Guardian of the Storm (24 page)

They’d assured him that they were evolving, just as the rumors had said about the other rogues, that they had awareness, felt things they never had before.

He wasn’t sure he believed that either.

He didn’t know what the fuck to believe anymore.

“There is still hot water,” Simon said after studying Seth’s expression for several moments as if trying to interpret his thoughts.

Seth shook his head, moving from the window. “I don’t need a shower,” he said irritably.

“The hot water soothes tension.”

Seth tamped the urge to ask him what the hell he’d know about tension. He was a fucking machine. “Why the fuck not?” he muttered. “At least it’s something to do to pass the time.”

“Cole is not likely to return before dawn,” Simon pointed out coolly as Seth stalked past him. “… If he returns at all.”

“It doesn’t look like the doctor is likely return either.”

The shower
was
soothing, as much as he hated to admit it. He wondered if that was why the doctor had decided to take the place—because it had the old fashioned water shower rather than the particle showers required by law now. For that matter, he was surprised she’d wrangled permission to keep it.

Unless, of course, nobody knew she had it.

It was possible. She had enough clout, or she was smart enough, she’d managed to virtually erase her trail.

It had taken determination to track her down.

* * * *

Claire was still so angry when she reached her mother’s house that the grief that had nearly overwhelmed every waking moment since her mother’s death barely caused her a pang as she stopped at the gate to key in the security code. She’d dreaded the task of wrapping up her mother’s affairs, of sorting her mother’s belongings, and trying to decide what to do with her personal affects, and the home they’d shared for most of her childhood. She’d put it off as long as she felt like she could before she’d dredged up the inner strength to face it.

Only to be met with the discovery that those
bastards
at Robotics, Inc., where her mother had slaved for more than thirty years, thought
they
were entitled to all her mother’s worldly possessions!

She didn’t give a damn if they were laboring under the impression that her mother had no next of kin! She still didn’t know how they
could
have failed know it when her mother had worked for them so long, but …
fuck
their damned clause!

It was an outrage that they’d had the gall even to put such a damned clause in their contracts! It wasn’t enough that they’d profited from her mother’s brilliant mind for more thirty years, claimed everything she’d ever discovered or invented? They thought they could take everything she’d accumulated over the years and put it back into their pocket, too?

The slimy bastards!

A vague sense of satisfaction wafted through her as the gates opened to allow her into the compound. The look on their faces had been priceless when the judge had examined her documentation and informed them that she was her mother’s sole beneficiary!

Take that, you slimy, money grubbing sons-of-a-bitch!

Maybe
the house still belonged to the company—they were going to have to prove that in court, though. She’d fight them every step of the way if it took every credit she had to her name, but everything else, everything
inside
the house and outside of the house, was hers, by damn! If wasn’t part of the property, had been purchased by her mother, then it certainly wasn’t theirs.

She had a good mind to dig up her mother’s rose garden while she was at it. Her mother had bought them and planted them!

Shutting off her craft, she barely waited for it to settle to the ground in front of the door before she shoved the door open and got out. She paused when she had, though, trying to take a few calming breaths.

Her throat closed as she stared the house, her anger dying to a slow simmer.

She couldn’t believe her mother was gone.

There was no way she was ever going to be able accept that her mother had taken her own life. It just wasn’t possible. She would’ve known if her mother had been depressed enough to have such thoughts. She knew she would’ve!

Thrusting those thoughts aside, she strode purposefully to the front door and keyed in the security code. The door opened.

The lights didn’t come on when she stepped across the threshold. “Lights!”

Frowning when nothing happened, she stepped back to the wall and skimmed her hand along the surface until she finally found the manual switch. Relief filled her when the lights flickered on.

Puzzled that the motion sensors seemed to have been deactivated, she glanced around the living room, but she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She hadn’t realized that she was listening to the house until she heard, faintly, the sound of running water.

Her heart bounced into her throat and tried to strangle her. Her mind went chaotic. The sound connected in her mind, though, to her mother’s pride and joy—the ‘natural’ shower she loved. Without stopping to think it couldn’t possibly be her mother, Claire closed the door and headed toward her mother’s room … rushed, a mixture of excitement and dread pounding through her.

It wasn’t until she’d stepped into her mother’s room that it hit her. Her mother was dead. She
knew
her mother was dead. She’d had to identify and claim her body from the morgue.

She froze then, her mind more chaotic than before.

The next thought that leapt into her mind was her confrontation with the CEO of Robotics, Inc. It didn’t take a great leap from there to reach the conclusion that the bastards had counted on the house being theirs.

At the sound of the water being shut off, Clair glanced quickly around for something to use as a weapon. Retreat didn’t occur to her until she saw there was nothing remotely weapon-like that she could see, but by then she’d heard the shower door open and the splat of bare, wet feet across the tiles of the bathroom. Shoving her hand into the pocket of her jacket as she heard them pause on the other side of the door, she pointed her index finger at the intruder, hoping against hope that it looked enough like the barrel of a pistol to at least give him pause.

The door opened. She hadn’t expected it to be anyone she knew so it was no great surprise to come face to face—well, actually chest—with a man she’d never seen in her life. Beyond that nothing was as she’d expected. He was naked, or the next thing to it, wearing nothing but a thin towel—two corners fisted in one hand at his waist—wrapped around his narrow hips that didn’t even make a complete connection, displaying a long, muscular, hairy thigh. His torso was proportionally as long as the legs, his chest broad, sculpted with muscles and sprinkled with a dusting of dark hair that was slicked to his skin with water. Long black hair was plastered close to his head and around his broad shoulders. The face above it didn’t even penetrate her perceptions beyond a vague impression of being hard and angular, the two almost straight black brows above his eyes pulled into a scowl.

The overall impression of a wall of flesh—he was a very
large
man—rocked her back on her heels, mentally speaking, and completed her mind’s descent into chaos that fear had started. “Put your hands up!” Claire croaked when she finally found her voice.

Something flickered in his deep blue eyes. A faint smile tipped one corner of his hard mouth up. Slowly, he released his hold on the towel and lifted his arms.

The moment he did, his towel hit the floor.

Claire’s gaze automatically followed the path of the flutter of white and then ricocheted upward to the behemoth the towel had been covering and hung there. Her jaw went slack. A blur of movement was registered in her mind, however, as an attempt to relieve her of her ‘weapon’, and she whirled instinctively to run.

A jolt went through her when she found herself facing a wall of flesh that so closely mirrored the mountain of a man now behind her that she thought, for too many seconds, that she actually
had
encountered a mirror.

His hand shot out before she could do more than gape at him. He caught her index finger in an unbreakable grip before she could even instinctively snatch it away. Two hands settled on her waist from behind. Her flight instinct kicked in once more. For the space of a few hundred thundering heart beats, Claire executed the ‘cornered feline’ escape maneuver—became a blur of twisting, jerking, flailing movement, evading a firm grip on her by either man but discovered in the end that they’d still managed to cage her so effectively between their bodies that no amount of wigging or jerking could free her.

That conclusion wasn’t what made her stop abruptly. It wasn’t even the fact that she’d run out of breath from hyperventilation. It was the sudden realization that the meaty flesh banging against her, back and front,
wasn’t
their thighs. It was something long, cylindrical, and it was getting hard.

Panting for breath, she gaped upwards at the man still holding her finger for a moment before fear sent a shaft of reviving anger through her. “Don’t even
think
about using those things on me!”

The man in front of her cocked his head to one side curiously. “I have no weapon—and neither do you.”

The man behind her speared the cleft of her buttocks with his ‘weapon’, poking her several times pointedly. “What? This?”

When she whipped her head around to gape at him, she saw his eyes were gleaming with both humor and anger, his hard mouth twisted in a grim smile. “You aren’t Dr. LaMotte, so why don’t you tell us who you are?”