Forever, page 14
But it was amazing what you could do when you had to.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “Honest. We’ll just get the ATV and—”
“That fuel pan didn’t stay fixed, but you know what we can do? Take one of C.P.’s SUVs up the back side. I’ll just run over to the lookout and bring her to you and the car. The view is not the point.”
“No, it’s not. But…”
The urge to argue was so strong, he opened his mouth, except then he realized something. How often had he fought against her just because he hated his own limitations? A lot. And she, just like everyone, gave him leeway because he was sick and he was a for-now-still-living tragedy. How many lines had he pushed through simply because he was frustrated… and what had it cost Lydia on the other side?
His illness made him a suffering saint of sorts, giving him a Teflon coating when it came to being reasonable.
“You know what,” he said softly. “I think that’s a really good plan.”
The easing in Lydia’s body was immediate, the tension flowing out of her shoulders, her breasts rising and falling as she exhaled.
“It’ll be great,” she said. “I promise—”
Crack!
The sharp impact shocked him out of his thoughts.
“Oh, no! Your phone.”
With a lurch, Lydia leaned to the side—and then she slipped off the bike, her synthetic hiking pants offering no resistance to the black paint job on the tank. He tried to catch her, but with his useless hands, she slipped right through his grasp—
The lithe way she threw out her palm and stopped a face-first crash was something he envied. But it was too late for his phone. The screen was splintered in the corner that had taken the brunt of the hit.
“I think it still works.” She curled over on her side and tilted the unit up. “Oh, it lights up. Good.”
Extending her arm, she held the iPhone out to him.
That was when they heard the helicopter.
As he took the cell back, they both looked in the direction of the thumping noise even though they couldn’t see anything as there were no windows around. The sound was unmistakable, however.
“Guess the boss is back,” he said.
“Guess so.”
He looked back down at his woman. “Can I be honest, too?”
Lydia nodded, even though fear crossed her face. “Yes. Of course.”
“I want to keep kissing you. I want to lift up that shirt of yours… and I want to suck on you while I strip those fucking pants off you and rip your panties off. I want… to trade places with you, and have you sit on my bike with one foot on the muffler and the other on the turned tire… and I want to eat you out until you come against my face.”
Her expression shifted as he talked, her mouth parting once again, her lids lowering, her head falling back as if she were already up there, already on the bike with her thighs spread for him, already holding him in place.
“That’s what I want,” he concluded. “And that’s just a start.”
She nodded. “I want that, too.”
“But if I’m really honest…” He glanced around again, as if the cars could help or change things. “I’m worried you won’t be satisfied because I can’t… you know…”
He indicated the front of his hips with a gesture. “I mean, I’m not capable of—”
“Daniel.”
As she said his name, he stopped with the rambling. He’d never had a problem talking about sex, about his body, about what he wanted or needed—but it was a whole different ball game when the syllables came out with so much shame and embarrassment.
“No matter how far it goes, it’s you,” she said. “And that’s what matters.”
Her smile was so beautiful to him.
Then again, acceptance was better than any kind of makeup, wasn’t it. Especially on the face of the woman you loved.
* * *
As Gus St. Claire rode up in the lab’s main elevator, he was in a ripe mood, as his grandmother would have called it. In a perfect world, he would have been alone so he could talk to himself. No such luck. He was ascending with several colleagues, one of whom he’d hired a mere month before, all of whom were leaving after a very, very long night’s work. Fortunately, none of them were talking because they were exhausted and all of them got off at the level that would take them out to the parking area. He continued onward.
But stayed quiet.
Glancing up to the camera’s eye in the corner, he knew it was the better move, and besides, he didn’t have to bother with the composure for much longer.
When the elevator bumped to a stop, he leaned into a sensor and got an eye scan, after which there was a pause, because for all of the state-of-the-art everything in C.P. Phalen’s world, entrance into her house was still manually reviewed—and given who she was and what she was doing, he didn’t blame her.
Nope, he blamed her for other shit now.
After the doors opened, he took a right and started walking. The corridor to the mansion’s entry point was good and long, and he used the distance to get his face arranged while people on the other side of mirrored glass watched him—at least, he was assuming fully armed guards were what were behind the panels.
His Zen session worked. By the time he finally passed through the last of the security checks and entered by the back door next to the servants’ quarters, he was good and balanced, everything where it should be, where it needed to be: nothing but perfectly-fine, showing the world—and his boss—that he was just as he’d been when he’d started at her company.
Before he’d fallen in love with her.
Emotions. Biggest pain in the ass there was—and considering who he worked for, that was really saying something. C.P. Phalen was like a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from, the damn woman haunting him during his waking hours and in the dark as well.
“Hey,” he said as he nodded to one of the security guards in whatever corridor he entered. He wasn’t tracking the trip.
There was no response. They never responded. Which was why he greeted them.
As he came to the next armed uniform, he hit the guy with a “H’w-r-ya.”
He passed by three more sentries on the way to his boss’s office. Jesus, it must be like living with a football team, just with semiautomatics. The food bill for on-duty, on-site snacking must be goddamn enormous.
As he made another turn and found himself in the kitchen, he halted. Across a field of stainless steel counters, a chef in whites looked up, and that was when Gus realized he was taking the long route on purpose: He was looking for the guard who had been fucking her.
Wow. That was insane. Because what the hell was he going to do if he found the bastard?
Nothing that made any sense, that was sure.
Fast-tracking the way to her study’s door, he reached for the stainless steel—or was it sterling?—handle. Except then he stopped himself, remembering what he’d walked in on before. And noting that he hadn’t found her piece of gym equipment.
Maybe another Orgasm Theory workout was going on.
He knocked loudly and made sure his voice was good and clear. “I’m here. And I’m not interested in waiting for—”
There was almost no delay in the entry opening—but what the hell was on the other side? He wasn’t sure what he was looking at.
“What the fuck did you do to your hair?” he blurted.
When the great C.P. Phalen didn’t answer him, he glanced over his shoulder and then backed the woman up. Closing them in together, he took her forearms in gentle hands and eased her over to the sofa in the sitting area. When they got within range of those black cushions, he released his hold—but she just stood there, staring at him like she wasn’t seeing him.
“Hello?” He waved a hand in front of her face. “Okay, so aliens are real and you’ve just come back from an abduction.”
In the past three years, since he’d come on board and started developing Vita, the woman had been all about her buttoned-up, ultra-professional, ice-madam bullshit: Hair in place, black-suit-wearin’, high-heeled, whatever. But here she was with her hair hanging in her face like she’d been trying to pull it out of her skull, her shoes off, her jacket opened like she’d needed more air than there was around her.
“Sit down,” he said gently.
Second time today he’d told a woman he respected to do that. Maybe he needed to add the skill to his résumé.
As C.P. did what he told her to, she nodded, like she was a child following the orders of a teacher in school.
“What’s going on?” he said as he sat down as well and brushed the blond out of her eyes. “Talk to me.”
Her stare took its time focusing on him, and for a moment, she didn’t seem to recognize him—to the point where he almost took out his badge and flashed his ID at her.
“Gus?” Then she shook herself. “Gus, I mean.”
Right about the time he started thinking he needed to do a medical assessment, he caught sight of the closed bathroom door over her shoulder.
What a fucking idiot he was. He knew damn well who was in there, and that she wasn’t in crisis. Her polish had been fucked out of her.
Gus got to his feet in a rush, jacking up his jeans, slapping the simp out of himself.
“You asked me to come up?” he demanded.
There was another pause and then she snapped back into place—or seemed to try to—her manicured hands going to her mop of hair like if she could just get the shit back into order, magically she wouldn’t look like she’d just been fucked twelve ways to Sunday.
Losing patience with the bullshit, he marched over to the bathroom, ripped the door open, and got ready to take the fucking guard to church. They had better things to be doing than—
No one was in the bathroom.
He looked back across the room. C.P. was eighty percent put-together, that hair in a better semblance of order, her jacket rebuttoned, but the undone was still graffiti all over her aura.
“Did you get my email?” she asked in a low voice.
“Yeah, I did. That’s why I’m here. So you’ve found our patient one?”
When she didn’t continue, he returned to the sofa. Sat next to her again. Frowned. “What’s the problem.”
“Did you review the medical record I sent you?” C.P. cleared her throat. “Actually, before you answer that, would—I’m sorry, could you get me a little seltzer?”
With a shrug, he got back up and headed for the bar. When he pulled up to the display, she said, “Actually, I think I’d like a gin and tonic if you don’t mind.”
He lifted an eyebrow. Then shrugged again. “Ordinarily, I wouldn’t recommend drinking on the job or starting this early in the day. Somehow, this seems like an exception.”
Making fast with the bottles and the glasses, he got a Coke for himself and brought the tumbler over to the woman. With a wobbly hand, C.P. took the libation and downed half of the Beefeater in a swallow.
“Thirsty, huh,” he said as he sat back and braced himself for whatever was coming.
“My real name is Catherine.”
“I know.” When she glanced over at him, he shrugged. “What, you think I haven’t read your Wikipedia page? Come on.”
“I was Cathy when I was growing up.” As she circled the ice in her tall glass, he wondered what she was really looking at—what part of her past, that was. “I, ah, I used to be her.”
The silence in the study was resonant, which was what happened when the walls were insulated against fire and explosions—and so was the glass. It was so quiet that the cubes he’d made the drink with sounded loud as she took another sip.
“So,” she said with greater command. “About patient one. You reviewed the medical records, including the most recent physical?”
“You need to tell me what the fuck is going on.”
Now her blue eyes shot over to him, and they were crystal fucking clear. “Do we have a good candidate.”
As his stare roamed her face, it was hard to switch tracks to the subject that they always wanted to talk about—proof, not that he needed it, of how distracting Catherine Phillips Phalen could be.
“I didn’t take a long time with the records.” He cracked open the Coke. “But the AML is right, and the patient is healthy enough. The return of the disease hasn’t been addressed yet, so the data will be clean. How’re we going to get consent? When can they get here?”
The patient’s history was significant for acute myeloid leukemia, but the real bitch? They’d had a bout with a Wilms’ tumor when they were four years old, and carboplatin had been given for a recurrence about a year thereafter, following surgery. Anyone who received one of the platinum-based drugs was at an increased risk for AML, although typically the risk of the secondary cancer decreased over time. In this case, that truism was either false, or the patient would have gotten the leukemia as an adult anyway. What was clear was that the AML was back, following successful treatment about three years ago.
“Do you think… Vita is going to work?” C.P. asked. “In this case.”
“Isn’t that the million-dollar question. Or billion-dollar, as the case is, right?”
He sat forward and focused on the bubbles on the inside of the glass he’d made for her. Then he checked out the freshly manicured red nails, so perfectly done.
“What do you think the response will be?” she prompted him.
“I think… I think it better work in this patient. Based on those records, there aren’t many options available to them considering the amount of drugs given over their life-span. They’re already at threshold doses between the treatment for the Wilms’ tumor and what’s going on now.”
C.P. made a noncommittal noise as she finished the G&T.
“Guess this is good timing for you,” he murmured. And mostly kept the bitch out of his voice. “What with the negotiations and all. Or will you sell, anyway?”
She put the glass on the coffee table and rubbed her hands together as if she were cold. Or ready for a big, greedy payday.
“So, who handles the contact for this patient?” he asked. “Have they even been approached?”
“Yes. They have.”
“And they’re up for it?” He frowned as she nodded. “How the fuck did you manage this without me—never mind. I don’t give a shit about that. When can they get here?”
C.P. put her palms on her knees and braced her shoulders. Then she faced him. “They’re already here. It’s me. I’m the patient.”
SIXTEEN
SURFACING FROM A strange dream, Lydia came awake in a dim room, in a bed she didn’t immediately recognize, in a house that she drew a lot of blanks on. But she knew who was with her. She knew the arms that were wrapped around her, and the body pressed against her back, and the leg that had wheedled its way in between hers.
Daniel.
In the gentle juncture between the amnesia of rest and the painful reality of consciousness, in the buffered, semi-dreamscape of rousing… she drifted into a fantasy where what she knew was real was the nightmare and what she was about to wake up to was a normalcy that made her eyes tear up—
“Hi,” came a gravel voice in her ear.
She smiled and stroked Daniel’s arm. They had fallen asleep together after she’d helped him back from the garages. Then they’d woken up and ordered a meal from the kitchen like they were in a hotel. Then… back to sleep on top of the covers, still in the clothes they’d been wearing down in the clinic.
“How did you know?” she murmured. “That I wasn’t asleep?”
“Right there.”
The arm she’d been stroking extended out over the duvet, and she followed the forefinger’s direction across to the full-length mirror mounted next to the door out of the room. And sure enough, there she was with her eyes open—and right behind her, spooning in, was Daniel. With him mostly hidden by her body, she could almost pretend things were the way they should have stayed.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Ten-thirty.”
Frowning, she glanced over her shoulder. “That can’t be right. We ate lunch at—”
“At night. Ten-thirty at night.”
“Okaaaaaaaaaay.” She rolled over and faced him. “And you? Did you sleep, too?”
“Out like a light. I don’t know what was in that IV. Knockout drops, I guess.”
As they stared at each other, she had the strangest sense of returning from a trip, sure as if she’d been traveling. Or perhaps it was he who had left and returned. Maybe it was both of them, separately departing.
In the back of her mind, she thought of what she’d talked to Gus about.
“Kiss me again, Daniel,” she whispered. “I don’t care where it goes. I just want to be with you.”
He brushed her hair back. “I want that, too.”
They leaned in together, and as he pressed his lips to hers, he tasted of mint, which was a surprise. Except then she remembered the Burt’s Bees he always used to keep his lips moist when he was dehydrated from the drugs—
For a split second, her mind got sucked into dark thoughts, but she reined the chaos in with a hard jolt of gratitude. How stupid would she feel, a month from now, two months from now, that she’d had this moment when he was with her, when he was alive, and she’d wasted it dwelling on everything she couldn’t change.
Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the caress, the warmth, the softness. And as she kissed him back, it got easier to feel him—and she realized that somewhere along the way, she’d decided that this part of their relationship was gone forever.
It was the kind of conclusion that she hadn’t been aware of making.
It was the kind of conclusion that was wrong.
Daniel had always been a dominating lover, and he took control of things now, rolling her onto her back and shifting over onto her. Deeper now with the kissing, his tongue entering her, his hand stroking down the side of her rib cage as his leg moved up on top of both of her thighs.
“Daniel…” she sighed.
“Is this okay?”
“God, yes.”
Her body came alive again, just as it had back in the garage, her heart beating faster, her lungs burning, her core anticipating his touch, his penetration. That old familiar melting overtook her from the inside out, until her bones were flowing with the pulsing heat. When he slipped under her turtleneck and his hand rode up to her breast, she arched into him—
