He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cool metal of the laboratory hood. Formulas scrolled across his closed eyelids like a particularly boring and technical movie, the complex and intricate calculations of energy transfer and nuclear fusion, pages from textbooks he had read long ago and committed to memory, fragments of scientific papers he had written or read, and columns of computations that lodged in his brain the way phone numbers or the memory of a wonderful meal might take up residence in the brains of others. His photographic memory for all those numbers and calculations had allowed him to breeze though his undergraduate and graduate education and excel at the research that had propelled him to fame and even a little fortune.
All of that worthless, with his wife dead and his daughter far away from him. Amanda had been four when he had last seen her. She’d be five now—a huge chunk of her life he would never get back.
The door to the cabin that had been Mark’s prison for over a year burst open, but Mark didn’t even jump. The people who held him here were fond of such scare tactics as bursting in unannounced, but he was numb to that all now. “Renfro!” The man Mark knew as Cantrell had a big, booming voice. He was always on the verge of shouting. “We brought you a surprise.”
A muffled cry, like that of a wounded animal, made Mark whip around to face Cantrell. But instead of the dog or deer or some other nonhuman victim he had expected to see, he came face-to-face with a furious woman. Her hazel eyes burned with rage and hatred, and the tangle of auburn hair that fell in front of her face couldn’t obscure the high cheekbones, patrician nose and delicately pointed chin. She was young—midtwenties, he guessed, with a taut, athletic frame, every muscle straining against the man who held her, a baby-faced goon named Scofield. They had taped her mouth and bound her arms behind her, but still she struggled. So far her efforts had earned her a purpling bruise on one cheek and a torn sleeve on her denim jacket.
Mark half rose from his stool, an old, almost forgotten rage burning deep in his chest. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded.
“The boss figured you needed some help to speed things along.” Cantrell nodded and Scofield shoved the woman forward. She stumbled into Mark and he had to brace his legs and wrap his arms around her to keep them both from crashing into the lab table. “She’s your new assistant.”
Both men laughed, as if this was the best joke they had heard all year, then they retreated, the locks clicking into place behind them.
Mark still held the woman, though they were both steady on their feet now. It had been so long since he had touched another person, longer still since he had felt a woman’s soft, lithe body beneath his hands. She was almost as tall as he was, with small, firm breasts and gently curved hips, and she smelled like flowers and soap and a world very far away from this remote mountain cabin.
She wrenched away from him and stumbled back, staring at him with eyes filled with hatred. He got the feeling she had no more of an idea why she was here than he did. “Turn around and I’ll untie your hands,” he said. “But you have to promise not to strangle me when I do.”
Her eyes made no such promise, but she turned and presented her hands to him. He clipped through the plastic ties with the pair of nail scissors—all his captors would allow him in terms of sharp objects. Though his kidnappers had provided him with a laboratory full of the most up-to-date equipment, they had been very careful to exclude anything that might be used as a weapon.
Ironic, considering the purpose of the laboratory itself.
He pocketed the nail scissors and the woman brought her hands to the front and rubbed them, wincing, then picked at the corners of the tape on her mouth.
“Trust me, the best way is to just rip it off,” he said. “It still hurts, but you get it over with quickly.”
She hesitated, then did as he suggested and jerked at the silver rectangle of duct tape. “Ah!” she cried out, followed by a string of eloquent curses.
He retreated to his stool in front of the lab bench, fighting the urge to smile. She wouldn’t get the joke, wouldn’t understand how good it was to hear someone else express the sentiments that had filled his mind for months now. “I’m Mark Renfro,” he said. “Who are you?”
“I’m not your assistant,” she said, her voice low and rough. Sexy.
She went back to rubbing her wrists, the movement plumping the cleavage at the scoop neck of her T-shirt. Mark felt a stirring below the belt, his libido rising from the dead, startling him. He had thought himself past such feelings, that part of him burned away by grief and the hopelessness of his situation.
“I didn’t request an assistant,” he said. “That must have been Cantrell’s idea. Or someone higher up the chain of command. I’m sorry they dragged you into this, but I had nothing to do with it.”
“You work for them.” She moved closer, scanning the array of scientific equipment on the table. “You’re their scientist.” The disgust in her voice and on her face showed just what she thought of a man who would do such a thing.
“There’s a difference between being a slave and an employee. I didn’t have any more say about being here than you did.” He glanced at her. “Maybe less. You still haven’t told me your name.”
“Erin. Erin Daniels.”
It didn’t ring a bell.
“You don’t have any idea who I am, do you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Should I?”
“I don’t know. But I would hate for anyone to associate me with this scum.” She began to move about the one-room cabin, taking in the double bedstead in the corner where Mark slept, the open door beside it that led to the single, windowless bathroom, the three-burner gas range and round-topped refrigerator and chipped porcelain sink on the other side of the room, and the table and two chairs that provided the only other seating, aside from the laboratory stool he currently occupied. Her intelligent eyes scanned, assessed and moved on. She tried the sash on the larger of the cabin’s two windows.
“They’re screwed shut from the outside,” he said. “And there’s reinforced wire over the glass. If you broke a pane, all you would accomplish would be to let in the cold.” He had endured a freezing month right after they took him, when he had tried to cut out one of the panes of glass, in hopes of fashioning a weapon. The glass had shattered and Mark had shivered for weeks before he had persuaded Cantrell that the low temperatures were detrimental to his lab work, and his captors had repaired the pane.
“There must be some way out of here,” Erin said, moving to the back door.
“The doors are locked and dead bolted from the outside, plus there’s an armed guard out there at all times. The floor is a concrete slab. The gas is shut off, so the stove doesn’t work. They bring in food, unless I’m being punished for something, then I don’t eat.” They had kept him on short rations for a week after the glass-breaking incident.
“If there’s no gas, how do you heat this place?” she asked. “It’s in the forties out there today, but it feels fine in here.”
“There’s electric heat,” he said, pointing to the baseboard heating unit along the side wall. “A solar panel charges a battery for that. If the sun doesn’t shine for a few days then too bad. I had better learn to like working in the cold.” He had spent whole days in bed under the covers in the middle of last winter—he didn’t want to think about going through that again.
“How long have you been here?” Her expression was guarded.
“What month is this?” He had tried to keep track at first, then gave up. What did it matter? His captors weren’t going to let him leave here alive.
“January,” she said. “Today is the ninth.”
“Then I’ve been here fourteen months,” he said. The weight of all those months rested on his chest like a concrete block.