Noah rubbed a hand over his eyes. He wasn’t imagining what he was looking at, was he? He opened his eyes again.
A tennis ball floated before him.
He ran his hand above it, below it, around it, searching for the hidden forces keeping it in the air. Could it be held up by an air current, a fan with enough force to keep the lightweight ball elevated? Not if he couldn’t feel a draft. Magnets? Maybe the tennis ball wasn’t really a tennis ball. But he couldn’t see anything that looked like a magnet, either on the ball or in the rather plain, mostly empty room in which they stood.
Maybe the ball had an engine in it, a tiny, soundless jet-propelled engine, working like a helicopter. Without blades. But drones floated in the air, right?
Of course, that had to be it.
“You guys working on drone technology?” he asked Grace.
She gave him a look. The look said something along the lines of, “Are you blind?” but her verbal response was a much more delicate, “Something like that.”
He eyed the ball again. Floating, it was definitely floating. And he couldn’t hear a thing.
“Why is he such a skeptic?”
“He’s logical, that’s not a crime.”
“He watches the wrong kind of television shows. He should watch more science fiction.”
Well, he couldn’t hear a thing except his usual repertoire of hallucinatory voices. Right on cue, Joe chimed in with a grumpy, “Shush. All of you.”
Grace — the only person who was truly present — was talking, too. “On night shift, you’d be expected to patrol. Our scientists often work late, sometimes through the night, although they’re not expected to. But inspiration doesn’t always arrive during normal business hours. You’d need to learn the names and faces of the people who work here. I realize some security jobs don’t require that, but we can’t rely on ID cards and thumbprints.”
“I’ve got a pretty good memory,” Noah said, still staring at the ball. He’d seen drones. They usually had propellers of some sort. If it was solar-powered… no, that made no sense. Some kind of anti-gravity?
“It might not be for long, anyway. Once Akira and Zane get back…” Grace let the words trail off, opening the door across the room from the ball. “Looking good, Dr. Winkler.”
“Thank you,” the small woman in the adjacent room said. Sounding apologetic, she added. “We’re still not managing much in terms of weight yet, and the energy expenditure makes no economic sense. I can’t say that this will ever be practical in terms of—”
Grace interrupted her. “No worries, I’m just showing a new employee around.”
New employee? Noah still wasn’t sure how he’d gone from planning to get out of town as fast as possible to starting work on Monday, but it was beginning to feel like a done deal.
“Oh, of course.” The woman peeked around Grace and shot Noah a quick smile. “Welcome to the company. You’re going to love it here.”
“Thanks.” He ducked his head in a nod.
“We’ll leave you to it.” Grace led the way back to the hallway and toward the elevator.
The floor plan wasn’t complicated, nothing Noah would have trouble remembering, but the place was much bigger on the inside than it looked. From the outside, the parking lot led to several independent buildings resembling the small town versions of modern office suites. The kind of places that ought to have a dentist on the first floor, an orthodontist on the second, maybe a lawyer on the top. But as soon as they’d entered, Grace had taken him into an elevator that dropped down and opened into a sprawling complex of underground labs with tunnels connecting the buildings.
“So I wanted to show you some of the projects we’re working on, give you an idea of the kind of things that we’re doing.” Grace shot him a look. “Any questions?”
Noah couldn’t interpret the look. Did she want him to ask if they were magic? Because he was tempted, but the words were so incongruous in the setting of sleek walls, tiled floor, that there was no way they were escaping from his mouth. He’d spent a lot of years hiding his insanity from everyone he knew. He wasn’t giving in to it now.
“I’m good,” he said.
“Okay.” She took a deep breath, inhaling as if she were girding up for some unknown battle. She didn’t fuss with her hair or pull at her clothes, but she lifted her chin and straightened her shoulders before pressing the button to summon the elevator. “Let’s visit the security station and meet some of your future co-workers.”
“Would these be the same guys who, ah, came running this morning?”
“The very ones.” She didn’t meet his eyes as the door slid open and she stepped inside.
He followed her, trying to bite back his smile. It probably wasn’t funny to her. No CO wanted to get caught in a compromising position. But she saw it on his face and her own relaxed.
“You might hear about it,” she warned him. “Our morning, um, adventure.”
“I’d expect so,” he replied comfortably. The ribbing would probably start the minute she wasn’t in hearing distance. If it didn’t, it would mean they hated him on sight. Either way, he’d manage.
“Bear jokes forever,” she said with a sigh.
“What do you call a wet bear?” he asked her.
“Seriously?”
He kept his face straight. “A drizzly bear.”
She gave a pained grimace, but she laughed, too, and the tension in her shoulders disappeared.
“Dad jokes. He tells Dad jokes,” the Dillon voice said, sounding disgusted.
Noah wanted to laugh, but he didn’t. But he did stop trying to hide his smile as Grace led him past the reception desk and into the small office behind it.
“This is the security station,” Grace said, stating the obvious. The room held a wall of monitors, showing scenes inside and outside of the facility. As he watched, the scenes shifted.
The guard at the desk jumped to his feet. Young, clean-cut and muscular, his eyes raked over Noah in a comprehensive sweep that looked less than welcoming. “Afternoon, ma’am.”
“Jensen.” Grace nodded at him. She gestured toward Noah. “Noah Blake. He’ll be coming to work for us. With you. At least for a few weeks.”
The temperature of her voice had dropped by about ten degrees. Not hostile, not cold, but edged with a fine chill that said, ‘Fuck with me and you’ll regret it.’
“Yes, ma’am.” Jensen didn’t quite snap to attention, but it was damn close.
Noah was torn between sympathy for the guy and a rush of unexpected lust for Grace. He wanted to melt the frost from her tone, bring back the warmth in her eyes, even turn it into heat.
But then Jensen offered him a friendly smile and said, “You’re going to love it here.”
Hadn’t that scientist, Dr. Winkler, said the same thing?
“So I hear,” Noah replied warily.
Grace shot him a smile over her shoulder. The chill was entirely gone from her voice when she confided, “I pay them to say that.”
His brows rose and he blinked, before he said, “What?”
“Not big bucks or anything. Just a gift certificate for the local spa. Who doesn’t like a massage or a manicure, right? And the extra business is good for the spa.”
Jensen guffawed, his moment of intimidation clearly over. “The look on your face.”
“I don’t ask them to lie,” Grace elaborated. “But when I give a tour, it’s usually for a scientist I’m trying to recruit. Tassamara is remote and General Directions doesn’t have the academic credibility some of them want. We pay well, but I like to make a good impression, so when an employee says something positive during the tour…” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Gift certificate.”
“So someone else already said you were going to love it here?” Jensen shook his head. “I’ll have to come up with a new line. But it is a great place to work. We get gift certificates.” He laughed.
“And terrific employee benefits. Good health insurance, the usual vacation time, a 401K, contributions to continuing education… although that last.” Grace tipped her hand back-and-forth in an equivocating gesture. “We haven’t had too many employees take us up on that. We hire a lot of PhDs and they’re not usually interested in more school. Plus, it’s a long drive to the nearest university. We’ve got a couple people doing online programs, though.”
“Cafeteria’s good,” Jensen contributed. “And the people are friendly.” He cast a sideways look at Grace, before adding in a tone almost neutral enough to hide the mischief, “Real friendly.”
Grace looked amused. She let it go, nodding toward the monitors. “Any luck out there?”
“Yeah.” Jensen sounded disgusted. “Smithson found it.”
“Really? I wouldn’t think wandering around the forest was Derek’s speed.” She glanced at Noah. “He’s the head of research. Not the outdoorsy type.”
“I think he cheated. He had these weird glasses on, and he had his head down staring at a screen most of the time.”
“Hmm.” Grace tapped her lips. “Had the bear already abandoned the pack?”
“Yeah, but he found the bear first. Then he backtracked.”
“Thermal imaging to find the bear, I bet. We’ve got some glasses left over from Akira’s…” Grace paused and glanced at Noah. He could see her considering her words, before she finished, “…project. And I bet he used the variable threshold modeling AI we’ve been working on to look for its trail. I didn’t think that project was far enough along to be useful yet. I’ll have to ask him about it.”
“Like I said,” Jensen muttered. “He cheated.”
Grace chuckled. “Next time I send y’all out on a treasure hunt, I’ll make sure to make up some rules first. Do you know where he left it?”
“In your office, I think.”
“Great, thanks.”
Noah followed as Grace led the way to her office, but he paused at the door when she crossed to her desk, taking it in.
He wasn’t sure whether to be intimidated or impressed. Her desk was a work of art. Made of curved stainless steel with panels of stained glass in shades of pink and purple on the front and sides, it belonged in a museum of design. Or at the very least an office in Milan or Madison Avenue, not a sleepy small town in Florida.
Behind it, she had a desk chair of pink leather: tall and imposing, but pastel. In front of the desk sat two over-stuffed lavender armchairs, positioned side-by-side at an angle for easy conversation whether she was sitting behind the desk or in one of the chairs. One wall was lined with bookshelves, filled with books and photos. The windows on the other two walls looked out into tangled forest.
It was simultaneously ultra-feminine and imposing, comfortable and dramatically unconventional. In her casual jeans and fleece, she could have looked out of place. But she didn’t.
The neat pile of his possessions on her desk did, though. She made a face as she looked down at it and picked up his phone, which sat on top.
She held it out to him, her expression apologetic. “Apparently the bear didn’t like your phone.”
“Wow.” Noah came forward and took the remains out of her hand. It was crushed, the screen shattered, the circuits inside visible through the broken plastic of the case. “I’m guessing there’s no Verizon store in town?” His lip curved at the look she gave him. “Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
“Small town, middle of a national forest,” she said. “We’re happy to get a signal.”
His wallet was undamaged, Noah saw as he picked it up, but his pack was a lost cause. The bear had managed to tear the zippers out of their seams in its quest to eat his sandwich. He checked it for any other contents, retrieved the key to his room, and held the pack up. “Trash?” he asked.
Grace bent and fished out a can from under her desk. His pack wasn’t the first casualty of the day, Noah saw. Her pink shoes were sitting in the can, mud spread halfway up their sides.
“Sorry about your shoes,” he said.
She shrugged. “My own fault. I should have changed before I went out there. I knew better.”
Her eyes met his. The hum of attraction between them flared into heat. He knew they were both thinking about their encounter in the forest, about the feel of lips touching, bodies pressed together, the spark of desire.
“Tsk, tsk.” The clean freak sounded disapproving. “A soft-bristled brush, that’s what she needs. Let the mud dry, then a good scrub.”
Noah didn’t repeat her words to Grace. Instead he dropped the pack on top of the shoes and took a step back.