“No shite.” He chuckled. “You’re either a doctor or some kind of evil genius who’s going to set a virus on the world.”
“Well, if I was an evil genius, that’s exactly what I would do,” she admitted. “But I’m not. I work research. Neuro.”
He sighed and decided to play it the way a bodyguard who didn’t work intelligence would. “You’re going to have to use layman’s terms. Remember? I take bullets, not classes.”
“I research the brain, more specifically degenerative brain diseases. I’m hoping to find new therapies, even a cure for dementia and Alzheimer’s.”
For the first time she spoke softly, almost shyly.
He’d found something to poke and prod. “The way you talk I would think you would have studied viruses.”
“I thought I would when I was a kid,” she admitted. “Things changed as I got older.”
Because of her mother? He didn’t like how that thought made him soften toward her. That was the funny thing about getting to know the target. It often made them human. “What sent you into…neuro?”
She was quiet for a moment. “My mom died of Alzheimer’s, well, complications from it. I started studying the brain so I could understand what was happening to her. And then I kind of wanted to beat it, you know. It took her from me. I wanted to destroy it. I still do.”
“I lost my mum.” He wasn’t sure why he’d said that but she had a hollow look on her face that made him want to connect to her. It felt right to talk to her. Hell, he’d never talked about this with anyone but Ariel, and only because she wouldn’t clear him for play in The Garden or Sanctum until she felt like he’d faced it. He’d never faced it. How did a man face the loss of someone he couldn’t remember?
“Did she get sick?”
They hadn’t covered this in his briefing. Probably because he wasn’t supposed to go this deep with the target. He wasn’t supposed to be stuck in a lift with her. “She was killed in a break-in.” He swallowed hard, the emotion welling up hard and fast. “She and my sister. The men who…well, they were caught.”
Her eyes had widened. “That’s terrible. I’m so sorry to hear that.” She was silent for a moment and they both took long drinks. “Now you protect people.”
“And you try to save them,” he acknowledged. “Maybe it’s tragedy that sets us on a path. Maybe it’s the way we get fucked up that leads us to where we’re supposed to be.”
She held up her bottle again. “To fucked-up lives.”
He could drink to that.
She set her bottle down. “I’ve got a sandwich. You want half? I’ve got some chips, too. Now I wished I’d given in and gotten those cookies I wanted.”
Damn but she was pretty. “I’ve got a chocolate bar in my bag and a couple of protein bars, but they taste like shite. We should ration them. I’ll share it all with you if you’ll tell me why you wear spandex and just how tight it is.”
A glorious grin transformed her face. There was the glowy girl he’d seen, the one who utterly fascinated him. “Deal. Let me tell you all about the magnificent Captain Neuro.”
She passed him half the sandwich as she began to talk, and Owen got the idea that he was in trouble.
Chapter Four
Hour One
“This is pretty good, but it needs apples. Chicken salad needs some fruit in it,” Owen said.
“Who hurt you?” Becca clutched her half of the sandwich and wondered what kind of a crazy person she’d been stuck with.
Hour Two
“No one says Sassenach,” he insisted. “And you know I don’t eat haggis with every bloody meal. Nor do I play the bagpipes.”
“What kind of Scot are you?” She’d moved closer to him sometime after Colin had called to let them know it would be at least another three hours. The amount of times the kid had said the word sorry should be made into a drinking game.
Not that he needed one. He was out and he’d taken to helping her finish off the bottle of wine. She’d passed it back and forth, seeming not to mind that she was sharing germs with a stranger.
It made him wonder what else she might like to share with him.
Fuck, but she was sexy.
“A modern one,” he replied.
She wrinkled her nose sweetly. “How about a kilt?”
“Don’t even own one.” There was a reason for that. He’d seen pictures of himself in a kilt, but he’d left everything behind. His house in Edinburgh had been closed up and he hadn’t been back. “And yes, I wear underwear.”
“Such a disappointment,” she said with a shake of her head.
How disappointed would she be if she knew that while she’d closed her eyes and tried to find her calm a few moments before, he’d slipped one of the folders out of her bag and into his?
He suddenly didn’t want to be the one who disappointed her.
Hour Three
“Sometimes when the towel dispenser in the bathroom, you know the motion activated ones…when they don’t give me a towel, I wonder if I died and I don’t know it and this is how I find out. Same thing with the soap dispenser.”
She was bloody insane. It kind of did something for him. “I can see that public loos are difficult for you. Have you considered you might have watched too many movies?”
“Never,” she swore. “Not even once.”
Hour Four
She paced the length of the elevator. Two steps to the left, pivot and turn. Two steps to the right.
Fucking elevator. Meditation wasn’t working and she was pretty sure her superhot elevator co-hostage thought she was a weirdo for sitting there and trying to breathe. He’d been polite about it, but he probably was questioning whether or not she would lose her shit.
Did they even have enough oxygen left?
“Tell me about your ex.” Owen Shaw didn’t look like he was ready to come out of his skin. He wasn’t worried about the amount of oxygen left in the tiny box they were currently stuck in. He was cool and calm and it rankled.
How much longer? She’d kept it at bay for a while, but after Colin had explained they were waiting on a part someone had to drive in from freaking Burlington, she’d nearly lost her shit.
They were trapped and their cell phones didn’t work. The only contact they had with the outside world was freaking Colin. This was a nightmare.
And her partner in the cage didn’t look like it bothered him at all. She should have bought more wine. She knew what he was doing. He was trying to distract her. “He was an asshole.”
“Obviously,” he shot back. “Since you divorced him.”
God, that man was far too gorgeous. She should concentrate on him. If she was staring at his glorious eyes and thinking about running her hands through his thick red and gold hair, she might not remember that they were suspended in a steel box six and a half floors up from the ground.
She took a deep breath. “He liked to cheat. The grass is always greener for some men. I think he thought when we got married that I would settle down and be his good wife or something.”
“You were a doctor, too,” Owen pointed out. “Did the bugger expect you to give up your career to make his dinner?”
“Not exactly, though there was a part of that in there. I think he expected me to help him shine more than I was willing to do,” she admitted. “I was pretty smart and good at writing research papers.”
“Ah, he wanted you to coauthor with him.”
“Mostly he wanted to put his name on my stuff.” The worst fight they’d ever had was over a paper for the New England Journal of Medicine. He’d claimed he should be in the byline because he’d supported her while she’d written it. “Anyway, he found someone who made him feel more like a man and I divorced his ass. The trouble with a guy like that is he’s never going to feel like a ‘real’ man in a marriage. Marriage is about compromise, and there will always be fighting and nagging and struggle, and in the end what he really wants is that first glow of attraction. You can get addicted to it, think it’s love. It’s not. It’s lust and it serves a purpose.”