Red Midnight (39 page)

Erin pouted for a second, but he was right. She loved him, and right now they had been apart a little too long. A fire was raging within her, and being next to him was like trying to put that fire out with gallons of gasoline.

“Yes,” she murmured, her half-closed silver eyes luminescent as she tilted back her head. “We can forget Catherine if you’ll just make love to me…. Oh, Jarod! It’s been so long!”

He swept her into his arms and easily found the bedroom. But as he touched the zipper of her dress, the doorbell began to ring. “Don’t answer it,” he murmured, and with his whisper deliciously searing the lobe of her ear, she was tempted to obey.

But the bell kept ringing. “I have to get it, Jarod, I’m sure it’s Casey to pick up Bill, and she knows we’re here so she’ll just keep ringing.”

He lifted a brow in autocratic query, then scowled. “Okay—but get her out quick!”

“Yes, sir,” Erin complied, laughing as she scampered out of his reach. She grabbed the indignant Bill off the sofa where he had made himself comfortable after tripping her and walked to the door.

It was, indeed, Casey. Her eyes were alight with her insatiable curiosity, but before she could speak, Erin stuffed the protesting Bill into her hands. “Here he is, Case—and as to Jarod”—she dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper—“I’ll tell you two things. He is absolutely gorgeous naked, and he is … wickedly … wickedly … wickedly wonderful!”

For the second time that day, she closed the door on Casey’s open mouth. And then Erin chuckled—wickedly—and hurried back to the bedroom door. She paused as she looked in. Jarod had already stripped and was waiting for her on the expanse of her bed. Erin’s smile deepened as she thought two conflicting thoughts—one, that her white ruffled bedroom set was way too feminine with Jarod sharing the room—but also that his powerful bronzed body looked wonderfully rugged against the sheer white.

“Is she gone?” Jarod demanded.

Erin nodded, suddenly discovering she had lost her voice again.

Jarod scowled at her with the brilliant, compelling blue of his eyes taking the lash from his next command. He patted the bed beside him. “Then come here, wife, and do it quickly!”

“Certainly,” she replied, lowering her thick lashes sweetly, and pretending to comply. But she moved toward the bed very slowly, shedding her clothing with infinite grace as she took tiny steps. She watched as his eyes narrowed and roamed over her.

And for several seconds he
was
content to
watch
as the still deceptively slender form of his wife was bared inch by inch before him. He breathed in deeply as she stood naked before him, savoring the high rise of her breasts heaving slightly in anticipation even as she taunted him, loving with his eyes the tiny waist that flared to full hips … to the long, shapely length of silken thighs and calves. She stood just out of reach, and for a second he allowed it, letting his eyes have the first touch of her assets, allowing the blue of his to meet and clash with the suggestive, sultry silver of hers.

And then he snaked out a hand, jerking her so that she fell on top of him with a little gasp of surprise. “Think to torture me again, eh, wife?” he teased, drawing provocative little trails over her buttocks as he pressed her against him, allowing the pressure of his own full arousal to further elicit hers. “Thank God you’re a klutz!”

“A klutz!” Erin protested in a panted shriek, pressing her palms against his chest in an effort to confront him with blazing eyes.

“Ummm …” he murmured, taking the advantage to lean up and encircle his mouth tenderly around a nipple that had provoked him beyond reason by jutting hard and impertinently in front of his face. “An … exquisitely … beautiful … klutz …”

By the time he finished his words, spoken brokenly as he savored first one breast and then the other, she could protest no more. Her breathing had become very ragged. The strength had gone out of her arms and she was above him only because he held her.

Then she was lifted, dragged beneath him, and accosted from head to toe with burning, fevered kisses and hands that caressed and fondled and teased, and her strength returned along with the delicious weakness so that she could tease and touch him in return.

His hands roamed everywhere, and she gasped when they eased her thighs apart, subtly teasing until she whimpered and cried out when his fingers touched the core that burned so for him. He whispered how much he wanted her, and she writhed insanely with the wildfire need. His kisses covered her again, and then she was begging him, and then refusing to beg, touching him until he stopped torturing her with that incredible magic because she had caused him to groan his own need out in guttural demand.

Tears escaped her as he moved within her. She shuddered, opening to him, locking her slender legs around him in feminine surrender that created, that gave and demanded in return.

Similar thoughts struck them both as the world evaporated into a red glow that eclipsed the magnificence of that upon Red Square at midnight. They were together, they were home.

Jarod caught her lips as he escalated his rhythm with the rising spiral of his flaring desire. How he loved her, how he loved the tempestuous passion that met and matched his own. Deep within her he knew not only the ecstasy she gave him, but the love.

When the red glow shattered into blinding rapture, he held within her still, knowing that even now they were together, and that this lethargic delight that gently brought them back to the world was also a form of rapture. Touching her, holding her, being near her. It was all rapture. It was home. It was love.

He refused to pull away from her, but held them locked together. He lifted his head to meet her silver eyes and to see if her need to be together so intimately matched his own.

Her eyes flickered open. They half closed, beautiful, lazy, sensuous with satiation. She smiled, her lips a moist, lazy, half curl. And then she allowed her eyes to close, answering his unspoken question. Her words were richly husky. “My dear Russian American husband, my darling, my love, you
are
wickedly, wickedly, wickedly … wonderful.”

T
HE HALLWAY WAS LONG
and white, white walls, white tile flooring, evoking complete sterility.

The man and woman who walked the corridor were a vivid contrast, he so dark, she so vividly fair. Both tall, lithe, statuesque; something about them as a couple was very beautiful, arrestingly stately.

Her silver eyes flashed with confusion and sparkling curiosity, and she demanded in a hushed whisper that well fit the sterility of her surroundings, “Jarod, where on earth are we going?”

His blue eyes flashed back a teasing amusement and assurance. “You’ll see.”

Seconds later they reached the end of the hallway and the awesome mass of silver-gray machinery—the floor-to-ceiling memory storage, the multitude of drives, disks, modems, and controls.

She stared with wonder at the machine, but then turned to her husband with her eyes narrowing in further confusion and a smile that clearly indicated she thought he was crazy playing at the corners of her lips.

He smiled and bowed dramatically. “You wanted to meet Catherine.
Voila! I
give you Catherine.”

Erin glanced from Jarod to the computer and back to Jarod, then started laughing. “A computer! I was jealous of a computer!”

“Ahhhh … not just any computer!” Jarod explained generously. “This lady is top of the line. She is programmed to think—and she is equipped with a marvelous sense of humor.”

“A sense of humor?” Erin queried dubiously.

Jarod nodded. “Umm. A sense of humor.”

Erin stared at the computer a minute and then frowned again. “But how could Catherine be here and in Russia?”

“Easy, my love—she has a counterpart. This lady is Catherine I—in Moscow we have Catherine II—or Catherine the Great as we call her. Both Catherines are sheer works of genius, true tributes to the brilliance of the human mind.”

Chuckling ruefully, Erin continued to gaze at the extensive keyboard. “My rival!” she murmured. Then she glanced back to her husband. “Jarod—should I really be in here?”

He smiled. “Access to this corridor is not easy—access to Catherine is even more difficult. She accepts commands only when she has been properly entered—and one enters her through an infallible system. She has special lights that pick up on fingerprints. See.”

As he explained, Jarod slipped by Erin and sat in the chair, setting his hand into the pit. Catherine whirred into action.

GOOD AFTERNOON, JAROD STEELE.

Jarod answered:

HELLO, CATHERINE.

The computer whirred again.

THE DATE IS JUNE 4. TIME, 3.02.48 PM. THE TEMPERATURE OUTSIDE THE UNITED NATIONS BUILDING IS A PLEASANT 80
DEGREES FAHRENHEIT, 26.7 CELSIUS. SLIGHTLY CLOUDY, 20 PERCENT CHANCE OF RAIN.

Erin laughed delightedly. “She’s wonderful!”

“Umm,” Jarod agreed. His laughing eyes met his wife’s. “Actually, Catherine introduced me to you.”

“Oh?” Erin lifted a brow.

“Oh. Yes.” Jarod pushed a number of keys, and she saw a file on herself suddenly appear across the screen. She was astounded by the things the computer “knew.” Details she had half-forgotten herself.

Erin set her hands delicately upon Jarod’s shoulders and then pinched him. “That isn’t fair!” she exclaimed. “You knew my whole life—”

“Ouch!” Jarod murmured, catching her hands with his and pulling them over his shoulders to kiss them. “No, sweetheart, I didn’t know everything. There was a lot I had to learn from you. And the learning, that marvelous sense of trust you gave me, was a part of my coming to realize how much I needed you to be a part of my life.”

Erin dipped low and brushed a kiss on top of his head. “Then I guess I’ll forgive you—and Catherine,” she said huskily, before frowning and stiffening once more.

“Jarod—you were watching me all the while, weren’t you? That night I collided with you in the bar … in the airport … on the train—”

“The bar,” Jarod interrupted, “was purely accidental! I’ll admit to the plane and the train.” He sighed a little sheepishly. “You see, Catherine knew that you were somehow involved—but not how. As soon as your name had appeared on the roster of those entering the Soviet Union, Joe had planned to use you as a carrier. ‘Mc’ was the code name for you in the computer.” He hesitated for a moment, then explained. “You see, Erin, there was another embassy man who had gotten involved with Joe. His name was Samuel Hughes.” He paused again as he saw her brows raise. “Yes, the man I told Gil about that day in my apartment. Sam wasn’t such a terrible man, just weak. Service to the government doesn’t always pay much, but espionage can. Anyway, Sam got involved with Joe, then started to get panicky. He wanted out and he was in a business a man couldn’t just quit. He had access to Catherine—so he started planting little clues in the computer. Your code name was one of them. He planned to have a fail-safe system for himself—and I suppose he must have told Joe that he wanted out—and that if anything happened to him, Catherine would be there to tell the world. But apparently Joe knew that Sam hadn’t given Catherine too much information—too much would have cooked his own goose, because the Catherines link up and someone with access would be sure to catch on.”

“Joe tried to make it look like the Soviets had gotten Sam. The U.S. couldn’t have said much if he had been caught in the act of espionage. And there was a while when I believed it might have been possible. Except that Sergei denied it. And under the circumstances, Sergei definitely wouldn’t have lied. By the time they found Sam, I knew he hadn’t been killed by the Russians, but by whoever was running Project Midnight.”

Erin shivered and closed her eyes. She had come close to a little too much, and been such a fool that she had fought the man who had always been trying to save her, even when logic had told him she was a suspect.

She felt her husband kiss the palm of her hand tenderly. “Forget it, Erin,” he said softly. “It’s all over now.” He was silent for a second and then changed the tone of his voice. “Anything you want to ask Catherine? You can think of her as a mystic! She does great things with the laws of probability.”

“Hmmmmm,” Erin murmured, thinking for a moment as she tried to join his lighthearted attempt to ease away from the past. “Of course! Ask her if we’re going to have a boy or a girl!”

Jarod ran the Probability Program and then typed out the question.

Catherine whirred.

PERCENTAGE OF MALES BORN IS SLIGHTLY HIGHER AT THIS DATE THAN FEMALES. HOWEVER, PERSONAL PERCENTAGE IS THAT OF ANY EXPECTING PARENTS.

50-50

Erin chuckled softly. “Well that certainly tells us!”

“I’m glad,” Jarod said softly. “I kind of like the element of surprise. I mean, the father gets to call everyone, and the exciting part is announcing a son or daughter, right?”

“I suppose!” Erin laughed. “But which would you prefer?”

He paused a second. “A healthy child,” he said softly.

Erin touched his cheek tenderly. “We will have a healthy child,” she promised quietly. She placed both her hands lightly atop his jet head and tilted it upward so that she could bend to nuzzle his forehead with her lips. From that angle she held his eyes, her own rich with understanding. “I love you,” she said.

“And I love you.”

They held together for a moment, then Jarod once more clutched her hands. “It’s a pleasant day,” he announced, “or so Catherine says—if you don’t mind a small probability of showers. You and Catherine have now met, and I think it would be a shame to waste a pleasant day.”

“I get your drift!” Erin chuckled. “Let’s get out of here!”

She turned and started to retrace her steps down the sterile white corridor. Jarod watched the natural sway of her hips and grinned as he turned back to Catherine to check out.

But before he could touch a key, Catherine whirred, and Jarod smiled as he read the message.

HAVE A NICE, NICE LIFE, JAROD STEELE.