Chapter Four #2
Helen shook her head in amusement. Ah well…proposition in the morning. Good omen for the day. “Another time, sweetheart. I have VR this morning. You didn’t get to see me yesterday. You said you wanted to compare notes. You have…oh, half an hour…if you’re still interested.”
Flyboy straightened and pulled on the ends of the towel. “Can’t. How about lunch?”
Helen grinned. “Is it a business lunch?”
“Absolutely. What we do is our business, baby.”
She laughed. Subtle he was not. “Don’t you have something important to do, like fly your commandos out to some dangerous place to save the world?”
“Nope, bad guys must be taking a day off,” he quipped.
Flyboy was one of the nine commandos of the V-Program, some top covert group with whom T.
worked. Helen didn’t know too much about them but the few she’d met the past few months convinced her that they weren’t your normal commandos.
For one thing, they were all damnably attractive, as if sex was part of their armor.
For another, her operations chief’s name was linked in gossip with one of them.
That in itself was a revelation. T. was…T. Helen had seen firsthand how men were around T., no matter what disguise she happened to be in. Any man who had managed to hold the top GEM operative had Helen’s respect and admiration. For sure, he wouldn’t be a normal kind of guy.
Speaking of the devil, Alex Diamond came around the corner. Like Flyboy, he was stripped to the waist, towel over one shoulder, sweatpants wet from exertion. Helen ran her tongue over her teeth.
Wow. She had to check out one of these morning training sessions one of these days.
Alex Diamond was at least half a dozen years older than Flyboy but his physique certainly didn’t show it.
Lean and hard, his arms were roped with muscles.
He looked extremely fit, like an extreme-sports athlete.
Dangerous. Yeah. The man had that aura in waves.
Flyboy leaned and whispered into her ear. “Hey, remember me?”
Helen slanted him a teasing grin. “A girl’s got to enjoy the view God gives her. Good morning,” she called out a greeting. “Crowded corridor.”
Diamond, as always, just nodded. She couldn’t remember speaking more than a few sentences with the man. Strong, silent types always were a challenge to her.
A door opened. Helen’s smile widened. Oh, the fun was about to begin.
“Morning, T.,” she chirped.
Flyboy chuckled, folded his arms and relaxed against the wall again. Alex stopped, his light blue eyes meeting her chief’s. Helen pursed her lips. Operation Covert Combustion.
It was like watching two blond lions about to do some X-rated stuff on Animal Planet. Neither T. nor Alex said anything as they stood there. Their eyes, though, were doing a hell of a lot of communicating.
“Well, I’ve got to go, chief,” Helen said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
“Meet for lunch?” T. asked, not looking her way.
She shook her head. “I have other plans.” And deliberately stepped on Flyboy’s toes. He didn’t react at all.
“I’ll call you,” T. said.
“Yeah. Come on, Flyboy, we’re late,” Helen said, heading off. She would have liked to stay and watch. Flyboy followed her as she turned the corner.
“Man of few words,” Helen commented. “You’re heading in the wrong direction.”
“I came with you to get an apology.” Flyboy wiggled his foot at her meaningfully. She looked back at him innocently. “Diamond has a way with words, believe me. And, with women, too. I saw how you were looking at him.”
“You think T. and he are going to make a soap commercial of their own?” Helen asked.
When he shrugged, she gave him a friendly shove.
“Oh, he’s taken, Flyboy. Can’t you see the sparks flying in the air back there?
” She patted him on the jaw, privately amused to see a touch of jealousy in his eyes.
“You, on the other hand, are still an available hottie.”
Nothing like a compliment to soothe the savage beast. Flyboy grinned. “And don’t you forget it, sweetheart. Shall we meet later then, or was that just a ruse to get out of meeting your O.C.?”
She gave him another innocent look. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ll meet downstairs near those ghastly house plants, okay?”
Flyboy laughed. “The ghastly house plants. Yeah, that’s about the right description for those damn ferns. Okay, but I’ll be ten minutes or so late.”
“Now how would you know I’ll be waiting for ten minutes?”
He winked. “I’m a COS commando. I know everything.”
Yeah, and a half-naked man calling at her hormones to boot. She wished she had time to stay right there and chat, but duty called. She ran an appreciative eye over that gorgeous body once more and gave Flyboy a mocking salute before sauntering off.
Helen didn’t doubt that he had women calling him at every hour. She wondered whether every one of the gorgeous nine from the V-Program was like that. Arrogant and too sure of themselves. She had to ask T. about them one of these days. What the hell was V-Program, anyway?
“Morning, Dr. Kirkland. Are you ready to suck more blood out of me?” Of all the scientists and medics who handled her, she liked Kevin Kirkland the best. For one thing, he had a sense of humor.
For another, he didn’t treat her like a lab rat all the time.
Sometimes, she even thought he actually worried about her well-being.
“Morning, Miss Roston. How was your sleep?”
Medic Room 3 should have been renamed Special Room for Helen Roston.
As far as she knew, she was the only patient who went in and out of the place.
Every instrument in the room was part of the Helen Roston S and M toys, as she called them—from the head-scan machine in the corner to the oscillators on the tables that monitored her.
And to the left was the VR room. Most women had jewelry and shoes. She had tubes and electrodes.
“Normal,” Helen replied.
“Any interruptions?”
She sat down on the familiar leather sofa. “Nope.” She looked around casually. “You’ll have to take me to the viewing room one of these days.”
“Viewing room?”
“The one where you watch me sleep.”
There was a pause. “We don’t watch you, Miss Roston. All we do is monitor your brain waves and stats.”
Interesting. He was the second person—if you could call Eight Ball a person—confirming that someone else was watching her. Helen crossed her legs. “What, don’t you want to study my sleeping positions as well?” she asked lightly. “Might as well. You all seem to know just about everything else.”
Dr. Kirkland smiled as he pulled on plastic gloves. “How do you feel about tonight’s test? Do you feel ready? Anything bothering you?”
Putting an arm over her forehead, Helen stretched out in a classic psychiatric patient pose.
“I don’t know, Doc. Sometimes my left foot seems to want to go one way and my right foot, the other.
And I get totally confused whether it’s because one of my stepfathers hit me on that foot once.
The left one, I mean. And being he’s a male authority figure, Freud would say that I have a problem with—”
“All right, Miss Roston, it’s good to see that you’re mentally alert.” Dr. Kirkland shook his head. “I don’t know why I bother asking questions of either of you. Evasion, evasion, evasion. How’s a doctor supposed to make charts? Let’s begin then.”
Either of them, huh? She was getting some good information this morning. Helen sat back up, offering her arm for the usual procedures. She looked at the door leading into the VR room. She had a few questions for her trainer, too.
She found out that they called the new VR chair the Portal.
She watched Derek and some technicians playing around with it, using the goggles, head-scan gear and the special gloves on themselves, as they adjusted and fine-tuned the machine with its straps and electrodes.
The experimental gears and switches excited geeks like them.
She could tell from their little whoops now and then that they were having the time of their lives.