigerator. Pleased that she was well stocked with food as well as beer, he decided on scrambled eggs and toast, making the meal heartier by adding onions, parsley, and a wedge of crumbly cheddar. He felt himself unwind a bit, relaxed by the mindless snick of the knife against the cutting board and the mundane pleasure of preparing a meal.

Mrs. Greta had taught him well. The Senator’s cook had been a round, motherly woman who’d given her employer’s growing son a swat or a hug depending on the circumstances, and some of Nick’s happiest memories from back then were set in the rambling kitchen with her off-key humming in the background. She’d taught him to cook and hadn’t told his father, for which Nick had been eternally grateful.

With the memory of the older woman bustling warm and happy around the edges of his mind, Nick breathed deeply through his nose and looked up toward the second floor, wishing idly that he could see through the walls to the steamy shower beyond. If he closed his eyes, he was sure he could picture Genie Watson in glorious, pink-wet nakedness….

With a man’s fingerprints glowing purple against the rosy skin. The marks of violence at her neck, hips and face. A crumpled white ball under the chemical sink. A pool of blood, dried black at the edges, liquid and dark red in the center.

The housekeeper’s happy ghost vanished and Nick scowled at a half-peeled onion. He was here because a co-worker had been attacked. Because she had wanted to come home and needed someone to stay with her.

Someone to protect her.

He slid the mixture into a skillet while his thoughts poked and prodded at the facts. The detective, Sturgeon, had said there was no reason to think that Genie had been the target, but it didn’t make much sense to picture someone hiding in the darkroom waiting to assault the first person that walked in. Then again, picturing someone hiding in the darkroom didn’t make any sense at all to begin with.

Why their lab? Why the darkroom? How the hell had he gotten onto a locked floor in the first place? And how had he gotten away?

At the thought of a blood-covered, would-be rapist escaping through his lab space, and what might have happened had Genie not defended herself, Nick missed an English muffin with a wickedly serrated bread knife and almost took off his own thumb. “Shioot!”

“Be careful. I’m a little too shaky to sew you back together and I’m not up for another trip to the emergency room tonight, okay?”

Sucking on the narrow slice he’d carved into his thumb, Nick looked up to see Genie, wrapped in a thick terry robe, standing at the threshold. Her hair was a damp waterfall across her narrow shoulders. Her eyes were shadowed, wary, and the bruises on her cheek forcibly reminded him of her vulnerability even as his heart thumped at the sight of her. She needed his help, nothing more. His protection. Besides, he didn’t even like her.

“You cook?” Her voice was stronger, as if the shower had distanced her from the afternoon’s events, and he was grateful for that, since he wasn’t feeling particularly distant himself. In fact, he was fighting the insane urge to cross the room, scoop her off her feet and take her back to the shower so he could protect her. Naked.

“Yeah, I cook.” He waved the thumb in her direction. “If you don’t mind the occasional miss.” Giving her a wide berth, he placed two plates on the granite breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the dining area.

“But I thought—” She hitched herself up on a stool, seeming not to notice that the robe had fallen open across one rosy, damp thigh.

Resisting the urge to pull the robe closed—or off, whichever she preferred—he sat opposite her so he couldn’t see her pink-painted toenails. Never in a million years would he have guessed that Genius Watson painted her toenails pink.

“What? That a rich boy like me wouldn’t know how?” He shrugged. “Well, when you get along better with the help than with your own family, you pick up a few useful domestic skills.”

Most women would choose that moment to comment on his father’s wealth and position, or ask him what the campaign had been like. Genie did neither. She popped a forkful of egg into her mouth, made a sexy “Mmm” sound when she swallowed and said, “Poor baby. Do you do windows, too?”

He relaxed the tension he hadn’t even realized had crept into his neck and shoulders, bit into the toast and nodded toward the full-length windows surrounding the ground floor. “Yeah, but I’d charge you extra for those, particularly if you wanted me to polish the stained glass.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” After a few minutes of oddly companionable silence, she stared at her empty plate. “I guess I was hungry. Thanks.”

He got up and dished out seconds, grateful that she was lucid and eating. He added a couple of prescription pain pills and a glass of water to her place setting before he sat back down.

She scowled at the pills. “They’ll knock me out. I need something that won’t make my brain fuzzy.”

Without a word he leaned across the breakfast bar and grabbed the ibuprofen he’d put there earlier, popped the cap and handed it to her. “Kind of thought you’d feel that way.”

She swallowed four of the pills dry and chased them with a bite of egg. Gesturing again with her fork, oblivious to the fact that her terry robe was now gaping at the top, she said, “So what happened? I don’t remember much, but the darkroom was trashed, wasn’t it?”

Nick tore his attention from the hint of smooth, round flesh at her widening neckline and glued his eyes to her face, which was looking worse by the minute as the bruises darkened to the color of rotten eggplants. Protect, he reminded himself, not ogle. “Yeah, the cassettes were opened and the films thrown around, and it looks like he went after the developer with that pipe wrench we use to change the chemical tanks. He, uh, must’ve done that before you got there.”

“How do you know that?” She grimaced and pushed her plate aside.

“Well, from the amount of—” Nick cleared his throat and willed the image away “—blood on you and in the room, he’d have been too hurt to demolish anything afterward.”

Genie shook her head and her drying hair shimmered in the light of the stained-glass lamp. How had he ever thought her hair was a nondescript brown? The metallic threads of bronze and gold glowed as she moved, and the natural waves washed almost to the place where her breasts pushed against the rapidly loosening terry robe.

Ordinary she was not. But that didn’t change the fact that she was a pain in the neck.

“That doesn’t make any sense. I would’ve known something was wrong if the developer wasn’t running properly. And besides, how did he just waltz back down the hallway, onto the elevator, and past security? Wouldn’t someone have thought it strange? I mean, sure it’s a hospital, but bleeding people tend to stick to the E.R., not the research buildings.

She had a point. “Well, there was blood in the sink. Maybe he washed some of it off.” Nick closed his eyes and tried to picture the ruined room. What was he missing? “How about clothes? A lab coat or something he could’ve put on over his other stuff? A baseball cap to cover a scalp wound?”

“A scalp wound would work,” Genie agreed, her eyelids drooping and her words coming more slowly now. “It’d bleed like hell but not do too much real damage. The clothes make sense, but where would he get them? Bring them with him? Why would he do that unless he was planning on getting hurt? And why was he in there in the first…” She trailed off and would have fallen asleep face-first in her leftover eggs if Nick hadn’t seen it coming and reached over to catch her chin in his hand.

Why indeed?

He stared at her face, at the translucent skin, the bloom of violent bruises, the obscene line of black stitches above her swollen eye. She looked like an angel who’d gotten the losing end of a bar fight. Why would anyone want to hurt her? Hurt their research? They found disease genes, for heaven’s sake. They didn’t clone dinosaurs, they didn’t work with embryos and they didn’t use lab animals in their experiments.

They tried to cure people. Why would anyone want to hurt researchers who were only trying to cure people?

Nick had no idea. Nor, it seemed, did either of the detectives working on the case. At least not yet.

Sighing, he picked up Dr. Watson and manfully rearranged her robe so it covered as much as possible. He carried her up the spiral staircase to her bedroom, flicked on a faux Tiffany lamp that lit the room in bits of sparkling color and laid her on the big brass bed. She didn’t wake when he slid her between the covers and tucked them all the way up to her chin, but she murmured and curled up with both hands beneath her cheek.

Her two cats, which he had previously noticed only as flitting shadows at the edge of vision, appeared on the bed as if by magic. The big black shorthair curled itself behind her knees and the tiny gray tabby, maybe two months old or so, purred like a locomotive as it marched up to her face and sniffed at the line of stitches. It licked her chin worriedly.

The kitten looked directly at Nick and mewed a question. He stroked its little head with the back of a finger, and said, “Yeah, I hear you. She’ll be okay though.” He stared down at the motionless woman, barely a lump beneath the bedclothes. “She’ll be okay,” he repeated. “I’ll protect her.”

He paused and said to nobody in particular as he stared down at the woman in the bed, “I’ll protect her. God help us both.”

Chapter Three

While Genie slept, her brain, that precocious organ that had dictated much of her life up until this point, churned and spun in its liquid-filled housing and tried to make sense of the day’s events. A difficult task considering there was a large piece of that day tucked away in the back recesses of memory, protected by a twist of neurons and a few subconscious Keep Away signs.

She frowned; her sleeping self registering the pain of pulled stitches and ordering her face muscles to relax even as her dreams flickered red and black.

She had gone to the developer room, excited to read the films from the day before. They were about to begin analysis of a new Gray’s Glaucoma family and she wanted to see how the DNA samples were working, particularly since Molly had gotten a strange phone call from the family’s wealthy patriarch the day before.

The old man might just be a tube of DNA to the lab rats, but to the rest of the world he was a tycoon. A powerhouse. Someone that Genie wanted to keep very, very happy in the hopes that he’d donate generously to the Eye Center’s new wing. She made a mental note to return his call and be extra nice.

Placing a hand on the exterior port, she assured herself that the developer was running properly. The tray was hot to the touch, a puff of air ran across its surface to keep the films from sticking to the hard plastic, and the hallway was filled with the sound of turning rollers.

She glanced over the new cartoon taped to the wall near the darkroom door and a faint smile touched her lips. Dr. Nicholas Wellington might be a big, handsome jerk with no sense of protocol and an annoying habit of appropriating her equipment just when she needed it most, but his arrival had given the lab a certain sense of character. She glanced at his office door and grinned at a poster that featured a buff body with a cutout picture of Wellington’s head taped in place, the caption reading, Is This The Face Of Erectile Dysfunction? followed by an eight-hundred number for one of those new potency drugs.

Shaking her head, Genie grinned wider. Though she highly doubted that Wellington suffered from E.D., she had to give him points for leaving the poster where his techs had hung it.

He either had a great sense of humor or he was, so to speak, awfully cocky about his abilities.

Reassured that the developer was running, she reached for the spinning door and rotated it so she could step into the darkroom without letting in any white light. As she entered the light lock, she was surprised to see that the Occupied sign was lit. She sniffed. Wellington. She banged on the back of the light lock. “My turn, Beef. Check the chart!”

But there was no response. Maybe he’d left the sign lit after he was done. Genie snorted. Slob. She tried calling his name again before she entered the light lock, heard the rubba-thump, rubba-thump of the revolving door as she let herself into the darkroom—

She was in a field of daisies. Her cat, Oddjob, sat at her feet while Galore gamboled through the flowers, leaping in huge bounds to see over the stalks while he swatted at the yellow and black butterflies with kitten’s paws.

In her sleep Genie cried out in frustration at her brain’s refusal to show her what had happened in the darkroom. She twisted against the bedclothes and whimpered when she brushed a clenched fist against the ripe bruise on her cheek. Then The Voice returned and she stilled.

“Shh, sweetheart, it’s only a dream. You’re safe. I’m here.”

She struggled against sleep again, fighting to wake to tell him that she wasn’t afraid of the dream, that she was frustrated by the missing pieces. But the bed dipped as he settled beside her and she felt a whisper of a touch at her forehead that took away the pain. She sighed and snuggled deeper, turning her bruised cheek into his hand.

“Sleep now. I’ll keep watch.”

In the field, the cats purred and Genie turned her face up into the warm yellow sunlight. She felt Nick behind her and knew if she turned her head she’d see him, larger than life and twice as handsome—the high Viking cheeks, the flat blade of a nose and the warm blue eyes. But as she moved, something else caught her eye, a flash of mossy color at her shoulder. She looked down—

And saw that she was wearing green scrubs stained brown with blood.

“GREENS,” GENIE PRONOUNCED the next morning, waving a forkful of strawberry pancake in Nick Wellington’s direction before popping it into her mouth. It sure beat a handful of granola on the way out the door. If Wellington sticks around, she thought, I’ll have to exhume the StairMaster from the attic.

“Excuse me?”

She dropped her fork onto the plate with a loud clatter and blushed before she realized he hadn’t heard her slip of the medulla. And where had that come from? There was no way Nick Wellington was sticking around. No way she wanted him to. In the cold, rational light of morning, that little incident in the shower seemed like an out-of-body experience, like something that had happened to someone else. Now it was—hopefully—time for them to get back to reality.

Back to Dr. Genius Watson and Dr. Beef Wellington. Matter and antimatter. Magnetic north and south. It would serve her well to remember that, because there was no way in hell she was making the Archer mistake twice.

Besides, Wellington wasn’t even interested. Sure he’d felt sorry for her, and maybe a tiny bit responsible because he’d found her. Nothing more. He certainly hadn’t felt the hum of rightness in the ambulance and he hadn’t been prey to the fantasies she’d briefly entertained in the night.

He couldn’t have, or else he wouldn’t have bolted from the shower as if she had just grown a third eyeball in the center of her forehead. She had been naked—naked!—in his arms and her breasts had been rubbing up against his wet T-shirt and her thighs and her— Well, never mind. Genie resisted an unladylike snort. He hadn’t done a thing. He hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t even made a suggestive comment.

Nothing.

Ergo, he wasn’t interested. It didn’t take a genius to figure that one out. And it was just as well, she thought, since she absolutely, positively, wasn’t interested, either.

Screw me once, said Marilynn’s well-bred, Georgian contralto in the back of Genie’s mind, shame on you. Screw me twice… Genie’s lips twitched. She was pretty sure the conclusion of Marilynn’s malaprop didn’t really apply here, but it felt good to remember her friend, as if Marilynn’s ghost was standing at her shoulder, protecting her from being stupid.

“Genie?” Nick waved his hand in front of her face. “You still here?”

She mumbled something unintelligible while she tried to remember what they’d been talking about. Oh, yeah. “Greens,” she repeated and he nodded.

“That’s what I thought you said. Are we talking about lettuce, kale, spinach, that sort of thing?” He sipped at the coffee, which had turned out fragrant, flavorful and perfect, three things she had thought totally beyond her Mr. Coffee.

“No, greens as in surgical scrubs. I dreamed about them last night.”

Wellington looked at her as if that was the worst possible thing he could think to dream about, which it probably was. She bet he dreamed Technicolor fantasies starring tall blondes with chest measurements roughly equivalent to their IQs.

“So?”

She leaned forward. “That’s how he got out of the darkroom. My greens. I keep a set in there for changing the developer chemicals. What do you want to bet they’re not there anymore?”

Genie smiled when he nodded agreement, and was surprised to feel the tension across her shoulders loosen a little. Talking to Wellington over pancakes seemed to be making the events of the day before a little more bearable. A little less awful.

Not smart, her brain supplied, remember Archer. And she did. She remembered Archer in all his golden, popular glory. He might not have broken her heart, but he’d certainly shattered her pride.

“Yeah, that sounds reasonable. I’ll mention it to the detectives when I see them later today.”

Nick stood and piled his dishes in the sink before he grabbed his keys off the breakfast bar. Genie wondered fleetingly why he’d left them there when there was a perfectly good key rack just inside the door. Then she sighed. It was a timely reminder of their differences. She had racks, he had piles.

Magnetic north and south. She’d do well to remember it.

“I’m going to run an errand or two, check in at the lab and speak with the detectives. You going to be okay?”

So that was it, then. Genie tried to ignore the faint sadness that trickled through her. “Sure, I’ll be fine. My car’s parked in Chinatown so I’ll catch a cab to the commuter rail.”

He paused halfway out the door. “You’re not planning on going to work today, are you?”

Though the very thought of it made her queasy, she said, “Of course I am.”

He blew out a slow breath and abandoned subtlety. “You were beat up yesterday, Genie. You’ve got stitches in your eyebrow and I can tell your head’s killing you. Can’t you take the day off?”

Sure she could, but she didn’t want to. Already the idea of taking the elevator up to their shared floor and walking past the developer room was filling Genie with prickles of dread. She knew it would only get worse the longer she stalled. Her brain might be filling the emptiness with irrelevant thoughts of Nick Wellington in her shower and annoyingly apropos mental notes, but her soul knew the truth.

A big, tough guy like Wellington might not understand, but she was scared. Deep-down, bone-thumping scared.

What if the man was still in the darkroom? What if he’d hidden in the little office closet where she kept a change of clothes? She could feel him looking over her shoulder right now, breathing on her neck; the bruises on her stomach ached when she shivered.

What if the police found him near the lab and he told them that he’d been watching her for weeks, just waiting for his chance?

Or even worse, what if they didn’t find him at all? Would she spend the rest of her life trying to remember him, jumping at every shadow that might remind her of what she couldn’t know? Or would she remember him one day, remember what he had said, what he had done.

And wish that she could forget it again.

She shivered and rubbed an absent hand across a sore spot on her neck. “I could stay home, but I don’t want to.” Her self-appointed guardian scowled and she frowned right back. “I need to walk into that lab today, Wellington. I need to prove to myself that I can go back there and function.” She paused. “Otherwise he’s taken away more than just my feeling of safety. He’s taken away the lab.”

And although Wellington would have no way of knowing it, the lab was more than just a workplace to Genie. It was her life. Her salvation.

Her world.

He sighed and nodded. When he scrubbed a hand down the golden stubble on his jaw, Genie noticed for the first time that he looked tired. Worn. And very sexy in a grumpy, I’m-wearing-yesterday’s-clothes kind of way.

“Okay,” he said, “I can understand that. But let me drive you. I’m going to swing by my place.” He named a nearby section of town, surprising her. She hadn’t realized they were almost neighbors. “Once I’ve changed, I’m going to take care of a few things, then I’ll come back here and get you. Okay?”

He nodded and scratched the stubble on his jaw, clearly satisfied with his own plan. Taking lack of disagreement for an agreement, he gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze and left. The condo seemed much bigger and emptier in his absence.

Her shoulder tingled where he had touched it.

And the silence was as loud as a thousand freezer alarms shrieking at once.

Genie shivered. She was alone. Beef Wellington and his space-hogging tendencies were gone. There was no one else here. She was alone. The shadows seemed to pulse with it.

“Get over it, Watson,” she ordered herself. “You’ve been on your own for a long time and it hasn’t hurt you yet.”

Yet, throbbed the bruises on her breasts and belly as her brave words echoed through the silent space. She shivered again, suddenly sure that there were eyes in the empty darkness of the hallway beyond the kitchen.

What if he knew where she lived?

“Prr-meow?”

Genie jumped a mile and the kitten skittered away. She forced a little laugh. That was why she kept pets, after all. For those times when the quiet was too loud.

“Meep?” Galore inquired again, and set her miniature claws in the jeans Genie had pulled on that morning, unwilling to face Nick in her robe again. He’d been in the kitchen already and had dispelled any awkwardness between them by serving her breakfast, checking her pupils, and not mentioning her nightmares or the man-size imprint on her bed.

Looking at the jeans, she muttered, “Hell with it. I’m going casual,” and slid off the bar stool, slinging the limp kitten over her shoulder where it buzzed contentedly.

She couldn’t bear the thought of her usual work clothes—professional, grown-up, boring, the kind of things she’d originally chosen to make herself seem older. Now it was a habit, though she often wished she could wear her jeans and soft cashmere turtlenecks to the lab, and dreamed of leaving her hair long, or tucking it back in a simple braid that made her look carefree.

Young.

Maybe even pretty? said a soft Georgian accent in the back of her head. Genie shook her head with a half smile. Marilynn always had been an optimist.

“Hell with it,” she muttered again. “I’m wearing jeans today. I deserve it.” She was sore and grumpy and the thought of French-twisting her hair over the bump on the back of her head was enough to make her scream. She pulled a soft bra over her head and scowled at the bruises on her arm and stomach. “Bastard.”

She was going to find out who had wrecked the developer room and she was going to make him pay. Her brain was going to help her whether it wanted to or not. She was going to figure out what had happened and why—and if she had to go right through handsome Nick Wellington and his pat-the-little-ladyon-the-head-and-leave-her-at-home-while-the-big-strong-man-talks-to-the-police attitude, then so be it.

Chapter Four

She hadn’t waited for him. Of course she hadn’t. Nick scowled as he jammed the Bronco into a miniscule space between two identical minivans on the Massachusetts Turnpike. One of the drivers swerved, honked and made a rude gesture that was immediately picked up by the toddler in the back.

Nick ignored them and took the off ramp to Boston General’s parking garage, just outside the theater district. He didn’t know why he was surprised. Any woman who skipped pain pills in favor of a few puny aspirin when she had a face full of stitches and a concussion would be unlikely to sit tamely at home waiting to be picked up.

Of course she’d called a cab.

Nick locked the Bronco and jogged down the cement staircase to exit the garage. Though the hospital had built a series of catwalks and connecting tunnels to allow its employees to move from building to building without venturing outside, Nick preferred the quarter-mile hike through Chinatown. It added an interesting variety of smells to his day.

As he walked, he pondered Genie’s defection until he had to laugh at himself. When he stopped to buy a soda from a street vendor, he finally admitted the truth.

He was disappointed, darn it.

He’d wanted to drive in with her. He wanted to be sure she was okay, wanted to walk into the lab together in case the memory came crashing back all at once. In case it didn’t. Sure, they’d never gotten along particularly well before, but there was a first for everything. Maybe this horrible incident would have a positive side. Maybe they could call a truce. Find some common ground.

Take another shower.

Wincing at the thought of her reaction if he ever suggested such a thing, Nick swiped his passkey for admittance into BoGen’s Genetic Research Building, stepped through the sliding door—

And froze when he saw Detective Sturgeon standing in the lobby surrounded by most of the researchers, interns and techs who worked on the thirteenth floor. Genie wasn’t among them.

Nick’s heart thundered in his ears as he crossed the lobby with quick strides. Her attacker had come back to finish the job. Watson had been hurt, raped, or worse.

“What happened?” he practically yelled.

A babble of voices erupted as, excited, each of the techs tried to answer at once. The words “spill,” “gel boxes” and “radiation safety Nazis” filtered out of the hubbub and Nick relaxed a fraction as he called the elevator.

“Jared, keep everyone down here until I call down with the all clear, okay?” The tech grimaced and nodded. The chain that dangled from his pierced nostril swung from side to side at the motion.

Then the elevator arrived and Nick took a deep breath and told himself to relax as the car began to move. Genie was fine. It was just a radioactive spill. A serious but containable lab incident that had nothing to do with the previous day’s events in the darkroom.

Or did it?

UNTIL NICK ARRIVED, Genie hadn’t known she’d been waiting for him. But when he stepped over the yellow Caution/Radioactive tape and joined her in the little room where they ran the DNA separating gels, she felt the tension drain from her in waves and had the insane urge to throw her arms around his waist and blubber while he dealt with Dixon and plied her with painkillers for her headache.

Since that probably would have horrified him, she didn’t. But she thought about it. That is, until he looked down at her, grinned and said, “Hey, baby, you new here?”

She rolled her eyes. “Shut up, Wellington.”

He pretended surprise, but his perfect teeth flashed. “Why, Dr. Watson. Is that you? I didn’t recognize you for a moment.”

He meant because of the big, ugly bruises on her cheek and the stitches crawling across her forehead like a mutant Gypsy moth caterpillar. Genie didn’t want to cry on him anymore—she wanted to punch him. She knew she looked terrible. He didn’t have to rub it in. He’d made it plain enough the night before that he didn’t consider her desirable. She sighed and jammed her hands into her jeans pockets. Oh, well.

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