Heart of Danger (12 page)

He distrusted her. That had been made very clear. He distrusted her, didn’t believe her story, half suspected she’d been sent to spy on him.

What a terrible trick biology had played on her that this man—huge, dangerous, a man who didn’t trust her—was the one man she had a violent sexual reaction to.

It was explicit, too, which terrified her. It wasn’t a generic attraction, the kind you’d feel for some good-looking man who crossed your path, even though Mac was the furthest thing possible from good-looking.

This man, this particular man with the muscles and the scowl and the scarred face, he was the one she reacted to as if her body had been waiting all its life for him and him alone.

Her brain telling her body
forget it
didn’t work.

Her heart was pounding so hard she thought she’d crack a rib. She didn’t dare move, didn’t dare speak, because then he’d know she’d started trembling the instant he appeared at the door.

Oh God.

Heat blossomed between her thighs and she was shocked to feel her vagina clench once, very hard, just as it did in her infrequent orgasms. Her chest was tight, yes, but her breasts felt swollen, heavy. Most shocking of all was a weak, trembly feeling, as if all he had to do was hold out one big hand and she’d run straight to him.

That was the scariest thing of all. She couldn’t throw herself at him because he wouldn’t catch her.

He might end up shooting her, actually.

Mac looked around at the ruins of breakfast, then pinned her and Stella with a hard look. He addressed Stella. “You about done here?”

“Yes, I’m fine, thank you, Mac. Thank you for asking.” Stella tilted her head and studied him. “Always a pleasure to be around a man who minds his manners.”

His jaw muscles worked so hard his temples moved. Catherine would bet that anything that made the temperomandibular joints work so hard had to hurt the teeth.

That stony face showed no expression at all. Catherine wondered at Stella, who seemed to be totally indifferent to his mood.

“Stella,” Mac growled.

“Mac . . .” she answered, in an exaggerated imitation of his growl. To Catherine it seemed like baiting a bear, but Stella just looked exasperated, not frightened.

There was a stalemate of some kind. Catherine could practically see the lines of male and female will crossing. Amazingly, Stella won.

She pointed to the coffeepot. “Coffee? I still have enough for a cup.”

He hesitated, but Stella went ahead and got a cup from a cabinet. To Catherine’s surprise, there was a full complement of teas, a small sink and a microwave inside the cabinet. If she’d known, she’d have made herself a cup of tea last night.

Stella poured Mac a cup and handed it to him. “There you go, black no sugar. Just like your heart.”

Mac put the cup down on the table hard enough for a couple of drops of coffee to slosh over the edge. “Goddammit, Stella—”

“No, you listen to me, Mac. Do you realize that this woman—” She made a graceful move indicating Catherine, reminding her all over again that Stella had once been one of the greatest actresses in the world. “Do you know she thought she was a
prisoner
last night?”

Catherine made a sound, choked off before it could make its way from her throat to her mouth. She tried to hunker, to become invisible. Stella turned to her. “Didn’t you?” she demanded hotly.

Mac was looking at her narrow-eyed, face of stone. Oh God. She nodded, throat too tight to talk. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she wasn’t a prisoner.

“Well, you weren’t,” Stella said. “I can’t believe he’d make you think that for
one second
. This community doesn’t do prisons.”

Her eyes were the same eyes that had burned from the screen. Wide, pale blue, almost transparent, still beautiful and expressive, notwithstanding the scar that slashed from the right eyebrow to the edge of a sharp cheekbone, barely missing the eyeball. Those eyes had been magnificent on the screen but were even more powerful in real life. “She wasn’t a prisoner. Was she, Mac? You tell her she wasn’t locked up like an animal. And if you did lock that door you can forget about eating. Like, forever. You can cook your own damned meals from now on.”

That grim face winced, as if in pain. Catherine understood completely. Now that she’d tasted Stella’s cooking, banishment from her meals was indeed something to be feared.

“You weren’t locked in.” The words sounded forced. Painful to say.

Catherine shuddered.
She hadn’t been locked in last night.
Those miserable hours huddled in on herself, wondering if she would ever be let out of the room—that hadn’t been real?

She stared at Mac. He stared back.

“Oh Christ,” Stella said, and uncurled her long legs from around the chair legs and stood up. She marched over to the door and slapped a spot to the right of the door, halfway up. “There’s a slight indentation. Press it and the door opens. Press it twice and it locks. Come try it.”

Keeping a wary eye on Mac, Catherine walked to the door. Stella took her hand and pressed her fingers to the wall. It wasn’t visible to the eye but it was clear under her fingers. A slight round indentation. She pressed it and the door whooshed open and that fresh plant smell filled the room.

“See? Not a prisoner.” Stella was much taller than Catherine and looked over her head to Mac. “Not only is she not a prisoner, but I think she’s found her way to us. I think she is one of us.”

Catherine had no idea what Stella meant but Mac did. He winced again and shook his head. Stella sighed. “Christ, Mac, you’re hopeless. Go on. Show our guest around.”

“All right.” If his jaw got any tighter, the skin over his cheeks would crack.

Stella turned to Catherine. “See you for lunch. I’m making radicchio risotto and pear tart. I make a mean risotto if I do say so myself. You’ll like it.”

“I bet I will. And for the record, I love risotto,” Catherine said fervently. “I’m looking forward to it.” She watched with a touch of unease as Stella left. As long as she was in the room, there was an air of . . . normality. Three people, talking.

With Stella gone, Catherine was left with this mountain of a grim-faced man who seemed to dislike her and yet who turned her on so much she couldn’t think straight.

God, what a miserable combination. The worst.

She was in this strange building at his complete mercy. The door might or might not have been locked last night, but the fact was she wouldn’t have dared to leave the room to wander around even if she hadn’t been locked in. Even supposing she’d found a way out, they were still in the mountains, far from any town. If she’d tried to escape, she’d have frozen to death.

So she was a prisoner in fact, though one who was being exceedingly well-fed.

He was staring at her, no clue whatsoever as to what might be going through his mind, though it didn’t look like anything good.

“I’m supposed to show you around,” he said, his voice a low rumble. “So let’s go.” He stepped back and opened a huge hand.

O-kay.

Might as well fall down that rabbit hole. Catherine stepped out, crossing the big corridor outside the door and leaning against the railing.

Wow. What a rabbit hole, leading straight into Wonderland. Gripping the railing hard, she stared.

Last night she’d been too exhausted and too terrified to really take it all in, but now in the full light of day she saw . . . a city. Some kind of underground city, hidden from the world, stretched out before her. Buildings amid lush greenery, people walking with purpose on the brick and stone pathways. Someone sweeping away leaves, someone else opening doors, putting out two tables . . . a café! Sure enough, a man and a woman sat down and a waiter came out and took an order.

More people started crisscrossing the area below, some following the paths, some cutting across, as people did. Everyone who looked up saw Mac and waved. A couple of men gave a sort of ironic salute.

She glanced up at Mac, saw his nods and realized that she was indeed inside a community and Mac was their king. Or at least their leader.

And no matter how forbidding he looked, no one cowered. The salutes and waves were cheery and informal.

More and more people were pouring into the commons area below. Some had specific tasks—sweeping the paths, taking something from here to there.

The sky above was bright blue. If she hadn’t seen it last night, she wouldn’t have imagined that overhead was a huge glass dome. She’d have thought the city open to the elements. And yet what she knew was a dome was completely transparent.

“Where are we? What is this? If it’s a city, it’s one I haven’t heard about. A city carved out of a mountaintop. Or rather in a mountaintop.”

The look he gave her was sharp. She shrugged. “We traveled uphill. That’s the only thing I know about where we are. I’m surprised I haven’t heard about this place.”

“Don’t be surprised. We designed it to be off the map and off the grid.”

Catherine blinked. “Off the
grid
? You mean nobody knows you’re here? But—” Her mind whirred. “I mean modern towns need infrastructure, connection to the electricity grid, water mains, the internet . . .”

“We are completely self-sufficient.” Mac’s face gave nothing away, but she could detect a note of pride. “We have our own electricity.” He looked up and, startled, Catherine looked up, too. “That dome? It looks transparent but it’s not. It’s graphene, one of the strongest materials on earth, one molecule thick. There are tiny solar panels embedded in the dome. We have plenty of energy. And water. We have our own internet infrastructure and our own food supply.”

“The entire community must want fiercely to be off the grid. Who are they?”

He stood staring down into the huge atrium, muscles working in his jaw. It looked like he was literally chewing on his words. Three people crossing a grassy area looked up and waved. He nodded curtly.

“Mac?” Catherine hesitated, then put her hand gently on his forearm. It was covered by his fleece sweatshirt. The only thing she felt was hard, warm muscle. And a shiver running through her system.

He jerked and she pulled her hand away as if she’d touched a hot stove. Regretting her instinctive move the instant she’d made it. Nobody liked to be “read” by her. Why could she never remember that?

“Sorry,” she whispered.

He shrugged. Clutched the railing with white knuckles and looked out over his domain.

She had no idea where this compulsion came from but she had to know about this place. A place she’d never heard of and could barely even imagine existed, though she was looking right down at it. A place out of space and time.

“Why do you want or need to stay off the grid?” Her voice was low because her throat was tight. It almost hurt to get the words out and if she hadn’t burned with the need to know she wouldn’t have asked the question.

He looked down for several minutes. Another person looked up and waved. The pathways below were busy with people bustling to and fro. Very few couples. No children at all.

He wasn’t talking, though judging from the bulging jaw muscles, the words were right there in his mouth.

She swallowed. “Remember, Mac, you’re going to MIB me. Whatever you tell me will be lost to me, forever. I’m a neuroscientist and I can tell you that memories after administration of Lethe are physically lost, together with a few million neurons. So there’s no way I could talk, ever.”

She eyed him hungrily, happy he wasn’t looking at her. The memory of Mac McEnroe would be lost to her, too. She’d never had a physical reaction like this to any man in her life before and it was possible she never would again. Even the memory of her body heating up, of the shivers of recognition and danger and desire would be lost forever.

“Mac?” She tried again. “It seemed as if Stella wanted you to talk to me. She said something about me joining the community. I guess she meant the community here?”

He closed his eyes as if in pain and took in a deep breath. Wow. She’d touched a nerve, a painful one.

Well, of course.

Catherine Young didn’t do communities. She was always rejected like foreign tissue. In her family, in the small town in Massachusetts she grew up in, in college and graduate school, at her first job in Chicago. By the time she got her current job she didn’t even try to fit in. She just went in to work, did her job, went home. Any attempts at joining groups inevitably failed.

Different, different. She was
different.

Never mind
. She’d formulated the words in her head but they hadn’t left her mouth when he turned fully to her, eyes pinned to hers. And to her vast shame, having him look at her so intensely made her knees weaken. She had to consciously stiffen them to stay upright.

This was terrible. Her own body was rebelling against her, turning her weak when she should be strong. Mac waved a big hand at the scene below. An elderly gentleman saw, thought Mac was waving at him and waved happily back.

“This was originally a silver mine. It was panned out and abandoned way back in the 1950s. I knew about it because I grew up in a series of foster homes down in the valley. They weren’t the kind of foster homes that kept a close eye on their kids. All they kept their eye on were the bank accounts, to make sure the state paid on time. When I was fourteen, I found a motorcycle abandoned in the junkyard. I’m good with my hands. I scrounged parts, built it up. Spent the next four years until I joined the military exploring. Found this place. When we needed a hideout, I brought us here.”

He needed a hideout? Catherine didn’t go there. Of course he needed a hideout. This
was
a hideout, like the famous Hole-in-the-Wall in the Wild West. A place where, if you could find it, if you could make your way there, you’d be safe.

She looked around, then back at the man who was watching her so steadily. “You did some work.” That was an understatement. What she was seeing wasn’t an abandoned mine. It had been turned into a high-tech town.

“Yeah.” One side of his hard mouth turned up and it took her a second to recognize it as a smile. A smile seemed like the furthest possible thing his face could do, something completely alien to it. And yet—and yet it was a nice smile, small though it was. “We had to.”