Page 18 of Heart of Danger
Mac clenched his jaw, ashamed that Nick had to call him to order. What the fuck was this—getting distracted by a woman’shair?Lucius would be ashamed of him.
At the thought, another pang of pain shot through his chest. He made an effort never to allow himself to think of Lucius, of his betrayal, of how much it fucking hurt. It just was. He’d accepted a lot in his hard life and this was just something else to take on board.
And he shouldn’t be thinking that Lucius wouldn’t approve of something when Lucius had fuckingsold them out.Formoney. Lucius had forfeited his right to tell him and Jon and Nick anything, even inside Mac’s own head.
He reran the tape in his head.
“I said, where had he had the surgeries? His body? Bones reset? What?”
“No, no. All over his head and a cluster at the base of his spine. All neurological surgeries. He was messed with, heavily. And by experts. At one point it looked to me like he’d had two probes inserted in his brain, but they were removed.”
Mac had to repress the wince. He hated doctors and hospitals. “What were the operations for?”
“Well,” she said, looking down at her hands as if for inspiration. “That’s the thing. I don’t know. Millon doesn’t have us working in teams, for some reason, so I was the only one trying to figure this out. Particularly since patient Nine’s clinical charts weren’t available. I ruled out cancerous tumors or even benign tumors. He didn’t have epilepsy. And patient Nine had extreme difficulty forming words or making signs so he wasn’t any help. There were other anomalies, too.”
He’d caught her out. Now heknewshe’d been sent by an enemy. He jerked his head back.
“Yeah,” Nick said grimly in his ear. “We caught it, too.”
She continued. “Nothing about the patient’s functional MRI made any sense. I’ll spare you the technical details, but his dementia, which was clinically speaking quite severe, didn’t correspond in any way with known neurological patterns of dementia. I was so puzzled by the man that I would take his fMRIs and EKGs home with me to study. And then?—”
“Yeah?” Mac drummed his fingers on the table. Yeah she was pretty and yeah she was smart but he was going to get the truth out of her if he had to inject a triple dose of Trooth in her.
She leaned forward, looking him in the eyes. So this was where the big time lying was going to start.
“Then two days ago, I came in and he was in a terrible state, thrashing wildly against the restraints around his wrists and ankles. When he saw me he stilled, motioned with his head for me to come closer, signaled for use of my keyboard. He wrote they were going to kill him soon. He was…very convincing.”
“Though he was sick,” Mac noted.
“Yes, though he was sick. And of course paranoia is actually a symptom of dementia. I tried to calm him down because he was bleeding at the restraints. He said I had to find a man called Thomas McEnroe. Mac.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said harshly.
Her smile was sad and tired. “No?”
“No. You said he couldn’t form words, could hardly think straight and yet here he was telling you all of that. How does that work?”
She watched him for a full minute, breathing quietly. She’d been toying with the Hawk. She gently tipped her hand to the side, letting the Hawk she’d been holding roll onto the table. Her hand trembled but her gaze was steady.
They watched as the Hawk rolled once, twice, making a tiny rattling sound in the quiet room. Mac knew Jon and Nick were watching, listening.
And then his world turned upside down.
She reached further, her hand covering his, grasping it.
At first he thought it was a sex move, otherwise why the fuck would she be touching him? And, God, their two hands together were so erotic. His hand was dark and powerful, nicked and scarred and rough. A workingman’s hand. Hers was slender, long-fingered, elegant. Pale creamy skin over delicate bones. A pianist’s hand.
The contrast was arousing, female over male.
So that’s the way she wants to play it,he thought and then he was swept away by a blast of painless incandescent heat that moved from his hand, up his arm and across his chest. It was as if his body was taken over by an alien entity. An entity that was warm and enveloping and sweet beyond description. For a second he wondered if he’d been drugged. If her hand somehow contained a micro-syringe and she had injected a dose of…something in him. He had no idea what. He’d never heard of a drug that could do this.
Any further thought was impossible, he was in the grip of something powerful, more powerful than he was. He stared at her face as her features tightened, almost as if she were in pain. Her eyes glowed, as if some kind of light bomb had gone off behind them. As if they were a source of light themselves.
That incredible heat now flowed through his entire body, suffusing it with a golden glow. He was completely blocked, as if in a cube of amber. He couldn’t move a muscle, each element of his body locked into place.
“Boss?” Jon asked softly in his ear. “You okay?”
“Should we come in?” Nick growled.
