Dark Abyss (26 page)

She had one more chance to redeem herself in Simon’s eyes, just one. She had to testify that she’d overheard her father discussing the destruction of her home and lab as part of the prosecution’s case for terrorism. Somehow, she was going to have to convince the jury that she’d been part of his plan to wipe out the mutants—an unwitting pawn, but a piece of the puzzle.

Anna had settled down to read for a while before she tried to sleep to see if she could ‘calm the waters’ enough to actually sleep. Between the trial, her anxiety about the outcome, and her struggle to come up with enough data on her project to help them, her mind rarely rested.

She’d thought everyone else had gone to bed and to sleep long since when she heard a tap on her door. Instantly alert and wild with the possibilities, she sat up and set the reader aside, struggling with her conscience.

She didn’t think either Ian or Caleb would dare come to her room after the near disaster in court, but what if they had?

She had to say no, she told herself firmly. No more fooling around until the trial was over!

She was almost disappointed when she saw it was Joshua.

“Can we talk?”

She nodded a little warily and stepped back to let him in.

“I wasn’t sure you still needed this, but I got it and I wanted to give it to you when Simon wasn’t around—well, any of the others.”

Anna stared at the chip in absolute shock. “My chip? You got it? Oh my god! Joshua!”

He shushed her. “For god’s sake don’t let the others know! Simon would have my ass.”

“Why?” Anna asked, dumbfounded.

He grimaced. “I stole it out of the evidence room of the Water City PD,” he admitted.

Anna gaped at him, horrified. “You stole …?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t see that it would do their case any good. They don’t have squat. We’d all agreed to do it, but after that shit about Caleb …. Well, nobody said anything, but I figured they didn’t want to do anything else that might bring us grief. I knew you’d been worried about it before you got the stuff from Mrs. Bagley, though, and I figured it was still important.”

“Oh! You shouldn’t have, Joshua! What if they’d caught you?” Anna gasped in dismay.

He shrugged and grinned a little sheepishly. “I’d be in shit up to my neck. That’s why I decided to go it alone—so the others wouldn’t be fucked if I was.”

Anna very carefully placed the chip on the table by the bed and then turned to Joshua and slipped her arms around his waist. “You’re a life saver … really! From the bottom of my heart, Joshua, I thank you and if you ever do anything like that again, I’ll kick your ass myself!”

He chuckled, settling his arms around her loosely. “You’re welcome. Ian’s right, you are a magpie! Vicious attacks when a man least expects it!”

She pulled away to look up at him and reached up to caress his cheek. “I just wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, you crazy man!”

He swallowed thickly, his expression going taut. “I should go.”

He didn’t move, though, and the look in his eyes was enough to encourage Anna.

She shifted up to her tiptoes and brushed her lips lightly along his.

“This was a bad idea,” he said, swallowing audibly.

“Do you honestly think he’s going to ask me if I had sex with you?” Anna murmured.

Joshua nuzzled his face against hers. “The lawyer or Simon?”

“Either,” she said after a brief hesitation, plucking at his earlobe.

“Jesus,” he muttered, turning his face to meet her mouth and kissing her with a ravening hunger that sent her instantly into a drunken spiral of need.

Jesus
, she thought as they crashed onto the mattress together. It was like unleashing a tiger. He had stripped her of her robe before she even hit the mattress. He broke from her lips as they landed, diving for her breasts.

She couldn’t catch her breath. He caressed her breasts and moved from her neck to her mound as if he was consuming her. She
felt consumed, burning up with fever, achy all over. When he surged up to kiss her again, she met him with her own hunger, disentangling her legs from beneath him and curling them around him.

It was all the encouragement he needed. He curled over her, stabbed at her blindly a couple of times and made contact, forcing an inelegant grunt from her when he drove inside of her.

She scarcely noticed. The moment he began to pummel her, first to reach bottom and then to stroke her channel in a wild rhythm, she felt herself climbing toward climax like a rocket. He climbed further, faster. She was teetering when she felt his cock jerk.

“Wait!” she gasped a little frantically, but it was already too late. She could feel his hot seed spilling into her, feel his body jerking with the force of his climax.

It set hers off, pushed her over the edge into an explosive release. She was still quaking with the hard spasms when he collapsed heavily on top of her and groaned.

“Jesus, baby! Shit!” he muttered.

“Wha?” she gasped drunkenly.

“I left you.”

“No, no! Close thing, but I caught you.”

Apparently, she didn’t convince him. He started over. She groaned, but she wasn’t in any shape to fight him off. She was too weak. She discovered she was also excruciatingly sensitive. It was pure torment to feel him tugging at her breasts, agony to feel his mouth caressing her painfully sensitive skin. She was almost relieved when he left off on foreplay and got down to business, although she was also vaguely alarmed at how swiftly he’d recovered.

Her muscles quivered when he began to stroke her more slowly than before.

Pleasure wafted through her. She stroked his broad back, enjoying the slow, delicious cadence in an entirely different way than their first wild coupling and before she knew it, she felt the tension stir again.

She distrusted it immediately. She’d come. She was done.

Apparently not. He changed his cadence, began to move a little faster. Her body burgeoned once more. She seesawed between hopefulness and the absolute certainty that he couldn’t bring her off again—not so quickly. That being the case, she preferred to lie limp and let him have his way with her.

That lasted until he flipped her onto her belly and entered her again from behind, gnawing on her shoulders and her ears. Her kegels clapped. She groaned. He jerked her up onto her knees and began to pump into her faster, reaching down to pinch her clit.

Two seconds of that and she completely forgot she’d just come. She was just approaching explosion when he abruptly changed positions again. Flipping her onto her back, he shoved a pillow under her hips and began thrusting into her again, slamming the head of his cock into her g-spot.

She began to sing when the first convulsion hit her. Joshua plugged her mouth with his, spearing his tongue into her mouth in the same rhythm. She thought for a moment that she was going to fly apart. She whimpered, sucked his tongue frantically and came so hard she nearly blacked out.

She was semi-comatose when he came the second time.

He collapsed beside her, panting for breath. “Better, baby?”

“God!”

Dragging in a shuddering breath, he pulled her rag-doll limp body against his own. “Was that a yes or a no?” he murmured, nuzzling her neck.

“So help me, Joshua, if you stick that thing in me again I’m going to bite you!”

He seemed taken aback, but when he’d pulled back to study her face, he chuckled.

“I didn’t leave you hanging that time,” he murmured in satisfaction.

“You didn’t leave me hanging the first time. I think I might’ve pulled something when I came the second time.”

“Like what?” he asked, laughter threading his voice.

“My womb!” she muttered testily. His hands felt good, though. He felt good.

She thought she could drift to sleep right then. She’d almost achieved coma when he roused her.

“You didn’t …. This wasn’t because I brought you the chip?”

Anna frowned, trying to make sense of the question. She was vaguely insulted when she did. She might’ve been
more than a little insulted if she hadn’t been so out of it. It was a fortunate circumstance, because it dawned on her that it wasn’t an accusation.

It was a request for reassurance. She felt around blindly until she found his shoulder and patted it. “’Course not, baby. I adored you before you brought the chip.”

The tension eased from him. He lay strumming her back until she almost dozed off again. “You adore me, huh?”

“Dunce! Go to sleep.”

His arms tightened around her. “I can’t. They’d string me up by my balls if they found me in your bed.”

“Then go to your bed.”

She thought she’d insulted him but a moment later he was nuzzling her neck again. “As long as I’m here ….”

“
I’ll
string you up by your balls if you start again, damn it!”

“Grouch!” he said without heat, dumping her on the bed and rolling off of it.

“’Night, sweety!” Anna muttered.

He leaned down and bit one cheek of her ass. “Goodnight, magpie.”

* * * *

Anna was more than half convinced she’d dreamed the entire incident. Her sore inner thighs, the stickiness between them, and the chip on the table near the bed were all the evidence necessary to convince her it wasn’t a dream, though.

Smiling to herself, she stretched and finally got up and went to perform her morning ritual. She was tempted to grab her chip and head for the computer to check it for damage immediately, but when she smelled breakfast and heard the men’s voices, she decided disappointment, or victory, could wait a little longer.

She almost regretted the decision. Joshua greeted her with a brilliant smile that she returned without thinking and breakfast went downhill from there. Discovering the moment she sat down that Simon, Ian, and Caleb were looking distinctly suspicious, she plopped her elbow on the table, shielded her face with her hand on her forehead, and focused on her coffee.

It might actually have worked if Joshua hadn’t been so damned cheerful. By the time Simon and Ian got up to head first to the Watch Center and then to court, Caleb, Ian and Simon had all growled at Joshua and glared at her, and he didn’t look nearly as cheerful.

She looked at Joshua with a mixture of amusement and annoyance when they finally had the kitchen to themselves.

“What the hell’s with them this morning?” he growled resentfully.

“I think, maybe, it was your cheerfulness,” Anna said delicately.

He looked surprised and then favored her with a heated look. “I’m always cheerful.”

Shaking her head, Anna got up and moved around the table. Leaning down, she wrapped her arms around his shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Of course you are, sweety! That’s why
no one noticed,” she whispered in his ear.

His face reddened. “Well, shit!”

“It’s a good thing you left last night,” she said ruefully.

“Rub it in, why don’t you?” he muttered without heat, then added when he saw she was leaving. “You aren’t going to eat?”

She patted her stomach and sent him an arch look. “I’m still full from last night.”

He stared at her blankly for a moment and then laughed a little uncomfortably.

“We have to be in court in an hour,” Caleb reminded her as she passed him on her way to her lab.

“I’ll be ready,” she said. “I just need to check something on the computer.”

He caught her waist, reeling her toward him. She looked up at him in surprise. He studied her somberly. “When this is over ….”

Anna felt her heart flutter. She waited breathlessly for him to continue.

“We need to talk.”

It wasn’t what she’d hoped for, but it held a promise. She was sure of that—almost. She smiled at him. “Yes.”

He frowned at her a little quizzically. “Yes to what?”

“Whatever you want.”

He grinned lazily. “Whatever I want, huh?”

Anna touched his face, tracing the laugh lines in his cheek. “Yes, whatever you want.”

He released her reluctantly. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

“I hope so.”

Without a great deal of surprise, Anna discovered that the chip was damaged.

She was disappointed, but she told herself she hadn’t really expected it to weather such an event unscathed. The important thing was that it hadn’t been destroyed completely.

She had more pieces to her puzzle, enough to carve her research down to months instead of years. If the seeds Mrs. Bagley had rescued sprouted, she would have what she needed to prove her findings, but that wasn’t enough. She had to be able to reproduce the sequence to make large scale production possible, and it was going to take something massive to do what she hoped to do—cure world hunger.

Armed with her files, she approached the prosecutor after court and asked to speak with him.

He looked unreceptive, but he finally agreed to give her a few minutes of his time.

She supposed she could understand, under the circumstances, but his obvious reluctance put a severe damper on her own enthusiasm and confidence.

He listened to her pitch, but she left again with the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been convinced—at all. Frustrated and depressed when she discovered that he’d already decided to rest his case and wasn’t keen on reversing the decision, she barely even had the heart to work in her lab when she returned that afternoon.

Dismissing it with an effort, she checked on her seeds. The discovery that they’d sprouted heartened her and she headed into her lab with more determination. She’d moved all of the files from the damaged chip to the new computer the guys had gotten for her and set to work on trying to fill in the gaps on the damaged files.

She didn’t sleep at all well that night despite the progress she’d made, though, and she was almost as tired when she got up as she had been when she went to bed.

It wasn’t a pleasant surprise when she was called to the witness stand again. The prosecutor took her completely off guard, though, when he immediately introduced the subject they’d discussed the day before.

“We touched on your reason for being outside the night you were kidnapped, Dr. Blake,” he began, “I’d like for you to tell the court what your research entailed.”

“Objection! This has no bearing on the case.”

“I’d like the court’s indulgence to show that it does.”

The judge glanced from one man to the other. “I’ll give you a little leeway here, but I want to remind you that this trial has already dragged on for weeks. Come to the point.”

“I’m a genetic engineer,” Anna answered when the prosecutor nodded at her to continue. “I was designing a plant that would grow in seawater contaminated soil due to the fact that so much farm land has been lost to seawater contamination over the past several decades.”

“Why was it so important, that night, to remove it from the house? Why did you feel
any
need to move it?”

“I discovered that the plant I’d developed had properties I hadn’t suspected. The plant, while edible itself and fulfilling all of the criteria that had been established as necessary, went beyond that. It restored the soil. It had come to my attention that I was being watched and the importance of my finding was so significant that I suddenly knew that I couldn’t take any chance that anything might happen to it. People are starving. This plant could, within a few growing seasons, open up vast tracts of land that would end that.”

“But isn’t it likely that the company that hired you to develop it was the entity that was behind surveillance?”

“I thought it extremely likely. However, it had also come to my attention that my father was subsidizing my research and I didn’t trust my father.”

“Objection!”

“Tighten it up Mr. Steele,” the judge responded.

“But you were intercepted and taken before you could secure the data in a safe place?”

“Yes. Paul appeared and told me he was taking me to my father. Despite my suspicions, I was still shocked and appalled when he blew up my house.”

“Did he indicate why he’d blown it up?”

“He didn’t, but my father did. The first thing he asked was if Paul had ‘taken care’ of the evidence.”

“So he ordered Paul to blow the house?”

“I didn’t hear him order it, but his question seemed to indicate that he did.”

“He ordered the house blown up, that he owned, and one has to assume that he also realized that it would destroy your research that he had paid for. Why do you think that is?”

“Objection! She couldn’t possibly know what Miles Cavendish was thinking!

This calls for speculation!”

The judge looked at the lawyer hard for several moments and then the hopeful prosecutor. Anna held her breath.

“You’ll get to cross examine. I don’t especially care for the speculation, but I’m curious as to why he would do it myself.”

“Go ahead, Dr. Blake. Answer.”

“Paul knew Simon and Ian—or at least some of the watchmen had been keeping an eye on me. He tried to run them down with the boat when we left. My father also knew. My first impression was that it was an attempt to blame the incident on the mutants.”

“But you revised that?”

“No. I didn’t understand, then, what the impact could be. I thought it was Simon and Ian specifically that he meant to take the blame. When my father asked if Paul was sure that he’d taken care of the evidence, I realized that he was aware that I had concluded my research and the scope of it. It was worth a fortune to him if marketed, but he destroyed it. When I began trying to understand why he would deliberately destroy something with so much potential for wealth, then I realized that if it became known that mutants had destroyed a plant that held such promise, everyone would turn against all of the mutants.”

Anna braced herself when the prosecutor returned to his seat and the lawyer came after her.

“What did you say your area of expertise was, Dr. Blake?”

“Genetic engineering.”

“Not … psychology?”

“No.”

“And yet you profess to know not only what was going through your father’s mind, but also how everyone would react if it was proven that mutant terrorists destroyed a plant that might or might not have been a new food source?”

“Is there a question there?”

“How do you account for your … perception?”

“Food riots,” Anna said succinctly. “In the past several decades there’ve been dozens of riots and each time thousands of people were killed before the riots were put down. Starving people are dangerous.”

Irritation flickered across his face. “How did you arrive at the conclusion that that was your father’s motivation?”

“The rumors arose almost immediately that it was mutants who’d blown up my house and they were started by Humans for Humanity—the organization my father freely admits he is the head of.”

He decided to try a different tact. “You are published, Dr. Blake?”

“Yes,” Anna said tightly, realizing her damned papers were about to bite her in the ass, again.

“These papers all pertain to genetically engineering food to feed the poor, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it true that you also deplored, in these same papers, the genetic mutation of humans?”

“It is.”

“And yet you accuse your own father of having so much hatred for mutants that he’s willing to throw away thousands, possibly millions of dollars, just to create an insurrection to kill them when you are on record as despising them yourself?”

“There is
no
record that I despise mutants, because I don’t. There are many indications that my father does, because he has lobbied repeatedly against their rights as human beings, stating that they aren’t, that as soon as they allowed themselves to be genetically altered they ceased to be human.”

“And you know this how?”

“Because I looked it up. It’s a matter of public record.”

“Let’s go back to your statement that your father argued that mutants weren’t human.”

Let’s don’t!

He strolled back to his table and unearthed one of the papers. He presented it to her. “What does it say there?”

“What is that?” the judge asked.

“Pardon. One of Dr. Blake’s papers. It is your paper?”

“One of them, yes.”

“What does it say about halfway down?”

“Genetically altering humans is a threat to humanity in that ….”

“That’s enough.” He smiled at her triumphantly and strolled back to his seat.

Anna was sorry she couldn’t put her foot up his ass.

The prosecutor stood up. “May I cross examine the witness?”

The judge nodded.

“I’d like to hear the entire statement, Dr. Blake. Will you please read it?”

Relief flooded her. “Genetically altering humans is a threat to humanity in that there are no guidelines for the safety of those who have volunteered for the procedure and there have been no long term studies done on the subject to prove that it is safe. In the past, this never would have been allowed and it may be discovered, too late, that these procedures are ultimately harmful. At the very least, it has the potential of dividing the human race in their natural evolutionary paths and could lead to social disorder. It is far safer to focus on genetically engineering food to feed the starving.”

She was so weak with relief when she was dismissed that it was all she could do to stand up and walk back to her seat. She didn’t glance at any of the men. They’d been at pains since the trial began to maintain the appearance of ‘professionalism’ which meant lack of emotion and she doubted that she would be able to tell what they thought about her testimony. Beyond that, it had taken far more out of her than she’d thought it would and on top of that, she wasn’t at all sure she’d made the point she’d been struggling so hard to make.

She wanted to escape. She wrestled with a sense almost of suffocation while the lawyer made his closing statement and the prosecutor made his. When the jury filed out, she leapt to her feet and led the way out.