Never Tempt Danger

by Denise Robbins

  “Who else do you have some kind of psychic link to?”

  Gilly stopped laughing and her face froze in place with a frown. Shit! He had not meant to blurt it out like that.

  “What the heck are you talking about?” she asked under her breath.

  “I was just curious who else you have connected with mentally?”

  Her lips tightened and a red splotch appeared just above the collar of her shirt. She was pissed.

  “I thought you wanted to help?”

  “I do. I am.” He picked up a LED light and connected it to the base of the charging station. “I just thought I would make conversation while we worked.”

  “I like quiet when I work.” To emphasize her point, she shoved her glasses back up on her face and dropped her head.

  “Did you and your dad talk when you built things in his shop?”

  She ignored him. Hmm. Did he let it drop or keep pushing? Screw that. He was not known for backing down or soft-pedaling. He had proven that. When everyone else thought Victor Varela dead after an attack on his gun smuggling hideout in Arizona, hadn’t he been the one to dog his trail and his heels and capture him at his ex-girlfriend’s place in Mexico. Now Victor resided very unhappily in a maximum-security prison.

  “Tell me why you told Jimmy about your ability?”

  Lucas watched as her jaw muscles clenched, and she gritted her teeth. This was the second time she became annoyed at his question in regards to Jimmy. He sat back, rubbing his hand over his chin. His radar was on high alert. There was something there. Something she did not want to share with him.

  “Oh, shut up,” she commanded with a sharp tone and stiff lips.

  He held up his hands, palm out. “I didn’t say anything.”

  Her green eyes darkened to a glare. “He accidentally found out,” she explained, her face heating. “There. Satisfied? Now can we get back to work?” She harrumphed and turned her attention back to her task.

  He noticed her hands shaking as she picked up the soldering iron. “Hey. Hey.” He rested his palm on the top of her hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. Truly.” He shrugged. “I guess I’m a little jealous, that’s all.” Not a complete lie, he thought, and stroked the pad of his thumb over her smooth skin.

  Her gaze met his then and part of him wanted to let the subject drop, to not cause her any more pain, but the logical side of him, the side that wanted a killer stopped, had to push her. He lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “How did he find out, Gilly?”

  She set the soldering iron aside, blew out a heavy sigh, and lowered her head. “We were doing some testing in the lab and I responded to something.”

  Lucas twisted his face and ran his free hand down it in confusion. “What did you respond to?” Again, he kept his question calm and non-accusatory.

  “It wasn’t so much me as it was the robot.”

  What? He narrowed his gaze and glared at the top of her head, willed her to look at him. Was she deliberately being evasive?

  Gilly lifted her head. “It’s difficult to explain.”

  “We have all the time in the world. Please try.”

  She gulped audibly then giving his hand a firm squeeze, she rose to her feet and walked to the glass doors facing the backyard. “We were doing the final testing and Jimmy wanted to surprise me with a new feature he added into Morpheus. He slid this funny visor thing onto his head and then closing his eyes he concentrated on the robot and it moved. It did what he willed it to do.”

  “How?”

  Her back to him, she spoke. “He built a neural network into Morpheus.”

  “A neural what?”

  Gilly chuckled. “A neural network. It allows the robot to read human brainwaves.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but thought better and let her continue.

  “These sensors attached to the visor emitted a frequency that the robot could pick up and respond to. Jimmy could mentally think of Morpheus moving across the floor, and he did. Whatever Jimmy thought, Morpheus acted.”

  Not liking where the conversation and the wild notions running through his own head were going, Lucas got to his feet. He was afraid. Afraid of what, he could not pinpoint, but an icy fear raced through his veins. He itched to put his arms around her, hold her, but she needed to purge herself of the rest of it. She needed to unburden herself and let him help. And whether he liked it or not, he needed to hear it.

  “How…” He cleared his throat. “How does this tie to you?”

  She turned to him then, her head slightly cocked to one side, a trembling smile on her lips. “I’m trusting you, Lucas. Please don’t let me down.”

  Her words hit him full force, a stab of guilt to his heart. He swallowed his remorse and knowing she would not believe his words, he nodded.

  “Jimmy set the visor aside. You see, that’s the connection between the human brainwaves and the robot.” She paused, filled her lungs with air, and released it on a hiss. “The visor was on the table, but Morpheus moved anyway.”

  His head jerked back. That made no sense.

  “Morpheus responded to me.”

  “Did you have on a visor?”

  Her lips lifted on one side. “No. I was not wearing a visor or any other mechanism. Apparently, whatever this telepathic, telekinesis,” she waved a hand at her temple, “is that I possess registers with the neural network without the need for any transmitter. I have my own mental Wi-Fi.”

  Perplexed, astonished, he raked his fingers through his hair and slouched against the top of the desk. One hand pressed to his forehead, Lucas stared at her open-mouthed. She was not kidding.

  “No, I’m not.”

  He narrowed his eyes to slits. “Stop it. Just let me soak this all in.” He couldn’t. He did not understand it. “You…you can control the robot with your mind? Without any special gadgetry?”

  “No, that’s not quite true. The robot still has to be equipped with the sensors and programmed with a neural network. The difference is that I don’t require the visor with similar electrodes that transmit the brainwaves to the robot. My mental Wi-Fi, as Jimmy called it, is strong enough without the gadgetry.”

  Okay, okay, okay. What did this all mean?

  Gilly stepped to him, her feet shuffling across the hard wood surface and she touched him. He was the one supposed to be comforting her and yet she was the one who laid a soft hand on his cheek. He looked up and was certain she saw confusion written on his face. Straightening, he pulled himself together, took her hand in his, and pressed his lips to her palm.

  “I’m still here.”

  “Yes, you are,” she replied and smiled at him. “You sit. I’ll go make us some lunch.”

  “Gilly,” he started when she moved past him, “Thank you.”

  Her eyes lit for the briefest moment. Then she inclined her head and left the office. And he sat. He understood she was giving him time to cope, to come back from the very odd, very intriguing tale. Elbows poised on his knees, his head clasped between his hands, Lucas thanked Gilly for comprehending his need for a few moments alone. “Thank you.”

  Tuning out the banging of cupboards and drawers from the other room, he focused his mind on what she had just shared. She had a mental connection with a robot, a machine. No. That was not what she said. His palms pushed against his knees, he got to his feet. He paced the room. Mental Wi-Fi. He paused and snapped his fingers. “That was what she said.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught movement beyond the glass doors. Instinct and the events of the last couple of days had him drawing his weapon. When he peered outside, he watched a mother rabbit and her five babies hop across the yard, and slip under the shed. Grinning, he shook his head, and tucked his weapon away. It was that small act, that moment of distraction that gave him clarity.

  “I’ll be damned. I’ll be fucking damned.” The thought made his heart twist inside his chest. It pounded a nervous rhythm as it all hit him.

  No one else could do
what Gilly did. No one else had her gift. That was why someone wanted her. Alive. That was why someone had snuffed Jimmy out. But who knew? She only mentioned Jimmy. He paced the room again with hurried steps. Nervous energy zinged off his muscles as he curled his fingers into fists and flexed them out again.

  “Holy shit!” Anger and fear churned inside his belly as he stormed out of the office, down the hallway and into the kitchen. Lucas never gave her a chance. He grabbed her upper arm and spun her around to face him.

  * * * *

  “Ouch!” She gasped as Sloppy Joe mix leapt from the spoon she had been stirring with, and splattered against Lucas’s chest. A bubble of laughter started to erupt from her chest when she looked up and into the lavender-eyed bull standing not six inches from her. Steam billowed out of his ears. Gilly quickly stifled the giggles.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded, shrugging off the vice-like grip he still had on her arm.

  “You!” Lucas stabbed the air between them. “That’s what’s wrong with me. You!” He shoved his fists in the front pockets of his pants.

  “Excuse me?” she asked, her gaze fixed on the tangy meat sauce oozing down his shirt, leaving a trail of greasy orange-red in its wake. Wanting to wipe off the mess before it slithered any further, she reached for the towel on the counter, but stopped herself. It was probably not a good time to touch him.

  “Who else besides Jimmy was in the lab that day?”

  She drew her lower lip in and bit down. Now what? “No one saw besides Jimmy.”

  “Who—was—there?” he asked enunciating every word loud and clear.

  “Daniel, Jennifer, Allen, um…Mark, and Tim. But none of them saw,” she told Lucas finally making eye contact with him. “They couldn’t have seen. They were on the other side of the lab. When it happened they all came rushing over to ask what the deal was. Jimmy had not told anyone of his changes to Morpheus. The whole thing was a surprise. He took credit for the incident.” She gripped his muscled forearm. “No one knew it was me!”

  She no longer believed her own words, why would he? Jimmy and she had been so cautious from that day on. Her mind flashed back to last night’s dream. They had been in the lab, late at night, and there was a noise. Was Lucas right? Did one of Jimmy’s employees find out about her wretched curse? Did one of those five people kill Jimmy? She shook her head. It wasn’t Daniel. He was already dead. That left four others.

  “What else?”

  Her head snapped up, the sound of his deep voice yanking her from her thoughts. “The dream last night, I dreamt about one night when we heard a loud noise in the corridor outside the lab.”

  “What was it?”

  “Nothing, at least there was nothing there by the time we made it to the hall and checked it out. Jimmy thought maybe it had been the air conditioning.”

  Lucas’s face expressed the ridiculousness of the excuse. She couldn’t disagree with him. Even at the time, Jimmy’s excuse had seemed lame and frustrated her. “Don’t you see that could widen the scope of your search if you want to go chasing after some very good engineers without having any cause? For all we know, it could have been a cleaning person.”

  “Do you believe the crap that you’re shoveling?”

  Argh! Gilly didn’t know what she believed. All she wanted was to finish the job and accomplish something that would save hundreds of thousands of soldiers’ lives and let her do something in remembrance of her father and Jimmy. “No,” she admitted honestly.

  He smiled at her in that knowing way and although it grated on her already high-strung nerves, she returned the grin. Then he glanced down and her gaze followed his as it traced the ground beef, chicken gumbo, and ketchup concoction trail down his torso where it left a big splotch at right about ground zero, hit a knee and landed on the toe of his shoe, and splattered. When she peered up and her eyes met his, Lucas’s smile had turned into a grimace.

  “I think I’ll change before we eat. While we chow, you can tell me all about the other people within Jimmy’s company.” Seizing the towel from the counter, he bent and wiped up the mess off his shoe and the floor. “Or should I say, your company,” he said straightening, turned his back on her and marched out of the room.

  “That was a definite smack in the face.” Not one she deserved either. She didn’t ask Jimmy to leave her his company. Hell, she thought, as she dragged a hand through her hair, she wasn’t even certain she wanted it. The thought of Jimmy willing NanoRobotics to her before he had even proposed, before she even said yes, made her wonder if he knew something. Could he have known there was a killer after him? “Did he have knowledge of a would-be kidnapper?”

  Gilly directed her attention to reheating the Sloppy Joe mix and placing buns with cheese on two plates. “Wouldn’t he have told me if he had suspected he was in danger?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  She jerked her head around to find Lucas leaning against the kitchen doorframe dressed in a clean pair of jeans and burgundy polo that had the effect of deepening the lavender color of his eyes. Shoving away from the jamb, he strolled toward her with his hands in his pockets. When he reached her, he held the plates while she spooned Sloppy Joe onto the buns.

  “If he thought telling you would put you in harm’s way or more possible danger, he may not have told you.” He set the plates on the table. “Jimmy wanted to protect you. It’s what I would have done.”

  Gilly whirled around to face him just in time to see his shoulders settle back in place. “You would have lied? You think he lied?” She turned off the burner then took a seat at the table with him. “That’s not right. You badger me to tell you everything, yet you wouldn’t tell me something as important as being a possible target of a madman?”

  He shrugged again. Un-flippin-believable! Did he have no sense of fairness?

  “It’s a guy thing. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”

  She swallowed her mouthful of food before she spit it at him. “It’s a macho, bullshit thing.”

  “No,” he said with a shake of his head. “It’s our role as the man to protect the woman we love.”

  Gilly returned her gaze to her food. Love. Why did he keep using that word? A thought struck and she forced herself to look at him. “Why would he propose if he thought he was a dead man or if I was in some kind of danger?” She shook her head then curled the hair that fell forward back behind her ear. “No, I don’t believe he would have done that. And if that’s the case then he didn’t know something was up.”

  “Unless…” He trailed off.

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless it was only a suspicion.”

  A suspicion. She sat back. Her gaze shifted to the window. The thought swirled around in her mind. A suspicion. “Wouldn’t someone who claims to love you, tell you the truth?” As soon as the words tripped out of her mouth, she wished for a net, something to catch them and put them back. Or, a big hole that would swallow her up.

  When she peered over at Lucas, his demeanor had stiffened, and he shoved his plate back. The damage was done.

  “One would think.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “I’m sorry, Lucas.”

  “About what?” He stood, picked up her plate and his, and moved to the sink. Turning the water on, he ignored the bitterness that wrenched at his gut.

  He heard the scraping of her chair as she pushed it back then felt her hand on his shoulder as he turned on the faucet to rinse the dishes. Gilly reached around him and switched the water off.

  “I’m sorry. I never meant for you to find out that way.”

  Lucas whirled on her. “That’s what you’re sorry for? You’re sorry for the way I found out?”

  Gilly’s mouth opened, closed, and opened again as if she were a fish feeding. “Save it!” He started past her.

  She laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Please.”

  The combination of her touch and the plea in her voice halted his escape. He turned to face her and was su
rprised to see unshed tears pooled in her green eyes. Now he felt like a heel. His hand at the nape of her neck, he tugged Gilly to him, wrapped one arm around her waist and crushed his mouth to hers. He slowly released her lips, pulled back slightly, and whispered against her lips. “It’s not important. It’s in the past.” He lowered his mouth to hers again and kissed her, just a brush of his lips over hers.

  “Lucas,” she breathed.

  “Hmm.”

  “Lucas.”

  Glancing up, he saw a look of concern on her face. He loosened his hold and lowered his palm to cover her firm ass, but did not let her move from him. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Her slender fingers caressed his face. “It is important, please.”

  Lucas nodded and freed Gilly from his embrace. “Okay.”

  She licked her lips and swiped at them before straightening her clothing. Then she faced him, her chin held high and her back stiff. “I need to explain. I want to explain, but please can you just let me say it without interrupting?”

  He inclined his head once and kept his mouth shut.

  “Come with me.”

  Taking his hand in hers, Gilly pulled him out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into the living room. She paused next to the sofa, released his hand, and gave him a hard shove against his chest. He took the hint and fell back onto the couch. She joined him. With her legs crossed in front of her looking like a kid sitting around a campfire, she faced him.

  “I never wanted to keep a secret from you.”

  “Were there others?”

  Gilly slapped a palm over his mouth. “You said you wouldn’t talk.”

  He mumbled into her hand and she let go.