Dr. Bodyguard

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?”