Tom Hyman (36 page)

“Yes! ” “Try to calm yourself, miss.”

Anne couldn’t catch her breath to speak. She gasped as if hit in the stomach. She began running aimlessly up and down the aisles, casting her eyes around desperately. “She was right here!

A minute ago! That man took her!”

The security man trotted along behind her, trying to keep pace.

“What man?”

Anne halted abruptly in front of the stuffed-animal display.

Curled up in the lap of the big stuffed bear, with its paws pulled around her shoulders, was her daughter.

Genny looked up into her mother’s still panic-stricken face with a sly, slightly guilty smile. “I was hiding on you,” she said.

Paul Elder finished writing in the last patient folder in the pile and pushed the stack to one side. He yawned, rubbed his eyes, and glanced at the clock. Past midnight. He must get to bed. He had early rounds to make at the hospital.

Elder lived nine blocks from his office. He used to enjoy the walk.

It gave him a few minutes to relax and get his mind off his work. But during the last few weeks that walk had become a subtle torture. He could think of only one subject: Anne Stewart.

It was extraordinary. He barely knew her, yet he had never missed anyone as intensely as he had missed her ever since the night she had walked out of his office. For the first time in his entirely self-sufficient existence he felt lonely.

He had thought of dozens of plausible reasons to call her. She really did need his help. He had thought of all kinds of advice and suggestions to give her about her daughter. Several times he had actually had the phone in his hand and begun to dial her number.

But so far he had come to his senses in time.

Anne Stewart was not for him. Despite her humble origins, she now enjoyed a luxurious and comfortable existence in a world alien to him.

How quickly she would find him and his life boring!

Getting involved with her would be crazy and destructive.

And yet . . .

God, how he ached to see her again!

Images of her swam into his mind unbidden. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever set eyes upon. Everything about hen-the way she moved and talked and looked at him—held him transfixed. And when they were together their chemistry had seemed so strong.

Yet she had just gone away. Because he had discouraged her.

Why hadn’t he been warmer, more approachable? Why had he been so damned afraid to follow his own instincts?

No. She’d only break his heart sooner or later. Hell, it felt as if she’d broken it already.

He passed a pay phone. He knew the number by heart.

Maybe he should call her, just to talk to her. But it was too late tonight.

Tomorrow, then. He’d call her tomorrow for sure.

No, no. That was dumb. He had to just forget about her.

Elder realized that he had arrived at his destination. He walked through the lobby of his apartment building, said goodnight to the doorman, and rang for the elevator. He felt tired, suddenly.

He always felt tired, at the end of the day. He worked too hard, he knew. He had to make some changes. Have a little fun. Enjoy life.

Not spend so much time alone.

How long would it take? he wondered. To forget about her?

“I’ve spoken to a number of people,” the baroness said. She removed her exercise shorts and leotard and stood naked on the bedroom’s thick fur rug, glistening with perspiration from her late-night workout.

“Very discreetly, of course. The interest is there. We should begin serious planning now.”

“A little premature, isn’t it?” Dalton Stewart was sitting, fully clothed, on the baroness’s king-size bed. He had been napping in a guest room, down the hall, trying to recover from the wine and brandy he had consumed at dinner earlier in the evening, when the baroness had awakened him and invited him into her room.

“The babies from the pilot program aren’t due for another three months.”

The baroness toweled herself off slowly. She was completely unselfconscious in his presence. “And they’re all developing perfectly, Dalton. Three months will pass quickly. We should start selecting our first clients now.”

“That worries me.”

“Everything seems to worry you these days, Dalton. Are you feeling ill?”

“At the moment, yes. From the wine.”

“You need more exercise.”

Stewart studied the baroness’s body as she rubbed the towel energetically across its firm surfaces. Certainly she wasn’t one to neglect exercise. She was not precisely his erotic ideal—Stewart preferred his females a bit more lusciously rounded, with fuller breasts. Like Anne.

The baroness arched her legs slightly apart and rubbed the towel briskly against her pubic hair. “We shouldn’t wait. We should assume the babies in the test program will be born and develop just as your daughter has developed. We must assume that—otherwise what do we do?

Wait for several years to make sure the children are superior? No. We can’t wait that long. We have to accept the possibility that someone else may have a copy of Jupiter.”

“It’s unlikely.”

“I don’t agree. Goth’s assistant sold you a copy, didn’t she?

Why couldn’t she have sold one to someone else?”

Stewart didn’t bother to argue the point. She could be right, after all.

“And we must be more careful with our own copies,” the baroness continued. “At this moment there are four: one in my Munich office, one in your New York office, and two at the Romanian clinic. They must all be copy-proof.”

“I thought they were.”

“Not sufficiently, according to my lab in Munich. They can add a ten-digit access code to the program. If anyone attempts to copy or print from it, or even call it up on the screen, without entering the correct number sequence, it automatically shuts down. The copies in Sibiu and Munich are already encoded that way. That leaves the copy in New York. We must fix it immediately.”

“It’s locked in a safe in the wall of my office. No one else has access except Ajemian. It’s perfectly secure.”

“We must code it. That’s not an unreasonable request, Dalton.

There’s no way to copyright Jupiter, after all. It’s illegal in most countries. So our only protection is to make sure it doesn’t get out of our hands. Karla is in New York now. She could take it to the Munich lab. Would you please instruct Ajemian to give it to her?”

“If you insist.”

The baroness wrapped the towel over her breasts and tucked it in under her arms so that it hung from her like a strapless gown.

“In the meantime, we must get to work in Romania. We only have a few months to renovate that place.”

She headed for the bathroom. She paused at the door and smiled at him.

“Don’t go away,” she said. “I have something important to discuss.”

She closed the door behind her, and in a few minutes Stewart heard the shower running.

Watching her with the towel had aroused him. Despite his alcohol-induced headache and general lassitude, he thought he could probably perform adequately enough—if she was interested.

If she was interested.

The uncertainty was a novel experience for a man who had indulged himself much of his adult life energetically pursuing and seducing women.

The baroness, he had discovered, was quite different from the women he had known. For one thing, she had an uncanny ability for stealing the initiative—of somehow always being in a position to dictate the terms of their relationship.

He understood now why she was so successful in her business dealings.

She was always the most determined, the most organized. She was untiring and perfectly focused. And she always knew exactly what she wanted. This, combined with her willpower and lack of scruples, enabled her to get her way in almost any situation.

She seemed to have no exploitable weaknesses, either. She didn’t take drugs, she didn’t drink much. She had no family that she cared about, no children, no close friends. And she lived in a fortress environment, protected by alarm systems, bodyguards, and attack dogs.

Gradually—bit by bit, day by day—Stewart found himself sliding into a subordinate relationship with the woman. He was aware that it was happening, yet he felt powerless to do anything about it. And ending their partnership now was out of the question.

He had hoped, in the beginning, to forge some kind of acceptable association with hen-if not a completely loving and intimate one, at least an alliance of mutual interest. But that now seemed impossible.

She was simply too demanding and difficult a woman, unable to accept any show of affection on his part as anything other than an invitation to tease and manipulate him.

For weeks she would massage his ego, praising him in the presence of others, deferring to him, acting supportive. Then, when he was beginning to feel some comfort in her presence, she would start subtly undermining him by criticizing him or even embarrassing him in public.

Nothing about her could ever be taken for granted. She kept him constantly off guard. It was quite maddening.

As for sex, it was to her an itch to be scratched, no more. And the more satisfaction one could get out of the way one scratched, the better—as long as it didn’t interfere with one’s real life. If he wanted good sex, she explained, then he should learn to experience it her way. He soon found out exactly what she meant.

One night fairly early in their relationship he was awakened from a deep slumber to feel the bed shaking violently under him.

The room was in semidarkness. A small lamp was lit on the baroness’s dressing table.

He raised his head, alarmed. There was violent movement, other bodies, sharp cries . . . some kind of struggle going on. His first confused thoughts were that the baroness was being attacked by somebody. He twisted around and sat up, ready to fight or flee for his life.

In a few seconds his first impressions dissolved. Fright gave way to astonishment.

Two other people were on the bed—Aldous and Katrina. And both were piled on top of the baroness. Katrina was lying prone with her legs spread wide and her face buried in the baroness’s blond hair. Aldous, in turn, was on top of Katrina, grunting like an animal and ramming his penis violently into her from behind.

One of Katrina’s elbows kept hitting Stewart in the side.

It was too late to feign sleep. He sat there, immobile, trying to decide how to react. Expressions of outrage would probably be laughed at. And retreating from the bed would be cowardly.

The scene changed. The women were now wrapped in a passionate kiss, and Aldous was now pumping away furiously inside the baroness. She was moaning and shuddering with pleasure.

Seeing Stewart awake, Katrina reached a hand across and grabbed his penis. She fished it impatiently through his pajama fly, then squeezed it hard and giggled. She seemed drunk, or high on drugs. In spite of himself, Stewart felt powerfully aroused. He had had sex with many women, but never in a crowd.

Katrina climbed on top of him. Protestation was pointless. Katrina swiftly straddled his hips and impaled herself on him with a long, shuddering moan.

The baroness reached over and began stroking Katrina’s belly.

She slipped her hand further down and closed her fingers around the base of Stewart’s penis. Katrina increased her movement, pistoning up and down violently. He exploded inside her almost immediately.

Katrina paused, then gently began her pumping motion again.

The baroness kept her fingers around him. His penis stayed hard, and within minutes Katrina had him on the verge of coming again. And then her own orgasms began—one after another, at rapid intervals. She shuddered, whimpered, moaned, tossed her head back and forth. Her eyes and jaw shut tight. He could feel her vagina muscles squeezing him powerfully.

The baroness, far more excited now than Stewart had ever seen her, began her own paroxysms. She locked her legs around Aldous, clamped jaw and eyes shut, and launched herself into an extraordinary series of angry convulsions that seemed to last for minutes.

Stewart came again, even more powerfully than the first time.

The orgasm seemed to start somewhere in his toes, shoot to the base of his spineand explode through his penis in a scalding eruption that was as painful as it was ecstatic.

Katrina, still in a state of sexual frenzy, rolled off Stewart and returned her attention to the baroness, licking and sucking at her breasts hungrily.

The other three continued their revelry, moaning and squealing and giggling and gasping in various configurations. Stewart, stunned, spent, and vaguely angry, lost interest in the proceedings and retreated to a bed in a room down the hall.

More nights like that first one soon followed.

Sometimes only Katrina was present, sometimes only Aldous—whatever suited the baroness’s whim. Sometimes they were in costume; sometimes they were in restraints. The baroness loved to wield a whip on both of them.

Conventional sex held little interest for the baroness. Some of what did interest her repelled Stewart—especially her penchant for sadomasochism—but gradually the shock was wearing off, as the baroness repeatedly challenged him to broaden his sexual horizons. Sex became a kind of no-holds-barred competition, a game of sexual chicken. The baroness’s kinky tastes kept her constantly out in front of him. She initiated; he reacted, permanently on the defensive.

His sudden immersion in this bacchanalian maelstrom disoriented Stewart. He found himself spending far too much time recovering from some of the sessions, and far too much time thinking about them afterwards. The baroness, by contrast, compartmentalized her life rigorously. Sex was simply not central to the passions that powered her existence.

Stewart suspected that she was laying on all this sex for him at least in part just to probe him for his own weaknesses—to get him ever more deeply hooked and dependent.

By slow degrees the woman was shattering Stewart’s complacent assumptions about himself, luring him ever deeper into a pattern of self-destructive behavior.