Meltdown (5 page)

“Well,” she said with a sigh, “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to let you see Einstein. Just understand I’m not agreeing to anything. Okay?”

“Of course not,” he answered smoothly. He could afford to be magnanimous. He knew he’d already won.

Melanie pushed open the door slowly, afraid, as always, that even that slight movement would dislodge something in the densely packed room. Cautiously she stepped over thick snakes of cables that crisscrossed the floor, connecting the hodgepodge of machinery to the table in the center of the room. The table supported a small monitor screen, an ordinary computer keyboard, and something that resembled a palm-size version of a satellite dish. The antennae of the dish tracked her as she crossed the room.

Chris gave a low whistle. “Dr. Frankenstein had
nothing on you,” he said, stepping through the door behind her.

“Dr. Frankenstein didn’t have to worry about equipment bills,” she cautioned, eyeing his large frame. Bulls and china shops came to mind. “You will be careful, won’t you?”

“You won’t even know I was—ow.”

Melanie turned, cringing as she watched Chris rubbing his elbow. He’d bumped into one of the black connectivity boxes, half-hidden in the room’s dim shadows. “Watch out! That box is irreplaceable.”

“And I suppose my elbow isn’t,” Chris replied, shaking out the quick pain. “I think I hit my funny bone.”

Against her will, Melanie smiled. There was something endearing about the way he nursed that elbow, reduced momentarily from composed adult to vulnerable child. She imagined him as a little boy, presenting a scraped elbow or knee to his mother for mending. A little rascal. Her smile deepened, and she held out her hand. “Here. I’ll guide you through.”

Almost instantly she regretted her offer. His warm, strong fingers curled around her own, sending an electric tingle up her arm. Enough of that, she thought, putting a scientific damper on the feeling. With studied discipline she counterfeited self-control and led him to the central table.

The monitor and keyboard looked deceptively ordinary. Chris turned to her, his voice fighting to keep out the disappointment written on his brow. “Is this it?”

Melanie couldn’t blame him for his doubt. Einstein’s looks were not his best feature. She’d built him out of secondhand parts gleaned from discount and bargain sales, trying to make her limited dollars stretch as far as possible. But what he lacked in
looks, he more than made up for in function. Smiling confidently, she waved Chris toward the monitor screen on the table. “Say something.”

Chris continued his skeptical perusal of Einstein’s jumbled circuitry, but he stepped up to the keyboard all the same. He started to type, but Melanie stopped him.

“No.
Say
something.” She pointed to the small antenna dish. “This audio pickup is linked to a digital modem. It decodes sound waves into discrete units, like a telephone does.”

“He’s listening to us now?”

“Every word.”

Chris ran his hand lightly, almost reverently over the top of the monitor. Melanie shivered, feeling as if he were touching her. She recalled the feel of his hand on her arm, the burning sensation that lingered despite her repeated attempts to block it from her memory. Unconsciously she brushed her fingers across her arm, mirroring his movements. “Go ahead. Talk to him.”

“What do I say?”

She smiled. “Oh, nothing special. Just whatever you’d normally say to an intelligence who knows a hundred times as much as you and thinks a thousand times faster.”

“Big help you are,” he said, flashing a grin that cut straight to her heart. “Well, here goes nothing. Er … hello, Einstein.”

No second prompting was needed. The monitor screen blossomed to life, displaying a colorful backdrop overlaid by a line of crimson lettering.
Hey, dude
, it read.
What’s shaking?

“Hey,” Chris said, laughing. “A jive computer.”

Another series of words formed on the screen.
“Jive” went out with skin clothes and clubs
, read the screen.
Who’s the dinosaur?

“Dinosaur—?” Chris began, but Melanie interrupted.

“E, be nice. You know perfectly well who he is. You let Mr. Sheffield in. The least you can do is be civil to him.”

You weren’t
, Einstein reasoned.

Melanie ignored Chris’s muffled laughter. “That’s not the point. The fact remains, you let him in. Against my wishes, I might add.”

If Einstein felt any remorse over his disobedience, he failed to show it.
Natch, babe. You heard his offer but reached illogical conclusion. Just correcting oversight.

“It wasn’t an oversight,” she replied hotly. “It was my opinion. You should’ve respected it.”

Did respect. Then corrected.

This time Chris didn’t bother to stifle his laughter. “Is he always like this?”

“Worse,” Melanie acknowledged. “Ever since he linked his audio into the TV he’s talked like a juvenile delinquent. It’s frustrating.”

“It’s great,” Chris disagreed. “A computer with a home boy personality. What kind of processing power does he have?”

“Watch,” Melanie said. She quickly reeled off an intricate set of equations for Einstein to compute.

Chris shook his head in amazement. “Can he handle all that?”

Piece of toast
, the computer replied.

“Cake, E. It’s cake,” Melanie said.

Cake … toast … same major food group
, Einstein replied as his CPU tower began to hum.
Catch you on the flip side
.

“Incredible,” Chris said. “This is the most revolutionary system I’ve ever seen. He’s bound to make a hit at the board meeting.”

“Board meeting?”

“Sure. That’s my plan.” He turned away from Einstein, giving his full attention to Melanie. “In three weeks the board of directors hold their yearend meeting. All the major players at Sheffield will be there. My strategy is to present Einstein at that meeting, promoting him as the ‘computer of the future,’ or something like that.”

Works for me
, Einstein said, taking a momentary break from his processing.

Melanie wasn’t so sure. “Your father’s going to be at that meeting, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but that’s the beauty of it. If the rest of the board members agree to fund Einstein’s development, my father will have to support the decision.”

“And if they don’t?”

“They will,” Chris stated confidently. “Your hardware’s faulty, not your computer. We’ll replace his old parts with new, improved ones.”

Melanie sighed sadly. “Chris, Einstein has hundreds of parts. There’s no way we could afford to replace them all.”

“So we’ll make a list of the most critical ones and concentrate on replacing those. I have some friends in wholesale. I’ll call in a few favors.” He grinned broadly. “Maybe I could barter with them for a few golf lessons.”

Getting those parts may seem mundane, even humorous, to Chris, but Melanie saw it as an answer to her prayers. No longer would she have to make do with second-rate equipment, hoping that Einstein’s overworked circuits would last until her next paycheck. With tolerance worries behind her, she could increase Einstein’s processing power, enabling his hardware to operate at full capacity. He’d become the computer she’d hoped he could be, the computer she’d known he could be if given half a chance.

Chris was giving him that chance. Gratefulness for
the man beside her warmed her heart. She knew she was being foolish. Chris was willing to help Einstein only because he could use her computer to advance his own business career. E was a means to an end for him, nothing more. He didn’t care about Einstein, and he certainly didn’t care about her. Reality set in. The glow in her heart faded, leaving cold disappointment in its place.

“Melanie?”

She didn’t answer. She knew he was going to ask her if she accepted his offer, and she knew she would have to say yes. She had no choice. Chris’s plan to put Einstein in front of the most powerful men at Sheffield Industries was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If those men agreed to fund Einstein, her computer’s future would be assured. She needed Chris’s help, for Einstein’s sake. Even if the thought of working closely with him threw her into a panic.

“Melanie—”

She couldn’t answer, not just yet. Her alliance with Chris wouldn’t be a long one—just for the three weeks until the board meeting. Surely she could minimize his corporate-climber influence on Einstein for three short weeks.

Minimizing Chris’s influence on her was an entirely different matter. Just thinking about the man made her emotions more tangled than Einstein’s wiring. Still she was, after all, a scientist. She could use empirical techniques to modulate her reactions to him, to counteract the quick heat of his touch, to nullify the sweet, sensual burning in his amber eyes.…

“Melanie, Einstein’s smoking.”

For one absurd moment Melanie imagined her computer had acquired yet another vice. Then she smelled it.

“Break!” she said as the acid odor reached her
nose. Einstein’s humming stopped abruptly. She pushed aside the tangle of hanging wires and reached into the back of the smoking tower unit. “It’s the mother board. The increased processing speed maxed it out.”

Chris stepped behind her, looking over her shoulder as she worked. His body was inches away from hers, and the heat of him stepped up her pulse. Her usually agile fingers turned clumsy, making it difficult to perform the simple task of disconnecting the ruined board. Two times two is four, she repeated inwardly. Three times two is six.

The multiplication tables worked. Chris remained unaware of his effect on her. When he spoke, it was to inquire about Einstein. “So what happens now? He can’t process without a board, can he?”

“No, he’s not that advanced,” she said, pulling out the wafer-thin part. “Like all computers he’s driven by the processing power of his mother board. Hmm, this channel is pretty badly scorched. It’ll have to be resoldered.”

Chris took the ruined board and turned it over in his hands, noting its patchwork appearance. “This thing looks like it’s been used for target practice,” he said, raising his eyes to meet hers. “Working with parts like these makes your accomplishments even more remarkable. I must say, Miss Rollins, I’m impressed.”

The praise in his voice was reflected in his eyes. Warmth spread through her—a rich, comforting warmth that made her happier than she had any right to be. It wasn’t fair. Why did she have to be so brilliant in math and so dim-witted when it came to Chris Sheffield?

She pulled her eyes away from his and started for the door, narrowly missing the pile of computer
parts neatly stacked in one corner of the room. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the kitchen. I keep my extra processing boards there.”

He was silent a moment, as if wondering what to make of her comment. Then the hint of a smile touched his lips. “Of course. Doesn’t everyone?”

Space was at a premium in Melanie’s house. During her first six months in the bungalow she’d used up all the floor space and closets in the spare bedroom, hoarding computer hardware like a miser hoards gold. Initially she’d bought in bulk, unsure of what she’d need for the future. She expected the supply to dwindle as she made use of the parts.

The opposite happened. Constructing Einstein was ten times more complicated than she’d imagined, and required ten times the variety of parts—fragile parts that had a habit of overloading and shorting out at the most critical moments. She had to keep a spare of every one of them on hand in case of emergencies. After years of experiments every inch of storage in her house had been cannibalized for computer parts, and the kitchen was no exception.

Which was why she was leaning on the white tile kitchen counter, straining to reach the top shelf of the uppermost cabinet, the place she’d chosen to store the processing boards.

“Just my luck,” she mumbled sourly as she
strained her arm toward the hard-to-reach shelf. A listener might have assumed she was commenting on the unfortunate choice of storage for her spare mother boards. But computer boards were the last thing on Melanie’s mind.

Chris Sheffield’s presence disturbed her in ways she didn’t dare name. She’d told herself she could handle being in the same room with him. She’d been wrong. The man set a match to her senses and turned her blood to hot, heavy syrup. During the last half hour the spare bedroom had become an inferno, with hot sensations licking her skin like the ends of live electrical wires. Einstein wasn’t the only one in that room who was overheating.

The cool tile of the counter chilled the skin of her palm and the top of her thighs, but did nothing to quench the fire in her blood. It was just her luck that the one man who could help her realize her hopes for Einstein was also the object of her secret fantasies. It had been so easy, so safe, to cast the boss’s handsome, sexy, and inaccessible son as her imaginary lover. But now reality had walked in, a reality a hundred times more devastating than the shadowy hero of her dreams.

I need a chair
, she thought as she balanced on her toes, reaching up. But she was unwilling to leave the sanctuary of the galley kitchen. It was, after all, a place where Chris wasn’t. In a way she was grateful the board had overheated. No telling how much longer she could’ve kept up her facade of scientific detachment. She needed some time to recover, to breathe air that wasn’t laced with the scent of his cologne. Hell, even now she imagined she could smell it, rich and seductive, making her think of jungle nights. Hot, steamy jungle nights—

It wasn’t her imagination. With a mental start
Melanie realized she could still smell Chris’s cologne.

“Let me help you.”

He stood behind her, so close, she could feel the stir of his warm breath against her hair. Before she could even think to react he’d leaned against her, placing a hand on her hip for support. The light touch sent a shock through her body, which measured nine point nine on her personal Richter scale.

With his free hand he reached up, his long arm stretching past her own and easily pulling the mother board out of its high cupboard. “This is the one, isn’t it?”