Sorcerer: A Loveswept Contemporary Classic Romance (4 page)

“Twenty minutes left,” Parker announced.

“Damn,” Jillian fumed as she attempted to tug her skirt free from yet another snagging bramble. Her beautiful outfit was a disaster when it came to cross-country travel—the heavy material seemed almost magnetically drawn to every thorn in the vicinity. More than once she’d been tempted to shuck the elegant but unwieldy gown and go on without it, but she didn’t dare. She knew Felix was a stickler for detail—the unpleasantly real bramble bushes proved it—but she doubted whether even he had thought to include a pair of virtual lingerie in his topological design.

She felt ridiculous! She gave her skirt another frustrated yank, trying to ignore the embarrassed blush that heated her neck and cheeks. “Dr. Sinclair,
you go on. If we split up, we can cover more territory.”

The doctor stood a few yards away from her on a small cairn of stones, scanning the unexplored part of the valley. He barely glanced back in her direction as he answered, “That’s not advisable.”

Jill started to ask exactly what was advisable, but Sinclair had already turned his back on her, returning his gaze to the valley as if she didn’t matter at all. Correction—
because
she didn’t matter at all. She meant less to him than the bluebottle that buzzed around his helmet in the still afternoon air. A fly that wasn’t even real.

Sinclair may have looked the part of a brave and chivalrous knight, but underneath the shining armor he was as cold and heartless as he’d always been. Saving Einstein meant nothing to him—and she meant even less than nothing. It was like reliving the humiliation of their slow dance all over again.

Anger built within her, only this time her frustration had little to do with her skirt or the brambles. “You don’t give a damn, do you?”

Sinclair looked back at her. “What did you say?”

“I said
you don’t give a damn
,” Jill repeated, her anger increasing with every carefully enunciated word. “This is just another experiment to you. You don’t care whether we save Einstein or not.”

“Ms. Polanski, I assure you that finding the computer is my highest priority.”

“Highest priority,” she repeated acidly. “Doctor, Einstein isn’t a priority, he’s a
person.
He’s the
kindest, sweetest, most wonderful personality I’ve ever met—and that includes the people I know. He’s my friend—one of my best friends—and I’m not about to give up on him because we’re not meeting some … arbitrary rules you’ve established.” She raised her chin and gave him what she hoped was a grandly haughty stare. “I don’t care what you say. I’m going off on my own so we double our chances of finding E, and that’s
final
.”

Jill gave her skirt a sharp yank, hoping to pull it free and make a glorious exit. Unfortunately, her dress wouldn’t cooperate. No matter how hard she pulled, she remained firmly anchored in the bramble bush. In fact, her frantic tugging only seemed to make matters worse.

“It would appear,” Sinclair commented dryly, “that you’re not going anywhere.”

Damn him
, she thought.
Damn his blue-blood smile and his superior attitude.
Anger from a lifetime of in-justice boiled up inside her, bringing sharp tears to her eyes. People like him had made her childhood a living hell. Words from the past whispered through her mind, names that still had the power to wound her, even after all these years.
Gretchen Polanski’s little problem. That unfortunate Polanski girl.
And the worst of all,
Gretchen’s mistake.
“Go ahead and make fun of me,” she told him bitterly. “I don’t care.”

For a moment he remained perfectly still, carved, it seemed, from the stones he stood on. Then he bent his head and slowly, deliberately, removed his helmet.

Jill’s traitorous heart constricted in her chest. Bareheaded, with his usually immaculate hair tousled into a dark tangle, the doctor looked more impossibly handsome than ever. She felt a sudden urge to run her fingers through those curls, a quick, foolish image that opened a Pandora’s box of other desires. Dammit, she was supposed to be angry with the man!

“Ms. Polanski, my
arbitrary
rules are designed to save your pretty little—” He paused, his eyes narrowing as he gave her figure a bold once-over before adding, “… neck. I require cybernauts to stay together because there’s always a chance a person’s reasoning won’t last the full hour … not to mention the other hundred things that could endanger someone whose mind is linked to a synthetic environment.”

He started to walk toward her, his slow, deliberate movements making her silently add another danger to the ones he’d already mentioned. Lord, maybe her reason
was
beginning to deteriorate. Otherwise, how could she explain the crazy images that flashed through her mind—of her, and him, doing … oh, Lord! She closed her eyes, shutting out his advancing figure, knowing instinctively that she had to get away—fast. She twisted around, struggling so violently against the brambles that they began to tear the material.

“Jillian, keep still.”

Sinclair? It couldn’t be. She’d never heard him sound so gentle, so patient. She opened her eyes,
slowly at first, then finished with a wide stare of disbelief. Sinclair knelt before her, painstakingly un-hooking her velvet dress from the hundred angry prickers. His touch was as gentle as his words.

Jill’s wonder was quickly eclipsed by horror. “Dr. Sinclair, you shouldn’t … I mean, you don’t have to—”

“Help you?” he said, glancing up at her with his wry grin. “I suppose it does go against my Dr. Doom image.” He finished pulling away the thorns, then rose to his feet and held out his hand to assist her out of the bush. “We’ll just keep this between ourselves, shall we?”

Swallowing her apprehension, she placed her hand in his. Warm fingers clasped her own, reminding her of the other time he’d held her, at Griffith’s party. She recalled the humiliation, but somehow that stern, cold-eyed stranger seemed less real than the virtual man who stood beside her.

“Thanks,” she said shakily, attempting to put her feelings into words. “I didn’t expect you to be so … good at untangling skirts.”

Sinclair’s dark brows arched up in a humor that did not reach his eyes. “I suspect that’s a compliment. Thank you.”

The edge of self-deprecation in his voice stabbed her heart.
It’s not real
, she told herself. Dr. Sinclair had a hide of iron and a heart to match. Yet as she looked into the depths of his eyes, she caught a glimpse of the soul behind his stainless-steel personality, a soul as uncertain and easily wounded as her
own. It was probably an illusion, as counterfeit as his gleaming armor and his jewel-encrusted sword. Yet, illusion or not, his gaze captured her, drawing her in like a wandering comet caught in the gravitational pull of the sun.

Forces far stronger than her human will closed like a fist around her heart. The virtual world faded, leaving only his questioning eyes and her overwhelming need to answer those questions. Stepping closer, she brushed her fingers gently against his cheek. His eyes darkened at the slight caress, the hard silver turning molten at her touch. She felt the heat of his gaze quicken in her own body.
Illusion
, her reason warned. Yet in the deepest, truest part of her, she knew that this was the most real thing she’d ever felt in her life—

“Ten minutes,” Parker warned.

Jill’s hand dropped to her side, her common sense rushing back like air into a vacuum. It had happened again! She’d let herself be seduced by the image of the man she wanted Sinclair to be, rather than seeing him for the cold fish he was. She turned away, unable to face the cool calculation she knew she’d find in his eyes. “We’d better get moving. We haven’t got much—”

“Ms. Polanski?”

“Yes?” she replied, pretending to be fascinated by a stand of trees off to the left.

The doctor hesitated, then cleared his throat. “Harrumph. Yes, well, I just wanted to make you aware that the simulator’s representations of … 
certain responses, can be digitally corrupted. You shouldn’t be overly concerned by what happens here. It’s … only a projection.”

Jill stiffened. Was Sinclair actually trying to make her feel less foolish about what she’d done? Or was he just setting her up for another experiment? She turned back, meeting the doctor’s gaze with open suspicion. But before she could determine his intent, he frowned and looked past her, fixing his gaze on the stand of trees she’d recently pretended to study.

“There’s something moving behind those poplars.”

“Do you think it’s Einstein?”

“Maybe,” he said, walking past her. “But I’d advise you to stay behind me all the same. There’s no telling what might be over there.”

He started toward the trees, but Jill called him back. “Dr. Sinclair? I just wanted to say … well, thanks. From one projection to another.”

He glanced over his shoulder, arching his eyebrow in wry amusement. He started to say something, but he never got the opportunity. At that moment the “something” came out from behind the concealing trees.

It wasn’t Einstein.

The creature was huge with gray-green skin and arms as thick as tree trunks. It walked upright and wore a dirt-caked leather tunic, but those were its
only concessions to humanity. Bloodred eyes glowed malevolently from under its jutting brow, and oversize yellow canines curved up from its lantern jaw. Worst of all, the thing smelled as if it hadn’t had a bath since Creation.

“Good Lord!” Sinclair exclaimed, stopping dead in his tracks. “What is that thing?”

“I think it’s an orc,” Jillian said as she came to his side. “A small one.”

“Small?”
Sinclair swung his gaze back to the advancing monster. Slightly stooped, it still stood well over seven feet. It looked as if it could wrestle a baby elephant to the ground—with one arm tied behind its back.

And it was heading straight for them.

“Parker!” Sinclair barked. “Get that thing out of here!”

“I’m trying,” Felix answered, “but the pattern’s imbedded in the topological matrix. I can’t locate it.”

“Bloody hell,” Sinclair cursed, finding the oath more useful as time went by. The topological program listing for this overlay was easily six inches deep. Unless he knew exactly where to look, Felix wasn’t going to find the creature’s pattern anytime soon.

Sinclair shook his head, feeling the beginning of a tremendous headache coming on. He glanced back at the giant monstrosity, grateful that the ponderous thing moved slowly. They could easily outrun it. He grabbed Ms. Polanski’s wrist and started back the way they came, intending to do just that.

Ms. Polanski didn’t budge. “Uh-oh,” she said.

Uh-oh
proved to be an understatement. Looking back, Sinclair saw that his cybernaut partner had inadvertently stepped right into the middle of another bramble bush. Slow as the monster was, it would reach them before they could free her from the thorns. Sighing, he realized there was only one solution. “Cancel the experiment, Hedges. Bring us out.”

There was a long silence before Sadie Hedges’s disembodied voice answered him. “I can and I can’t, Doc.”

“Sadie,” Sinclair breathed, trying to contain his temper, “this isn’t open to debate. Bring us out.
Now!
”

“Doc,
you
I can bring out, no problem. But look where
she’s
standing.”

Sinclair peered through the tangle of branches at his partner’s feet, and saw a faint flickering line of cobalt blue. Damn. The thorn bush was situated right on top of one of the lines of the power grid. And Ms. Polanski’s shapely ankle was far too close to it for comfort. Sinclair’s headache began to throb in earnest. “Well,” he said as he raised his hand to the jeweled sword, “it appears I’m going to get a chance to see if virtual armor holds up like the real thing.”

This time it was Ms. Polanski’s hand that closed around his wrist. “Doctor, it’s just a projection, right? It can’t really hurt you.”

Sinclair looked into her earnest eyes. Gently, he
lifted her hand from his arm, exhibiting the same care he’d used to untangle her dress from the prickers. “I designed the simulator to emulate physical stimuli,” he told her calmly, as if he were commenting on the weather. “
All
physical stimuli.”

Yards off, the plodding monster roared, as if acknowledging his statement.
Damn
, Sinclair thought as he glanced at the creature,
the thing looks like a Sherman tank on legs.

“I won’t let you do this!”

He swung his gaze back to his fellow cybernaut. Bedraggled, with her gold circlet askew and her elaborate dress ripped and ruined by a hundred grasping prickers, she stood with her head high, her brown eyes flashing with absurd but somehow effective pride.

“Forgive me, Ms. Polanski, but you’re hardly in a position to dictate to anyone.”

“I’m not dictating. I’m using my head,” she stated, crossing her arms resolutely in front of her. “You can leave. I can’t. You’re the brains behind this operation, not me.” She raised her chin, meeting his gaze without a trace of fear. “You’re not expendable, Doctor. I am. Leave me your sword, and get out while you can.”

Sinclair looked at her, amazed and impressed by the courage and the clarity of her logic. Earlier something had passed between them, something she could have traded on if she’d wanted to. But not her. Backed to a wall, he imagined she’d go down fighting
rather than beg for even an ounce of mercy. Some people ran from adversity, others met it head-on.

Sinclair suspected that Jillian Polanski was one of those rare individuals who could have had adversity for lunch.

“That’s … excellent reasoning.”

“Then you’ll go?”

“No, but it’s a fine argument. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with a walking bulldozer.”

“Doctor, I …”

Her sentence dwindled away, leaving behind a silence that said more than words ever could. Bright tears shimmered in her eyes, tears of fright, but not for herself. Deep inside him, something cracked open.

He remembered the moment they’d shared not ten minutes before, the tenderness he’d denied, labeling it as a glitch in the simulator program. Complicated feelings were often corrupted by the black and white logic of the simulator matrix. But that didn’t stop him from being drawn to the emotions he saw in her eyes. Nor did it stop him from remembering the touch of her hand against his cheek—soft as silk, and gentle in a way he’d almost forgotten how to want.
Lord, who am I kidding? I wanted to dance with her at Griffith’s party. I practically sprinted across the room when that slow song began.
…