Gillian laughed as she was meant to. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Castle Mountain, Maine
HUNTER ST. JOHN LAY in bed, enjoying the aftermath of passion. The woman snuggled up against him was a biochemist working at the nearby think tank colloquially referred to by the locals as the “brain factory.” Toni Maggione was intelligent, driven, seductive, and what was most appealing to Hunter, she possessed an unrelentingly hedonistic attitude toward sex.
They’d first met three years ago, when, following his release from a Bosnian hospital, he’d arrived on the remote island off the rocky coast of Maine to work on his latest project. After a brief verbal exchange of personal résumés, and even briefer explanations of their works in progress, she’d leaned against a stainless steel table in her laboratory and chewed on a short scarlet fingernail while studying him, as if he were one of the lab animals she was considering using for her cancer research. He’d watched her gaze flick over his scarred and disfigured face, waiting for the expected response of horror, but all he’d read in those coffee-dark eyes had been vague curiosity.
“Three of my rats died this morning,” she’d told him.
“Should I say I’m sorry?”
“That’s not necessary. Since it wouldn’t change the fact that they died. And I was so hoping for a remission.” Her full lips had pouted. “It’s been a horrid morning.”
“Perhaps it’ll get better.”
Her smile had been slow and openly provocative. “You must be a mind reader. Because that’s precisely what I was thinking.” Her hips had swayed enticingly as she’d crossed the white tile laboratory floor in a way that had reminded him of a lioness on the hunt and locked the door. Then, still smiling, she’d turned back toward him and had begun taking off her clothes. Not waiting for a verbal invitation, Hunter had quickly shed his, as well.
They’d continued to get together three or four times a month. Constantly underfunded, suffering frustrating setbacks that were part and parcel of medical research, Dr. Antoinette Maggione used sex to relieve the unrelenting pressure of her work. Possessing a strong sex drive himself, Hunter was more than willing to help her out.
“I almost forgot. I brought you a present,” she said, slipping from his arms.
“A present?”
She laughed at the unmistakable alarm in his voice. “Don’t panic, darling.” Reaching up, she patted his scarred cheek. “You’ve already insisted that I’m not allowed to get you a Christmas present again this year,” she reminded him. “This is just a little something I saw in the video store the other day.” She left the bed, went into the living room and returned with the boxed tape. “I thought at the time that it might add to the mood.”
Hunter pushed himself up into a sitting position. “If you need a porno tape to get in the mood, I must not being doing my job.”
She laughed again. “Darling, if you weren’t a magnificent lover, I wouldn’t have forgotten about the tape two minutes after you opened the door. It isn’t pornography. It’s a music video.”
She turned on the bedroom television and stuck the tape into the VCR, then slipped back into bed.
Piano music filled the room. Hunter had never considered himself even a remotely fanciful man, yet the way it flowed, clean and clear, vaguely reminded him of a sunlit river tumbling over mossy rocks on the way to the sea.
On the screen, a slender woman was seated in a circle of towering stones. Her back was to the camera, her long hair—a blend of red, copper and gold that brought to mind a dazzling sunset—fell in rippling waves to her waist.
“I wonder how the producer got permission to film at Stonehenge,” he wondered out loud.
Toni shrugged her bare shoulders. “Gillian Cassidy’s sales figures probably speak pretty loudly. Factor in her incredible looks and I doubt if there’s a male government bureaucrat anywhere in the world who’d be able to say no to the woman. There are also some incredible scenes set on the Irish coast.”
“Cassidy?”
His nemesis’s surname rang an instant and unpleasant bell. It was, Hunter reminded himself, a not uncommon name. Especially along the eastern seaboard where so many immigrants of Irish extraction had settled.
But didn’t George Cassidy have a daughter? He vaguely remembered a skinny little thing with wild carrot-hued hair that was always escaping her braids, and a mouthful of metal braces.
“If you’d ever get your head out of the laboratory, you’d know that Gillian Cassidy just happens to be the hottest New Age performer in the country,” Toni informed him. “Last year her Machu Picchu CD outsold John Tesh’s and Yanni’s albums combined. This one went platinum in the first week.”
As the slender hands flowed over the keyboard, the music grew richer, more complicated, soothing his mind even as it stirred his blood. It couldn’t be the same girl, Hunter assured himself. George Cassidy had always seemed more android than man; from what Hunter had witnessed, the scientist hadn’t possessed a single iota of human emotion.
The idea that such an unfeeling bastard could have fathered a child capable of tapping into such deep-seated primal passions merely by skimming her fingertips over eighty-eight ebony and ivory keys was inconceivable.
The view shifted as the camera lens went in for a close-up of the pianist’s face. Unaware of doing so, Hunter leaned closer toward the screen.
She was looking down at the keys, but as he watched, seemingly in response to his unspoken command, she slowly lifted her gaze.
Pow! Hunter experienced what felt like a body blow as he found himself staring straight into a pair of thickly lashed green eyes that were simultaneously both foreign and familiar. Unbelievably, it was her. Damned if Cassidy’s little girl hadn’t grown up. Which, Hunter allowed, only made sense, since the planet certainly hadn’t stopped spinning since that long-ago day when his mentor had betrayed him.
Her velvety soft eyes, which he recalled having been once hidden by thick, tortoise-shell-framed glasses that had seemed oversize on her small face, tilted up, catlike, at the corners. Her complexion was the pale alabaster of a true redhead, and either she’d neglected to paint her lips or the makeup person for the video shoot had selected a pale pink the color of the inside of a seashell.
When a faint breeze picked up a few strands of hair and blew them across those slightly parted pink lips, hunger stirred, deep and unbidden.
She looked as fragile as blown glass. But the music flowing from those unlacquered fingertips was as potent as Irish whiskey. And every bit as intoxicating.
She appeared to have inherited her mother’s passion. Hunter recalled George Cassidy’s third wife, Irene, being a great deal younger than her husband and a great deal less restrained.
Yet the one trait both Cassidys had shared had been their unrelenting, unapologetic aggressiveness in going after what they wanted. At the time, Irene Cassidy had certainly wanted him.
“Well, I’d thought the tape might set a sexy mood.” Toni’s husky voice was a blend of amusement and feminine pique. “But I didn’t expect competition.”
Music from the stereo speakers swelled around him, in him, like a fever in the blood.
“Don’t talk nonsense. You’re in a league of your own, sweetheart.” He pulled her close and kissed her with more affection than lust.
It was times like this, when his body was sated and his mind pleasantly fogged, free from the burden of romantic entanglements, when Hunter understood that George Cassidy had been right about one thing. Emotions were unnecessary complications. They weakened a man, made him vulnerable.
During the thirteen years since he’d left MIT, Hunter had survived—indeed prospered—by burying his feelings