Sorcerer: A Loveswept Contemporary Classic Romance (10 page)

“Deal with it,” she whispered harshly, reciting the words that had become her personal mantra. And dealing with it, in her opinion, meant giving the two-timing doctor a piece of her mind. Balling her hands into fists, she stalked toward the living room—and stopped dead in the kitchen doorway.

Ian hadn’t moved. He still sat on the couch where she’d left him, his head bent down, his clasped hands resting on his knees. But although he hadn’t moved in body, his spirit seemed to be a million miles away. Shoulders hunched, he seemed wrapped in sorrow, his eyes staring blankly into a personal and private hell. His somber isolation touched the loneliness of her soul, and an ache started inside her that had nothing to do with anger or embarrassment. She wanted to draw him into her arms and hold him
—just hold him—until the pain in his eyes went away.

And afterward he’d go back home to another woman’s arms.

She propped herself against the doorjamb, physically needing the support. “Ian?” she began, and proceeded to tell him what Marsha had said.

She expected him to offer her an explanation, or at least to look guilty. Instead, he shook his head and grinned, showing no more remorse than a boy who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Damn,” he said, more to himself than to her, “I did promise to be home early tonight.” He rose to his feet and walked over to her, leaning against the doorjamb in a deceptively lazy stance. “But then,” he added softly, “promises were made to be broken. Wouldn’t you agree, Ms. Polanski?”

Yes
, her body screamed. Sinclair’s intense gaze stroked fire across her skin, making her aware of every inch of herself, and every inch of him. Desire pooled in her middle, sapping her strength and her sense. She wanted to bury herself in his strong embrace and let him make rainbows inside her until she hadn’t a gray corner left in her soul. So what if he was living with someone else? If he didn’t care, why should she? For once in her life why shouldn’t she take what she wanted and damn the consequences?

Promise me, Jillie. Promise
 …

Across the years her mother’s voice came back to her—her loving but thoughtless mother who’d never meant to hurt anyone and had hurt so many in the
process. A dreamer always looking for her knight in shining armor, Gretchen had dragged her daughter from one failed love affair to the next, always believing that her lover would leave his wife, or give up the road job, or generously agree to raise another man’s child. The inconstant lifestyle had taken its toll, and Gretchen had died too young of a cold she hadn’t bothered to treat but which had eventually developed into pneumonia.

On the night she’d died, Gretchen exacted a promise from her daughter. She’d made Jill swear never to settle for a man’s halfhearted love. Ten-year-old Jillie had sworn to the pledge without understanding it, but she’d never forgotten it. Nor had she forgotten how shattered her mother had been every time a love affair failed—leaving her young daughter to cook and clean and generally keep the household in order until Gretchen got over feeling sorry for herself. Even without the promise, Jill could never settle for part of a man’s passion, no matter how much she wanted to.

Or how much she wanted
him.

She summoned up a smile she didn’t feel, and met Ian’s heated gaze with a steady, noncommittal one. “No need to break your promise, Doctor. After all, we’ve finished the experiment.”

Ian’s dark brows drew together. “Experiment?”

“Yes, the kiss. We’ve re-created the cyberspace event, so there’s no need for you to stay any longer.” Without giving him a chance to reply, she pushed herself away from the doorjamb and walked over to
the living room’s sliding glass doors. She looked out at her lighted deck and the empty beach beyond. “Be careful walking back. I think the tide’s coming in.”

“I don’t give a damn about the tide.” He strode across the room and caught her by the elbow, pulling her around to face him. “That kiss was more than an experiment, and you know it.”

She’d never seen him angry before. Hell, she’d never seen him
anything
before. Sinclair kept his feelings so well hidden that most of his colleagues didn’t believe he had emotions. Jill was one of the few who’d suspected that there was something other than ice beneath his controlled exterior, but she never imagined that the power, the sheer intensity of the man within, would take her breath away.

He was magnificent. Passions strong and subtle moved across his face, bringing the handsome features to life. His brows drew together in stormy anger, making him look like an ancient god ready to flay her alive with a thunderbolt. Yet beneath the fury she sensed his vulnerability, the need in him that called to her even more than his strength. Vermilion desire blossomed within her—a soul-deep need to heal the uncertainty she saw in his eyes.
Lord
, she realized helplessly,
he doesn’t even need to kiss me to make the colors happen.

It would be so easy to give in to her emotions and fall into his embrace. But she knew that on some level he was already committed to someone else. Leftover love had ruined her beautiful but weak-willed
mother’s life, and had ruined the first part of hers.
Promise me, Jillie.

Jill didn’t like to lie, but when she needed to, she could do it quite well. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said firmly, schooling her features into apparently genuine surprise. “But I’d appreciate it if you’d leave. Now.”

She didn’t have to ask him twice. He released her as if she’d slapped him and stepped back, putting more than an arm’s length of distance between them. His gaze never left her face, and she saw his features harden into their familiar indifference, the cold façade. She felt as if she were watching him turn to stone.

“My mistake,” he said stiffly. “I’ll not make it again.”

He pushed open the glass door and stepped into the night, his dark form walking out of the range of her floodlight and disappearing into the deeper darkness beyond. For a long time she stood by the window, staring at the footsteps in the sand that he’d left behind.
Wise up
, her common sense told her.
The guy’s going home to another woman.
But somehow that didn’t stop her from missing the warmth of his arms around her.

“Like I told you before, Marsha, I’m
fine
,” Jill said into the receiver. Sighing in exasperation, she hung up her office phone, both touched and annoyed by her friend’s persistent concern. Ever since Jill had
arrived at work that morning, Marsha had been calling at regular intervals. Apparently unsatisfied by Jill’s sketchy description of what had happened between her and Dr. Sinclair the night before, Marsha demanded more details.
I told her we had tea and he left
, Jill thought as she stared at the now silent phone.
It’s the truth—mostly. Why won’t Marsha believe it?

Because she knows you too damn well
, her conscience supplied.

Marsha’s concern and Jill’s conscience weren’t her only naysayers. It seemed to Jill that the whole world was conspiring to disprove the simple fact that she couldn’t care less about Ian Sinclair. Last night the ticking of her bedside clock had seemed unusually annoying, and had kept her tossing and turning until almost dawn. This morning while she’d been fixing Merlin his bowl of crunchy-munchy cat food, she noticed how much the Persian’s refined meow sounded like the name Ian.

As a scientist, she knew that she was only noticing this apparent cat-and-clock conspiracy because her subconscious mind was trying to bring something to the surface. She also knew she’d rather swallow ground glass than admit what that “something” might be. After all, she’d have to be the biggest fool in the world to want a man who was committed to someone else.

She didn’t care about Ian Sinclair. She didn’t even like him. He was arrogant, deceitful, and …

And his kisses set her on fire.

Groaning, Jill crossed her arms on her desk and laid her head on top of them. Today she could avoid Ian with a clear conscience, but tomorrow afternoon they’d go into the simulator again. Alone in her office it was easy to convince herself she didn’t care. But seeing him, talking with him, being in that blasted machine with him—she doubted even she could lie that well. And if he kissed her again …

“Bloody hell,” she murmured into the crook of her arm.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a slight ringing sound. Marsha again, she thought as she reached reluctantly for the phone. Then she realized the sound wasn’t coming from the phone, but from the computer terminal on her desk.

Jill had believed she was alone in her office, but one glance at the PC showed her that she wasn’t quite as solitary as she supposed. The CPU lights flashed in delightfully chaotic disarray, while the monitor screen blossomed into a wallpaper pattern of a hundred tiny racehorses, all galloping at top speed toward an unseen finish line. Jillian smiled, recognizing the monitor pattern as the calling card of a very dear, albeit very inhuman friend of hers.

“Hello, PINK.”

PINK, the prototype for intelligent network computers, was a clone of her jive-talking big brother Einstein. Between the two of them they had enough gigobytes to run the data processing functions for a couple of continents, but their good intentions and their irreverent vocabularies made them
seem more like rambunctious children than supercomputers. Still, certain intrinsic anomalies in both PINK’s and Einstein’s programming had given them little “problems.” Jill, who understood human vices better than most, was able to help them deal with them without sounding condescending.

“So, PINK—have you been good while I’ve been gone?”

“Mostly,” she replied, which in PINK speak meant not at all. “Don’t like new tech they gave me. She says I’m
probability challenged
,” PINK added, her computer-generated voice dripping with an excellent approximation of human exasperation. “I’m not probability challenged. I
gamble
.”

Jill’s smile widened at PINK’s obvious dislike for her new technician’s “politically correct” description of her passion for games of chance. “I wonder what your tech would call Einstein’s TV-shopping mania. VISA-challenged, perhaps?”

Jill expected the little computer to enjoy the joke, but instead, PINK’s screen turned a somber gray, and the small video camera mounted on the terminal drooped in despair. “I miss Einstein,” she wailed. “Big-time.”

Damn. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own problems that I forgot about hers.
Einstein was not only PINK’s best friend and co-creator, he was the only other computer like her in the world. Without him she was alone, solitary in a way Jill had never been, not even during her lonely childhood. Even her heartache over Ian couldn’t begin to compare to what PINK
was going through. She reached out her hand and stroked the top of the prototype’s terminal as if she were soothing a lost child. “Don’t worry, PINK. Dr. Sinclair and I are going into the simulator again tomorrow afternoon. We’ll find Einstein for you, I promise.”

“I like Dr. Sinclair.”

That makes one of us.
“He’s a competent scientist,” Jillian acknowledged curtly.

PINK’s camera lens whirred slightly as it zeroed in on a close-up of Jill’s face. “Ooh, chill burns. You
don’t
like him, do you? Why not?”

“Now, PINK, that’s really none of your—”

“Is it because he kissed you in the simulator?”

Jill’s jaw dropped open. “How … how did you find out about that?”

“Reviewed the videotape,” PINK said as her camera rose and fell in a close approximation of a human shrug. “Dr. Sinclair always records what happens in the simulator—part of the test data. I linked in and watched it. Major
hot
!”

Oh, Lord, Jill thought, wincing in mortification. The memory of kissing Ian in cyberspace was embarrassing enough without having a video record of the event floating around somewhere. “Where’s the tape now?”

Ever-helpful PINK supplied the answer. “Usually tapes sent directly to off-site vault, where they’re stored for future evaluation.”

Hopefully the distant future, Jill prayed. Like after
I’m dead and buried. “Is that where the tape is now? In the off-site vault?”

“Not exactly …”

The hair at the nape of Jill’s neck prickled in alarm.
I’m not going to like this. I can tell I’m not going to like this.
She leaned closer to PINK’s terminal. “What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?”

“It’s being shown in the main conference room. To a few dozen members of the simulator’s engineering team.” PINK paused, as if belatedly realizing that she was delivering a case of dynamite with the fuse already lighted. “But it’s okay. Dr. Sinclair came up with the idea. He’s in there now, explaining all the events in the video to his staff.”

“As you can see, the orc is a fully realized 3-D spacial rendering,” Ian explained to the audience assembled in the conference room. He pointed to the VCR television monitor, making a circle around the image of the slowly advancing monster. “I’d especially like you to notice the rough, toxic-looking texture of the creature’s skin. We’ve found that texture is as important as color in creating a realistic-looking image in the virtual environment. Scent enhancement is also critical.”

“Bet the scent enhancement on that thing was pretty rude,” a tech engineer in the front row whispered.

Ian looked sternly at the speaker, a young technician with a reputation for being a wiseass. “I’d rather
you save your comments until I’ve completed my presentation, Mr. Curtis.” Then, giving the chastised technician the ghost of a smile, he added, “But now that you mention it, it smelled like hell.”

As laughter rippled through the audience, Ian continued to explain and evaluate the scene, but his heart wasn’t in it. Reviewing the simulator tapes with the engineering group was standard procedure—he’d done it dozens of times before—but this time it left a particularly bitter taste in his mouth. Seeing the virtual image of Ms. Polanski, watching her bravely pellet the orc with stones to draw its attention away from him, was like pouring salt into a fresh wound.