“I’m not taking it with me.” She freed her hands from his, and stuffed them in her pockets to keep from reaching for him again. At the same time her head seemed to clear. “If you call in a complaint about the bike to the cops, they’ll send someone to tow it away.”
“There is something better to do,” he assured her. “You can stay. Work for me. Until your bike is fixed.”
“Work here? At the restaurant?” Rowan couldn’t understand why he was offering her a job, until she remembered him paying off Bernard. He thinks I’m going to stiff him. “Listen, I will get you your money back, Dansant. There’s a job waiting there for me in Boston, and I start as soon as I get there.” Honesty made her add, “It might take me a couple of months to earn enough to cover what you gave Bernard, but I’m good for it. I promise.”
“So? You are here now. I have a job for you.” He spread his hands. “You stay, work, pay me back.”
“Exactly what kind of job are we talking here?” She glanced at the industrial-size dishwasher in the far corner of the kitchen. “You want me to do dishes? A little cliché, don’t you think?”
“You, a plongeur? Never.” He began replacing the supplies in the first-aid kit. “I think you would be very good as un tournant, a . . . kitchen helper?”
She knew what a tournant was; little more than a glorified drudge who ran between stations to fetch and carry for the line cooks, and handled the dirty work no one else wanted to do, like cleaning out the grease traps and scraping plates. It was supposed to be like an internship, to give an aspiring chef a chance to see a professional kitchen staff in action, and learn how things worked on the line. But that didn’t change the fact that tournants were minimum-wage gophers who spent hours up to their elbows in trash and shit.
Rowan might never have gone to culinary school, but she was better than that. “Thanks, but I’ll pass.”
“It is work, Rowan.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “You have family here, or Boston? Friends? Someone to help you?”
She would have lied to him again, but by the time she’d completed the thought the “no” had already left her lips.
“Do you have any friends?”
She had friends, plenty of them, but the thought of asking them for help didn’t appeal to her in the slightest. Matthias and Jessa were living on his farm in Tennessee, but at the moment she felt as if she’d rather walk to Boston on foot than call Matt and ask him for money. She hadn’t exactly faced up to Jessa or explained why she’d deceived her, either, and she was in no hurry to have that conversation. Drew, the closest friend she had after Matt and Jessa, had moved on himself, all the way out to California.
No, she thought, dismissing the last shred of doubt. Her life was her own now; she had to deal with this mess herself.
“Rowan?” he persisted.
She shook her head. “There’s no one I can ask for help.”
He slid his hands down her arms before letting go. “Except me.”
If he kept smiling and touching her like that she was going to climb the wall or jump him.
“It’s sweet of you to offer me a job, Dansant, but even if I took it I’d still need a place to live.” Seeing his blank look, she added, “This is Manhattan, my man. I’m broke, and minimum wage won’t cover the rent for closet space around here.”
“Of course.” His expression cleared. “You will live here.”
She couldn’t help the laugh. “Uh, as comfortable as the floor looks, I think ceramic tile would be bad for my back. Or are you planning to let me use one of your storage rooms?” He was staring at her again, and she brought her hand to her nose. “Is there something on my face?”
“Yes. No.” Dansant shook his head a little. “I am sorry. I do not mean live here in the restaurant.” He gestured toward the ceiling. “Upstairs, there are two flats. One is empty.”
Maybe he didn’t understand the concept of I’m broke. “And what does the landlord want for rent?”
“Nothing.”
Her brows rose. “There’s no such thing as a free apartment, pal.”
“There is when I am the landlord.” He smiled briefly. “My partner and I own the entire building.”
“Nice.” She glanced up to keep from drooling over his teeth, which were of course as dazzling white and perfect as the rest of him. “You’d let me stay there for free, when you could rent out the apartment to someone who could pay?” The way he kept touching her, maybe he meant to handle rent another way. “You thinking of taking it out in trade?”
He was staring at her face again. “What is this trade?”
“You know.” She let her gaze drift down the length of him, pausing to study the excellent fit of his khakis to his strong thighs and lean hips before looking into his eyes again. “You give me an apartment; I give you what you want. Trade.”
“What do you think I want, Rowan?” He didn’t sound offended or angry; now there was something like pity in his eyes.
She’d spent years in bars hustling pool tables and getting hit on by beer-soaked Romeos; she’d heard every come-on in existence. She had few illusions about her looks. The only reason a guy hit on her was because he was plastered or desperate.
But Dansant wasn’t drunk, and if he was hard up for a woman she’d eat her helmet. As spectacular as his looks were, he was also kind and gentle, and had tended to her as if she were some stray kitten he’d found in the alley. She had no right to think he wanted her to pay the rent on her back; he hadn’t made one move on her. She looked at his hands again, and saw how immaculate and well shaped they were. The evocative scent of jacqueminot warmed her lungs, as if she was standing in some unseen garden. One where she could happily spend the rest of her days.
He’d definitely been shopping in the wrong cologne department. . . . Isn’t there someone waiting for you at home? So beautiful and clean and perfectly groomed, Dansant was, right down to his manicured fingernails. My partner sleeps to dawn.
Oh, hell. Suddenly it all made sense. He’s gay.
“Nothing. I was wrong.” She ducked her head. “Sorry.” And she was, for herself and all her sisters in the world who would never have a chance with the man. “You’re sure about this?” Still a little heartbroken, she glanced up. “I mean, giving me a job, letting me stay here?”
“Oui.”
He’d said only one of the apartments was empty. “Do you live in the other one?”
He shook his head. “The man who lives there is a mechanic. I think he will know how to repair your motorcycle.”
A job, a place to live, and a neighbor who could fix her bike. That was a hell of a lot more than she had waiting for her in Boston.
“Well, you may be crazy, Dansant, but I’m not. All right.” She grinned at him. “You’ve got yourself a new tenant tournant.”
The special analysis lab in the Atlanta headquarters of GenHance, Inc., had been given many names since being built. Administration identified it as “the clean room.” The few technicians cleared for limited, supervised access quietly referred to it as “the pressure cooker.”
The janitorial staff, who were not permitted inside, called it “Area 51.”
In reality the room was an enormous, two-thousand-square-foot sealed, sterile space, with its own air lock, power grid, security system, and complex, multifiltered air supply. Until they submitted to a full-body scan, no one who was authorized access could enter the room. Each day security personnel performed similar, intensive scans on the surgical steel walls, floors, and equipment inside the lab.
Nothing was brought into the room that was not first thoroughly inspected.
The official explanation was that the stringent measures were to protect the delicate materials involved in ongoing genetic experiments. In reality the measures were taken to protect the reason behind those experiments, and to assure that no activity or conversation held inside the clean room was monitored or recorded.
Lately, GenHance chairman Jonah Genaro had been spending a great deal of time in the clean room, but he had no choice. A month ago he’d discovered a traitor on his staff, one who had been passing along information on GenHance’s most sensitive projects to the company’s primary targets, the Kyndred. He was taking no more chances.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Dr. Elliot Kirchner told Genaro after he finished relating the details of his latest test trials, and handed off the file to his assistant, Nella Hoff. “Results consistently show that neuroblockers will not mute or nullify the negative effects.”
Genaro regarded the two scientists for a long moment. Kirchner, a tall, gray-haired man with the graceless build of a long-legged bird, looked like an ostrich beside his petite, slightly built assistant.
“Whoever injects the transerum will experience significant, cascading cerebral destabilization,” Kirchner continued. “The breakdown of behavioral inhibitors and impulse control will occur within twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
As they had all witnessed when Bradford Lawson, a GenHance executive wounded during a botched attempt to capture a particularly valuable Kyndred, had stolen and injected himself with the transerum. “Is the damage reversible?”
Kirchner shook his head. “The transerum doesn’t damage the brain, sir. It alters it.”
“Permanently,” Hoff added, nodding enough to make the bell of auburn hair around her face bob.
As chairman of one of the largest and most profitable biotech research corporations in the world, Jonah Genaro was accustomed to success. Under his direction GenHance, Inc., was actively researching therapeutic treatments for dozens of genetic abnormalities and disorders. His company was also widely considered the global leader in ground-breaking genetic research procedures, medical applications, and other important developments in the biotech industry.
Genaro had spent a great deal of time and money to create and maintain that illusion, to ensure that no one learned of the real work going on behind GenHance’s humanitarian facade: using Kyndred DNA to create a serum that would genetically enhance humans and turn them into living weapons. He would not accept that the work of the past eleven years—indeed, of his entire existence—had all been for nothing.
