Mind Games Read online

  When he came out, Jane was sitting up in bed, arms stretched out to the side, the neck of his T-shirt slipping over one shoulder. Christ almighty. Could she be any sexier? On the baseball field, on the battlefield, Eric never lost focus, not ever. Runners on, screaming fans, explosions, gunfire—he tuned it all out with ease. But Jane stole his concentration without even trying.

  “So today I get to see where you work,” she said, cracking her neck and then straightening his shirt so it hid her delicate collarbone. And damn, but he wanted to go muss her up again.

  “Not me. They don’t let me near tech.” He held up his hands and wiggled his blunt fingers. “I’d need a special keyboard.”

  She laughed and tossed a pillow at him. “Oh, stop.” She unfolded herself from the bed and stretched again, and his entire body came to attention. Sometimes he really hated his job.

  Because he desperately wanted to touch her and because he knew what a bad idea that would be, he tossed the pillow right back.

  “Time to shower, Sleeping Beauty.”

  “Sure thing, Prince Charming.” She dropped the pillow onto the bed and sauntered into the bathroom, her every swaying step raising his blood pressure by a couple of points. When the door closed behind her, he shook himself and headed into the kitchen to make breakfast. With a little luck, that would satisfy the gnawing ache in his gut.

  He finished scrambling a big mess of eggs and cheese just as Jane came out of the bedroom dressed in ass-hugging jeans and a white men’s dress shirt, which shouldn’t have been sexy at all but managed to accentuate the small swells of her breasts and the more generous curve of her hip. His fingers itched to hold her there, to pull her body into his, so he busied them dishing up the food.

  “Here you go.” He passed her a plate.

  “My God, Eric,” she said with a little laugh, “this is enough for two people!”

  He shrugged. “You need fuel.”

  “Yes, sir.” She gave him a mock salute and took the plate and fork over to the couch.

  “Coffee? Juice?”

  “Coffee. Lots of coffee.”

  He knew that. Had seen how much of the stuff she downed over the past several days. If he drank more than a couple of cups, he found it hard to sit still, but she was never jittery or out of control. He poured her a large mug and carried it over to her, then returned to the kitchen to eat his own breakfast standing at the counter.

  “You are such a guy,” Jane said, watching him. A tiny smile hovered around her lips, and he wanted to touch them, to let the warmth of that little grin wrap itself around him.

  “Why?”

  “You eat standing up. Women don’t do that. I bet your sister doesn’t do that.”

  “No. In fact, one time when she was about fifteen she told me if I ate standing up I’d end up with fat feet.”

  Jane raised her eyebrows. “Fat feet? What did you tell her?”

  “I told her if that was the case, then eating sitting down would give her a fat ass.”

  She laughed, the sound bright in the sterile space. “You must have been a terrible brother.”

  “The worst.” He joined her on the sofa. “Now aren’t you glad you never had siblings?”

  “Nope.” Her smile went wistful. “I so wished I hadn’t been an only child.”

  “Was it hard? With your mother?”

  “It wasn’t so bad. I mean . . . not most of the time. Other people’s parents had fights, got divorced, got drunk. It’s not as if I was the only one whose home life had flaws. As long as she stayed on the meds, she was pretty much average. She shook and twitched, but she could talk about normal things and take care of me and keep the house together. But then she’d go off them and . . . I remember one day, I came home after school and she had destroyed all our mirrors and broken the glass in all the picture frames. ‘They’ were watching us, she said. There was glass everywhere, and she was all cut up, but she didn’t even notice.”

  “Jesus, Janie.” He put his plate down, scooted close, and wrapped an arm around her, pulling her into his body. She rested her head against his shoulder. “What did you do?”

  “I called my dad. While I waited for him to come home and take her to the hospital, I cleaned her up as much as possible—we didn’t have mirrors or photographs in the kitchen and she hadn’t touched the windows, so it wasn’t all glass ‘they’ could see through. That was our usual game plan. She lost it the first time my dad called an ambulance, so that was out of the question.”

  So matter-of-fact. Even after her revelation in the lab about her mother’s suicide, he’d been considering her smart but sheltered. He hadn’t taken the time to imagine what her day-to-day life must have been like. She would have had to be stronger than most of the neighborhood toughs he knew growing up.

  “It must have been hard to invite friends over.”

  Her snort held no humor. “That didn’t happen.”

  “I’m so sorry, Janie.”

  She reached up and laid a hand on his cheek. “Don’t be. It wasn’t a bad childhood, I promise. But having a brother or sister would have made it easier.”

  “Be sure you tell my sister that when you meet her.” He tweaked her chin and got up before he gave in to the temptation to turn his head into her hand and kiss her palm. His appetite gone, he dumped the rest of his eggs down the disposal. If Jane noticed, she didn’t say so.

  At eight thirty on the dot, the doorbell rang. One thing about Lexie, she was fanatically organized and precise. He wondered whether she’d been standing outside for five minutes, watching the time count down on the second hand of a watch just so she’d be on time.

  “I’m going to take Jane to tech and introduce her around,” she said when he opened the door. “They set up a station for her. Nash wants to see you in his office.”

  “Is there news?”

  “He didn’t tell me.” Her eyes flicked to Jane. “If you’re ready, we can go.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll be up in a few minutes,” he promised as Jane and Lexie stepped off the elevator. Then the doors closed, actively cutting him off from her for the first time in days. She was perfectly safe on the seventh floor. Not only because she was in the building, but because the guys who ran tech for Nash were required to train as operatives as well. Every one of them was armed and ready to fight. Still, until he could be sure she was safe, he didn’t like not being able to get to her.

  That tension might have shown a bit when he strode into Nash’s office and found the man tilted back in his chair, loafer-clad feet on his desk, reading a report. Despite having every kind of gadget on earth, Nash still preferred paper, a preference Eric shared except when it hid his boss’s face from him.

  “Did you find something on Jane’s case?”

  Nash read for another second, then put down the paper and slowly lowered his feet to the floor.

  “Have a seat, Eric.”

  He sat, bracing himself for the worst.

  “You want to tell me what’s going on between you and Dr. Evans?”

  What the fuck? “She’s a client. We’re friends.”

  “So you’re not sleeping with her?”

  “Would it matter if I was? You’ve never given a damn about my social life before.”

  “And if I thought you were just fucking her, I wouldn’t now. But emotional involvement makes people careless, gets people killed. I lost an agent last year, damned near lost this building, all because of emotions.”

  Yeah, he’d heard about that. They’d chased Mac Brody’s girlfriend to some Caribbean island, and it had all gone to shit. That was the case where Hal had died and a bomb had detonated in the HSE garage.

  “She’s my friend. That’s the extent of our involvement.”

  “Fuck.” Nash rubbed a hand across his face. “I’m tempted to take you off this, see if J
ake or Mac can give me a few days.”

  Fury rose, fast and hard, and he beat it back. Anger would only alienate Nash. “You chose me for a reason.”

  “Yeah. Because she knew you. She would trust you, confide in you.”

  “So how has that changed?”

  “Anything she was going to reveal, she would have by now. Whatever this is, she doesn’t have a clue. I can assign Jake to her for whenever she’s not at work, and you can go back to doing K and R with Travis.”

  “You have a case?” Kidnap and ransom was Eric’s usual beat. He and Travis, often with a third operative, would make sure the transaction went smoothly. And when it didn’t, they’d take back the hostage by any means necessary.

  “Would you go if I did?”

  So it was cards-on-the-table time. “No.” He tried to be reasonable. “Look, Jane is the kind of person who needs everything to make sense, to be explained. I’ve gotten her to the point where when I say jump, she jumps. Jake would have to start that all over again. He’d say jump and she’d want to know who was coming, which direction they were coming from. . . By the time she jumped, it would be too late. I can’t let that happen.”

  “And what if I ordered you to take a different case?”

  “Then I’d quit. And whoever you assigned to her would have to work around me.”

  “All because you’re friends.”

  That didn’t deserve an answer, so Eric didn’t give it one. He sat, matching stares with Nash, until the other man shook his head.

  “Jake said you’d be this way.”

  “That’s what you were talking to him about last night?”

  “Partially. He’s also going to run some data through one of his algorithms for me. But he was a profiler in a previous life, and even though he says he’s a lousy judge of people, I’ve found he’s better than he thinks.”

  “And what did he say?”

  For the first time, a hint of a smile lightened Nash’s expression. “I think I’ll save that until I decide whether he’s right.”

  • • •

  THE NEXT SEVERAL days brought disappointment after disappointment. Jane weeded through the information Nash’s guys collected with amazing speed, but Eric could do nothing to help. As he’d told Jane, computers and research were not his areas of expertise. On Monday they returned to the lab so Jane could finish up the paperwork for the patent sale, but once she was done with that she told Clive she wouldn’t be back until Thursday. It was a mark of the man’s respect for her that he didn’t insist she return Tuesday to work with her new team as he’d first ordered.

  The only time Eric felt useful was in the evening, when Jane wore herself out with work and worry and allowed him to take care of her. He cooked, teased her out of her funks as much as possible, talked to her about inconsequential things like how she’d learned to crochet from her grandmother, and found the crappiest movies possible for them to watch together. And at night, when they crawled into bed together and she snuggled close and fell asleep in his arms, she made him feel like the only man in the world who could help her. And though he knew it was wrong to take advantage of her vulnerability—to lead her on and let her believe that their relationship would deepen when she was no longer a client when, in truth, he had nothing beyond the moment to offer her—he couldn’t bring himself to stop. When her fear dissipated, she would realize she didn’t really want him. As long as he didn’t give her anything to regret, she could move on heart-whole.

  Tuesday afternoon, Nash called them both into his office.

  “We’ve run out of leads,” he said once Jane had settled into a chair and Eric had taken up a standing position behind her.

  Jane squeaked, a tiny sound from the back of her throat, but otherwise did not respond. Eric dropped his hands to her shoulders and felt the tremors running through her body.

  When she finally spoke, even her voice wobbled. “I understand. Tomorrow morning it will be too late anyway.” The defeated tone made him want to break something or, preferably, someone.

  “I’m very sorry, Dr. Evans.” Eric had never heard sympathy or kindness from Nash. It kind of creeped him out. But he would use it.

  “Can we have the office for a few minutes?”

  If Nash objected to being kicked out of his own space, he didn’t allow it to show. With a brief nod, he left the room.

  Eric knelt in front of Jane. “Look at me, Janie.” He took her hands in his and waited. “Janie.” She met his gaze. “I swear to you, regardless of what happens, I will not give up. I won’t allow HSE to give up. I have friends here who will continue to work on finding out what’s happened to Dani whenever Nash doesn’t have another job for them. No matter how long it takes, no matter where they’ve hidden her, we will find her.” Or her body. But he figured Jane already understood that part.

  Once some color returned to her face, Jane let go of his hands and stood. He followed her up.

  “We should give Nash back his office.”

  “Just say when.”

  “When.” She gave him a wan smile.

  In the elevator back up to his apartment, she asked the question he’d dreaded since opening his mouth to make his promise. “If Nash says they’re out of leads, where will you look?”

  “We’ll start with Dani’s life away from the lab. She never told you her brother was back in New York, but obviously someone found out if they took him. So maybe she had close friends, people she told about the research you guys were doing who had another idea for it. Did you two ever talk about your private lives?”

  “She didn’t think I had one.” Jane’s cheeks turned pink, and he couldn’t help the lightening of his heart. Yeah, she talked a big game about having casual sex, but she’d also said her teammates considered her an automaton.

  “The last person I know she was really close to was Bryan Axlerod. He worked at AHI with us for a year, and they dated for a while. But he got hired away to work at a lab in California several months ago, and I have no idea whether they still talk. She hasn’t mentioned him in ages, so I assumed they’d lost touch.

  “She also tried to get me to go out for margaritas with some friends of hers from a couple of other labs. They got together Thursday nights, mostly at Rosa Mexicano, to drink and dish the dirt. But I don’t know whether she was really close to them, either. They sounded more like . . . like . . . well, when I was in college, I hung out with some of the premeds. We’d study and party together. We’d even go to the occasional baseball game together. But I wouldn’t call them my friends. I never told them anything meaningful about myself.”

  “If you didn’t tell them, who did you tell?” He’d had more friends in college than he knew what to do with. Getting time alone to study had been the problem.

  “Are you kidding? I was younger than all my classmates. I didn’t talk to anyone beyond the most trivial and mundane crap until I was in med school. At least by then I’d learned the trick of never mentioning my age, and I’d grown up enough not to look so different from everyone else.”

  • • •

  WAY TO REMIND the guy what a pathetic loser she’d been. Not what she intended.

  “After that, I got better,” she assured him as he let them into the apartment. “I took a cooking class. Did a couple of yarnathons with other crocheters and knitters to raise money for cancer research, basically became a human being instead of an academic machine.”

  “Oh, really? And the men in your life. You met them in cooking class, or in the yarnathons?”

  “Wow, Eric, sexist much?”

  He grinned. “Just giving you a hard time. Who does the cooking around here, Miss ‘I took a cooking class’?”

  “That’s Doctor ‘I took a cooking class’ to you, and don’t you forget it!” She snorted, remembering the disaster that class had turned into. “My God, you should have seen it. Seriously. I was so
sure before I took that class that there was nothing I couldn’t learn. But cooking . . . The science parts of it appealed to me, but it’s an art as well, and you can’t teach that part. Everything I made tasted awful. I’d think I was following the recipe exactly, but terms like ‘cream’ the butter and eggs are so imprecise and nothing looked the way the descriptions sounded. And then there was the turkey.”

  “Dare I even ask?”

  “I didn’t realize that there were two packages of stuff inside. I saw the instructor reach into the turkey cavity and pull out the bits and pieces, so I did the same. Or thought I did. But there was still one bag left in there. It melted.”

  “Oh, dear.” He was laughing outright, his eyes sparkling with light, and her heart turned over. She wanted him beyond all reason. All his intense focus, those muscles, the laughter that warmed her and cleared the shadows from her heart.

  She put her arms around his neck. He hadn’t kissed her, except to brush his lips over her forehead when they went to bed, since Friday night when she’d confronted him. But she had only sixteen more hours as a client, most of which would be spent right here at HSE. The only real danger she’d be in would be on the way to the press conference. And it was doubtful anything would happen then—if Clive’s competition knew they were making their announcement, they’d also know time had run out and kidnapping her would have no purpose. And as soon as he was off the clock, Eric would disappear. She could practically feel it. Oh, sure, he’d check in occasionally to tell her about Dani—he was a man of his word—but for all intents and purposes it would be as if these days had never happened.

  “I watched you in college, you know.”

  His arms, which had gone around her waist automatically when she hugged him, stiffened.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember when you told me about how baseball was a game of statistics and strategy? And that it was your job as catcher to know all the opposing players’ stats and use those stats against them?”

  “Not really, but it sounds like me. I was pretty full of myself.”