He lifted his hand and caressed the side of her face again. A shiver ran down her spine.
“What name should I call you?”Could one sound breathless in one’s mind? His fingers tickled sensuously. She could feel a frisson of awareness sliding like silk against her skin. She’d gotten used to him touching her. She should be mad as hell at what he’d put her through, but now wasn’t the time to challenge his way of introducing himself. After all, Dr. Kirkland was trying to get the goggles to work right. She was sure she’d foul up their equipment testing if she started kicking Naked Guy’s ass.
“You choose.”There was mockery now in that voice, too, as if he’d read her mind again.
“No, you choose.”She wanted to see how clever he was.
He leaned closer and she swore she could smell cologne on the man. This was freaking unbelievable. His breath even tickled her ear.“Hades,”he whispered.“And you’ll come when I call.”
He snapped his fingers. There was that humming again and the lighting in the room dimmed.
“Miss Roston? We’re done for now. Please stand by while we take each sensor off.”
Hey, wait a minute! Where did he go? It was over? Helen looked around as the place returned to darkness. She hadn’t even checked him out thoroughly yet!“Hey, you!”
Of course he didn’t answer. It was strange as she sat there, seeing nothing, trying to grasp the memory of what just happened. Damn. It left her feeling bereft. Hades. Hell and Hades. Damn smart-ass.
The goggles came off and she blinked again, her eyesight focusing back on Derek the programmer. He looked extremely pleased, as if something grand had happened. Oh yeah, of course. They had managed to sync brain waves today. Yippeedo.
“How was the avatar, Miss Roston? Everything like you ordered?” he asked.
Helen sniffed. She didn’t like the way it had ended. She was the one in charge still, wasn’t she? He was still her naked guy.
She shook her head as they freed her from the straps and sensors and whatnots. She swerved the seat toward the computer. Mr. Hades was going to get a big surprise.
“Not quite,” she said and tossed Derek a wicked look. “I found him lacking in the size department. I want to make some parts bigger.”
She had been watching Derek earlier and with her photographic memory, she repeated a sequence of typing on the keyboard. Then she played with the mouse and watched the cursor on the screen follow her movements.
She hated to admit it. Those times in the CAVE, when he’d chosen to put her in roles where she felt dominated, pushing at all her hot buttons, testing her emotions as if he wanted to learn how to switch her on and off, had sometimes left her feeling vulnerable. She didn’t like that at all, and the bastard knew it. She knew he was testing her mental strength, to see how far she would allow him to go.
She wrinkled her nose. She was going to push some buttons herself. Her forefinger tapped on one of the keys several times. And a few more. She laughed in naughty satisfaction. Revenge was satisfyingly sweet.
“Hell, yeah!”
Three
Philosophy class was an odd course for them to inflict on her. After all, thinking too deeply would affect action. Analysis paralysis, that was one of her Special Ops. trainer’s favorite sayings.
“You start thinking about how dark it is in there, you’ve already lost half the battle, Roston,” he’d said, during one session when she had to belly-crawl into a pitch-black tunnel. “There’s active anticipation of danger and there’s passive anticipation. The second type will get you killed.”
But they insisted on philosophy classes at the Center. Helen hadn’t thought she would enjoy them. She wasn’t particularly interested in logic and reasoning; she reasonably explained to the tutor that if she had any logical brain cells at all, she wouldn’t have signed up for this experiment in the first place. Everyone had laughed at the workshop.
However, the sessions weren’t entirely useless. There was a method to their madness, she supposed. Command Center definitely had a different approach. Analysis, Helen found, was used to paralyze latent emotions, such as fear and anger.
She understood that fear could be a major stumbling block in the coming experiment. It could defeat her. It was important therefore that she learn to shape her fears into something tangible so she could overcome them.
Helen was getting so damn good at pretending, it should scare her. But it didn’t, really. Fear, as they had told her from the beginning, would eventually be under her control.
She applied fresh lipstick in the restroom, and made a face. She’d learned at GEM that reality had many faces. Often, what one saw in front of oneself was just part of the truth. What mattered most was the hidden agenda.
She knew from day one that she was different. She’d sensed the danger behind the reality around the friendly strangers who’d approached her, but food was a powerful tempter to a hungry kid. She had options—accept the food and go with those nice GEM agents or remain alone. Hunger could conquer anything, even fear. And something about the whole thing gnawed at her, so she’d followed them. And here she was.
Unanswered questions. Looking for the unvarnished truth. That was her driving force in life.
Pulling her loose hair into a ponytail, she fluffed the bangs away from her forehead. Her hand wandered on its own to the spot below her earlobe. How did he know she liked to be touched there?
That irritated her. She didn’t mind being psychoanalyzed by their team of head doctors; she was trained in NOPAIN—nonphysical persuasion and innovative negotiation—and she could easily evade questions she didn’t want to answer. She had even grown comfortable with them staring at her through their microeyes; it was in her contract. She had known when she’d agreed to this experiment that her life wasn’t going to be hers again. What was it Enrique always told her?Ya gotta let the big boys think they’re bigger and stronger before you can whoop their ass,Elena. She smiled at the memory of the older punk boy who was her sometime companion. At fifteen, Enrique—a name he’d chosen for himself—was more grown-up than most kids his age. Street wisdom still made a lot of sense in her world.
