Sorcerer: A Loveswept Contemporary Classic Romance (2 page)

Jillian gave Marsha a valiant smile, wishing she could do more to calm her friend’s fears. But facts were facts. She knew as well as Marsha that there was a slight but very real chance that the neurocyber link established between the simulator and the human mind could rip a person’s consciousness to shreds.

“Dammit, Marsh, you’re making me nervous,” Jill said, masking her distress with another bright smile. “I’ll be fine, you’ll see. It’ll be … a piece of toast!”

“I hope you’re right,” Marsha commented, only slightly cheered by Jill’s use of Einstein’s favorite expression. “Look, I worked with E as closely as you did. That little computer means a lot to me too, but if you don’t think you can go through with it, you
back out. I mean it. Sinclair or no Sinclair, you back out.”

“Count on it,” Jill assured her. She started to say something else, but her words were drowned out by a ringing alarm. “That’s the signal for unauthorized personnel to clear the area. Sorry, Marsh, but only techs—and victims—are allowed from here on out.”

Marsha started to leave, but she turned back for a final word. “Remember what I said about backing out. This isn’t worth your life. Besides, I need you,” she added with a grin. “Kevin’s bringing the whole engineering department to my party tonight, and you have to help me make a good impression.”

“Like Kevin’s gonna care,” Jill called after her, grinning herself. Considering how besotted Kevin was with her beautiful Latino friend, Jill doubted he’d notice anyone else at the party. Or that Marsha would either, for that matter. Those two definitely had it bad for each other.

Jill started toward the Simulator, but her mind refused to stay focused on her project. The wires and steel scaffolding faded as she thought about Kevin and Marsha, and the special relationship blossoming between them. Jill was incredibly happy for her best friend, yet there was a small, secret part of her that died a little each time she saw them look at each other, their eyes shining with love.

Her thoughts ended abruptly as she ran full tilt into a man’s solid chest. “Ohmigod!” she exclaimed.

Momentarily disoriented, she had a scant second to register the scrupulously spotless lab coat, the understated
elegance of expensive cologne, the confident strength of hands on her upper arms, holding her with disconcerting gentleness.

“Steady on, Ms. Polanski. Are you all right?”

His rich British accent poured through her like sweet sunshine. Her gaze shot up, meeting the intense, deep-set eyes that never failed to stop her breath. Dark and broodingly handsome, he could have easily been mistaken for a matinee idol, the star of some torrid eighteenth-century melodrama set in the moors. His Lord Byron looks had set many hearts fluttering in the cyberengineering department, and he’d broken every one on his own heart of granite.

“I’m … okay.”

“You should watch where you’re going,” he admonished her.

Five seconds since we met and already he’s giving me orders.
Nothing had changed. And yet … she thought she saw a flicker of amusement hovering near the corners of his stern mouth. And she could swear she detected an almost imperceptible softening in his steel-gray gaze. She swallowed, feeling unbalanced despite his anchoring hands. “Dr. Sinclair, I—”

A sudden shout distracted Jill. Reluctantly, she tore her gaze away from Sinclair’s and glanced past his shoulder. Marsha was dashing toward her across the room.

“Jill, you forgot your gloves,” Marsha called,
waving the bulky orange handgear. “You’d better not lose them, or your Dr. Doom will have your hide.”

My Dr. Doom
, Jill thought, wincing. She opened her mouth to explain, but Sinclair had already released his hold on her arms and stepped away. She looked up into his eyes and found them chillingly distant, like the space between the stars. The cold cut clear through to her bones. The warmth she’d thought she’d glimpsed a moment before had vanished—if it had ever been there at all.

“Here you go,” Marsha said as she handed the gloves to Jillian. But even as she spoke her eyes strayed to the handsome, dark-haired scientist standing next to her friend. Being in love hadn’t made her lose her appreciation for a good-looking man. “Who’s the hunk?”

“Hunk?” Sinclair asked as a frown creased his forehead. “Hunk of what?”

“You don’t know what hunk means?” Marsha said incredulously. She turned to Jill, nodding in Sinclair’s direction. “Honey, we need to bring this man into the twentieth century. Make sure you bring him to the party tonight.”

“Marsh, I don’t think that’s such a good—”

“Party starts at eight,” she said, disregarding Jill’s warning. Then, after delivering a final provocative wink at the doctor, she left the room.

Jillian knew Marsha hadn’t meant to embarrass the hell out of her, but that didn’t stop a telltale blush from creeping into her cheeks. “I’m sorry
about that, Dr. Sinclair. Marsha doesn’t know who you are.”

“So I gather,” he remarked dryly. “I doubt she would have invited
Dr. Doom
to her party.”

“She wouldn’t have called you that if she knew you,” Jill said quickly, the words leaving her mouth before she realized how foolish they sounded. If Marsha had known Sinclair, she’d probably have called him much worse. In the five months Jill had worked with him, she’d never seen him laugh, or tell a joke, or show any trace of human feeling. Even the scientists and technicians who’d worked with him for years said that underneath his frosty exterior beat a heart of pure stainless steel.

And Jill had gotten more than her share of frost-bite.

Okay, so maybe some of it was her fault. On her first day with his department she’d learned that the simulator waste products weren’t being recycled properly. Environmental issues had always been her hot button, and when the doctor’s secretary told her Sinclair couldn’t see her that day, Jill had simply stormed into his office anyway. His cool gray eyes had met her fiery brown ones, and the battle was joined. For three months they’d argued about everything from environmental responsibility to simulator safety standards. They couldn’t be in the same room for five minutes without fighting about something. Jill chalked up their battles to a deep-seated loathing for each other. Or she had, until the night of Harry Griffith’s farewell party.

Dragons
 …

Sinclair checked his watch, then started a quick march toward the simulator without sparing so much as a glance in Jill’s direction. “Step on it, Ms. Polanski. We’re wasting time.”

Jillian fell in behind him, noting the strength of his stride, the certainty of his confidence. Jill, whose life was a rabbit warren of human fears and failings, had been drawn to his self-assurance like a magnet to steel. Yet ultimately she’d been drawn by something even stronger—the flashes of emotion she’d glimpsed in his metal-hard eyes, the brief frowns of human uncertainty, the diamond-rare smiles. A champion of lost causes, she’d been incapable of turning her back on a man who appeared to be at war with himself.

But appearances, as always, were deceiving. Every attempt she’d made at friendship had met with at best renewed arguments, and at worst cruel indifference. The contradictions in his character had torn her apart like storm winds, ultimately coming to a head at Harry’s party. She’d been dancing with several of her tech friends, when the music turned slow and intimate. She’d started to leave the floor, but suddenly, impossibly, found herself in Dr. Sinclair’s arms, dancing to the sultry song.

At first courtesy kept her from pulling away, but courtesy was quickly eclipsed by a stronger and much more potent emotion. Sinclair’s British heart may have been ice, but he danced with all the passion of a Latin lover. Jill let him lead her, meeting his
passion with the forbidden feelings she’d kept locked inside, finally admitting to herself what she’d been fighting so hard to deny—that there was a man beneath the hard exterior, a man she’d been attracted to since the first time they’d met. Sighing, she lifted her gaze to his, opening herself emotionally in a way she hadn’t done for years, and—drew back in shock at the look of cold, almost cruel interest in his eyes. He was studying her reaction, like one of his damn experiments.

Luckily, the song ended at that moment. She’d left the party and gone back to the safety of her home, feeling betrayed by his clinical curiosity, and by her own traitorous emotions. She’d gone to work the next day determined to put the episode behind her, but the moment she met Sinclair’s cool gray gaze she’d felt the same potent attraction—and the same icy betrayal. And the more she tried to deny it, the stronger it became.

Jill wasn’t a quitter. She kept up the farce for two months, stuffing down her unwanted emotions, trying to pretend that moment in his arms had never happened. But the effort took its toll, and the dishonesty began to sap her spirit. When she heard about the Sheffield cybertech job, she jumped at the chance, knowing it was the coward’s way out, but taking it anyway.

Now her affection for Einstein had forced her back to Sinclair’s side.
In his dire clutches
, she thought, smiling wryly at the melodramatic image. After all, this was a high-tech laboratory of the nineties,
not some gloomy Yorkshire castle of the last century. And she could certainly keep her silly schoolgirl infatuation under control for the short time they’d be working together.

Besides
, she thought as she looked over the doctor’s head at the small “eggs” suspended in the center of the huge metallic scaffolding,
I’ve got plenty of other things to worry about.

She was without a doubt the most uncooperative woman he had ever worked with.

“I don’t care if you
wrote
the book on the simulator procedures,” Sinclair said as he placed another self-affixing sensor on her temple. “You’re going to listen to them again.”

Jillian strained against the egg’s bright yellow rayon-mesh harness, almost as if she were straining against his commands. “Haven’t got much choice, have I? I’m a captive audience.”

Logically Sinclair knew he should ignore her sarcasm just as he ignored everyone else’s. Acknowledging slights was a waste of time in his opinion. It redirected one’s mind and energy away from more important matters—like getting the job done. As a rule, both praise and insults rolled off him like water from a duck’s back. But Jillian’s comments stung.

Looking away, he reached behind him and picked up another sensor wire. The close quarters of the egg made it an uncomfortable maneuver, but Sinclair ignored the twinge of pain. Acknowledging
physical discomfort was another waste of time. “When you first become ‘immersed’ in the virtual environment, you’ll experience a minute or two of disorientation, like—”

“Like a sailor gaining his sea legs,” she finished. “I
know
, Doctor. I’ve played Dactyl Nightmare and other virtual reality arcade games.”

“So have I, Ms. Polanski, and those games are Tinker Toys compared with what you’re about to experience. That’s one reason I’ve limited a cybernaut’s time to an hour in the simulated environment. After that, a person’s higher reasoning skills begin to deteriorate—similar to a scuba diver’s rapture of the deep. Now, after you become accustomed to the virtual surroundings, you’ll see the power grid.”

“The lines of light that map and stabilize the virtual world,” she stated in a singsong voice.

His jaw tightened, caught between annoyance and admiration. She’d obviously studied the revised documentation carefully before returning, but why she had to repeat it to him in such an irritating manner … But then, Jillian Polanski had always been insubordinate. Insubordinate, argumentative, challenging, stimulating, exciting—

He cleared his throat in a loud harrumph. “They’re more than just lines of light. They transmit energy units to the environment. If you cross one while you’re in the virtual world they present no danger, but … do you recall what happens when a consciousness leaves the simulated environment?”

She reached down, apparently to tighten one of
the harness straps. “Yes,” she said quietly. “The grid lines reenergize to full capacity. Anyone standing in one could receive a significant—possibly fatal—shock.”

She continued to worry the harness strap. The low artificial light in the egg blurred the clarity of her profile, but Sinclair was a detail man, and the details of Ms. Polanski’s features were something he’d made a study of more than once.

With scientific detachment he’d logged the fact that she was an attractive woman with a delicate, almost ethereal bone structure. Her smooth, soft skin was saved from bland perfection by a spray of freckles over a pert nose that another man might have called adorable. There was an energy about her, a vitality for life that others might have found stimulating, even intriguing. Bending nearer, Sinclair caught a whiff of the elusive scent that always surrounded her, a hauntingly familiar aroma that might have kept another man awake nights, that—truthfully—had kept him up for a night or two since the evening of Griffith’s party, when he’d held her body against his for that one, slow dance—

Bloody hell!
He swore inwardly, clamping down on an image that had no place in his efficiently streamlined simulator, or in his efficiently streamlined life. “This is not an arcade game, Ms. Polanski,” he said, his voice a trace rougher than it had been before. “Once you’re in the virtual environment, everything you see, hear, touch, smell, and even taste will come to you through the computer.
The ‘real world’ will cease to exist. You’ll be trusting your very sanity to the simulator.”

“And to you,” she added softly.

Her words unnerved him. He’d taken cybernauts into the simulator before—Dr. Miller, and at least a half-dozen others. Each of them had placed themselves in his hands, and he’d accepted that responsibility as part of his job. But as he stared into Jillian’s wide brown eyes, that responsibility suddenly took on an awesome weight. Swaddled in Miller’s hastily cut-down harness, she looked impossibly small, and fragile as a porcelain vase. For the first time the risks of the cybernaut seemed to outweigh the value of his research. For the first time, he hesitated.