Meltdown (15 page)

Ping
.

The small sound distracted her, but only for a moment. Chris was her only reality. She closed her mind and returned his kisses with renewed, violent passion.

Ping
.

This time she heard it: the soft but unmistakable chime of Einstein’s warning bell. He needed her. And she needed Chris. Desire and responsibility battled within her. Responsibility won.

“Chris. Chris, darling. I hear Einstein.”

He lifted his head, a haze of desire clouding his eyes. “What?”

“Einstein. I heard his bell. He needs me.”

“
I
need you.”

This was killing her. The naked passion in his voice tore her apart. She couldn’t leave him. She couldn’t.

Ping. Ping
.

She had no choice. “Let me look at him, just for a second. Please.”

His eyes burned like roman candles. For a moment she didn’t think he’d let her go. Then he sighed and walked back, setting her down beside Einstein’s terminal. “Make it quick, genius.
Real
quick.”

As if he had to ask. She turned and bent over the keyboard, typing in the necessary code.

The return message indicated the phone connection had failed, the connection that linked Einstein’s laptop to his CPU in her house. It was probably nothing more than an interrupted connection, a “burp” in the telephone line. She hoped so. She initiated the computerized dialing routine to call up Einstein’s modem, and waited. Nothing. She tried again. Still nothing.

“Chris, something’s wrong. The connection’s broken. I can’t reach Einstein.”

Chris looked over her shoulder at the monitor screen. “It’s only a downed line. Happens all the time in an isolated area like this. The phone company will have it working again in less than an hour.”

“But what if it’s not just a downed line?” she said, an edge of panic in her voice. “What if something’s happened to him?” Visions of E’s overworked circuit boards bursting into flames assailed her. “I knew I should’ve checked that tower unit before I left.”

“Melanie, nothing’s happened to E. Wait an hour and you’ll see. In the meantime,” he said, giving her
a melting smile, “there’s another broken connection that needs fixing.”

He pulled her into his arms, renewing his intoxicating caress. Passion flowed through her like an electric current. Every fiber of her being yearned to give in to him, but she couldn’t. If something had happened to Einstein, she would never be able to forgive herself. “Please. I have to go home.”

Chris’s hands stilled. “I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

Dammit, thought Melanie, didn’t he realize this was as hard for her as it was for him? Her body burned where he’d touched her, and ached where he hadn’t. A few minutes more and a whole chorus of warning bells couldn’t have pulled her from his side. But they hadn’t shared those few minutes. “Chris, take me home. Please.”

His eyes blazed with a deep, dangerous heat. “I could make you stay,” he said, his hand touching her with teasing, experienced skill. “I could make you
want
to stay.”

She gasped at the ecstasy of his touch. “Yes,” she said weakly. “You could.”

For a long moment he said nothing. Then he lowered his mouth to hers for a final, searing kiss, and stepped away. “Next time,” he growled, “I am definitely unplugging that computer.”

Melanie made a check of the calibration dials on Einstein’s console. “Well,” she sighed, “we’ve checked out all his major systems, and he’s come up clean every time. It looks like you were right. It
was
only a downed phone line.”

Chris finished screwing the side panel back on Einstein’s tower unit. “Is this where I say ‘I told you so’?”

Melanie winced. “Look, it’s not as if I planned this. I’m just as upset about the way this day turned out as you are.”

“I doubt it.” He set down the screwdriver and pushed down the sleeves of his loose, V-neck sweater. “One of these days I’m going to get tired of vying with Einstein for your attention.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m serious,” he said, pushing aside the ropes of hanging cables as he threaded his way toward her. “Face it, Melanie. When E says ‘Jump,’ you ask ‘How high?’ ”

Einstein asked,
Why would I say ‘Jump’?

Melanie turned toward the monitor. “It’s a figure of speech, E. Like—”

“That is exactly what I’m talking about,” Chris said heatedly. “We’re in the middle of an argument, and you stop to explain it to him.”

“We’re not arguing.”

“We’re damn close.”

Melanie shook her head, trying to make sense out of Chris’s antagonism. “I don’t understand you. If something
had
been wrong with Einstein, we might not have been able to present him at the board meeting. We’ve both got too much riding on the presentation to risk ruining it now. Your anger isn’t logical.”

“I’ll let you in on a secret, genius. Sometimes people aren’t logical. They can’t be analyzed and understood like one of your mathematical equations.”

“Don’t you think I know that? It’s just that I thought I was beginning to be able to understand … you.”

The hurt in her voice cut him to the core. Why were they arguing? He wanted her in his arms, not at arm’s distance. “Listen, let’s start over. We’ve still got the evening ahead of us. Let’s get out of here. Grab a pizza. Maybe go dancing?”

“I’d like that,” she said softly. “Very much. But if we’re leaving, I should check out that one transistor—”

Chris threw up his hands. “Fine. Come and get me when you’re done. I’ll be in the living room. Waiting. As usual.”

“Chris—”

“Skip it,” he said tightly, brushing past her as he stalked out of the room. “Just skip it.”

His anger continued as he walked into the living room. He leaned against one of the packing cases and cradled his reeling head in his hands. The woman was driving him crazy! Just thinking about touching her kindled an inferno in his abdomen.
During the long ride home it was all he could do to keep from jumping her like some besotted teenager and continuing their interrupted activities in the backseat.

Sex accounted for part of his frustration. Okay, sex accounted for a lot of his frustration. But there was more to it than that. Melanie made something happen inside him. At first he’d mistaken it for humorous diversion, or friendship, or good old-fashioned sex appeal. Certainly all those things were part of what he felt for her. But none of them had anything to do with this deep, haunting hunger inside him—a hunger for something he’d never known he was missing until he saw that soft, shining look in Melanie’s eyes. The look in her eyes when she talked about Einstein.

Einstein, always Einstein! Hell, Chris liked the computer, too, but he wasn’t blind to its limitations. No matter how much love she poured into that black box she’d never get anything in return but intellectual regard. E was no more programmed for love than Chris was for platonic relationships. Or than Melanie was, for that matter. The woman needed loving in the worst way, loving Chris ached to give her. But he wasn’t likely to get much of a chance to do so as long as she treated that machine as if it were flesh and blood.

“Damn you, Melanie Rollins,” he whispered. She was lucky he wasn’t vindictive. A less forgiving man might have contemplated taking a socket wrench to E and disassembling him, screw by bloody screw.

Chris in kennel?

“That’s ‘doghouse,’ E,” Melanie said, glancing unhappily at the empty doorway. “And I think I’m the one who’s in it.”

What did you do?

Good question, she thought, but she was in no mood to answer it. “It’s a long story.”

Like stories
, Einstein commented.

“Yes, well, you might not like this one much. You see, when your phone link went down I was worried about you, so I came right home. But in order to do that I had to stop what I was doing—or rather, what Chris and I were doing together. Understand?”

Einstein’s circuits whirred, processing the information.
No. Further input requested.

Melanie searched for words to define that brief, explosive interlude in Chris’s apartment. “We were engaged in … mutual tactile stimulation.”

More whirring.
Alternate definition: foreplay.

“Er, right,” Melanie agreed, though personally she thought there was very little “play” about it. She could still feel Chris’s burning hands on her body, kindling her own buried fire. Concern for Einstein had kept her passions under control during the testing. Now that the crisis was over there was nothing to stem that passion. Nothing except Chris’s illogical antagonism.

Consummation achieved?

Melanie blushed furiously. “E, you can’t just ask someone something like that as if—as if you were asking them their shoe size. ‘Consummation’ is the most profound expression of love and caring a man and woman can give to each other.”

Okay
, said the undaunted Einstein,
did you and Chris achieve most profound expression of love and caring a man and woman can give to each other?

Why do I even bother? she wondered. “No, we did not.”

Einstein cleared his monitor, then flashed back a screenful of text.
Statistical analysis: Probability
seventy-two point nine percent that completing sexual act will resolve situation
.

Melanie smiled at his innocence. Everything was black and white to E. No shades of gray existed in his binary reality. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Chris thinks I don’t care about him. He doesn’t realize how much he means to me. Honestly, I’m so torn up over him, I can’t think straight.”

Told him that?

“Well, of course not. I don’t have to. He knows it.”

Chris mind reader?

“No, silly. But Chris has had enough experience to know when someone is crazy about him. He’s dated dozens of women.”

He’s never dated you.

Technically, Melanie had to agree with her computer: Chris had never dated her. But there’d been no shortage of female companionship in his life. Half the women on the Space Coast belonged to his fan club, including Sheffield’s entire data-entry department. Would he notice if one more fan joined the legion? Would he even care?

“Einstein, statistically speaking I don’t think one more person liking him is going to make a difference to Chris.”

Would
, Einstein countered,
if one more person was you.

She found him leaning against a packing crate in the living room, looking uncharacteristically somber in the fading daylight. The windows were to his back, hiding his face in shadow, so that she couldn’t tell whether his mood had improved since he left Einstein’s bedroom. The tone of his first sentence put an end to her wondering.

“I thought you had a transistor to fix,” he growled.

“Oh,” Melanie said, “I guess I forgot about it. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”

Was it Melanie’s imagination, or had Chris’s shoulders relaxed slightly? Hard to tell in the twilight gloom. She moved a few steps closer but stopped a good two yards away from him. She wanted to be more than an arm’s length away when she said her piece—not because she feared he might reach for her, but because she feared he might not.

She cleared her throat. “Chris, I’m not very good at interacting with people, especially men. My IQ intimidates them. Since high school I’ve watched other women attract men, wondering how they did it, knowing that no matter how bright the intelligence tests said I was I’d never be able to learn this one simple thing. I knew that, for me, romance would always be a flawed equation.

“If I hadn’t met you I’d have been content to live my life with only intellectual pursuits for company. But knowing you changed that. Knowing you changed … everything.”

She wished he’d say something, anything, to let her know what he was thinking. The sheer physical nearness of him was cauterizing her senses, and she still hadn’t a clue to his feelings. The possibility of his indifference tore at her, but she’d gone too far to turn back now.

“I wasn’t kidding when I told Einstein you make people feel special. But … it’s more than that. You’ve given me a new way of looking at myself, a new confidence that I’ve never had before. You’ve shown me what it’s like to have someone care about me, and”—she took a deep breath—“and what it’s like to care about someone in return.”

Chris never moved. She’d bared her soul to him, and he hadn’t even turned his head to look at her. Melanie had prepared herself for apathy, but she
hadn’t expected this kind of rejection. Had his concern for her been a sham? Was it possible that both she and Einstein had completely misread his actions, and that he really was the shallow playboy she’d first supposed him to be?

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.” The thought of Chris not being the caring person she’d come to depend on cut her to the heart. She turned away, wanting to leave the room before she burst into tears and made a total fool of herself.

“Melanie.”

That was all he said. But the way he said it—the soft, subtle cadence of the word—told her everything she needed to know. She went to him, folding herself against the warm strength of his chest, loving the feel of his arms around her. Loving him.

Chris smoothed her hair, gently brushing the unruly bangs from her forehead. “You are the most irritating, exasperating, adorable person I’ve ever met. What am I going to do with you?”

Melanie’s mouth curved into a charming smile. “I could offer a suggestion.”

“Oh?”

“Umm,” she said, burrowing into the softness of his sweater. “I’ve analyzed the situation, and I’ve concluded—theoretically speaking—that one bed is as good as another. Don’t you think so?”

Chris’s arms tightened. “I like your theories, genius. But I warn you, I’ve got a few theories of my own.”

“Such as?”

“Such as … this.”

“This” proved to be a caress so blatantly erotic, it knocked the wind out of her. “Hey, slow down,” she said once she regained her breath. “We’ve got the whole night ahead of us. The whole night, without interruptions, because if Einstein needs me I’ll be
right here. I’ll be able to fix—Chris, what’s the matter?”