Merline Lovelace - Hot As Ice

“How did I escape my guard?”

His voice was still rough, still raspy, but there was no mistaking the lethal edge to it.

“He wasn’t a guard.”

“You could have fooled me.”

He crossed the room in two swift strides, backing Diana against the wall beside the sink.

“He’s just a research technician,” she said as calmly as she could with his blue eyes blazing down at her. “There to help you if you wanted anything. You didn’t hurt him, did you?”

“He won’t show any bruises, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

His balled fists and threatening stance didn’t intimidate her. She could take him down if she had to. What bothered the hell out of her was the fact that his proximity was causing every nerve in her body to snap with an almost electrical intensity.

“What do you want?” she asked coolly.

“The truth. Who are you?”

“I told you. My name is Diana Remington. I flew up here, along with Drs. Goode and Wozniak and the others, when your body was recovered from…”

“Don’t hand me that crap about being buried in the ice for forty-five years again!”

“It’s true.”

His reply was short and decidedly scatological.

“What will it take to convince you?” she asked. “How many documents or videos do you need?”

“Documents can be faked. So can those whiz-bang movies you showed me.”

“Why in the world would we go to so much trouble?”

“You tell me, blondie.”

Angling her chin, she met his belligerence head on. “I’m not a Communist propagandist trying to get into your skull and play mind games. The Cold War is over. We won. The Wall came tumbling down.”

“What wall?”

Too late, she remembered that the ultimate symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, hadn’t been erected until years after Stone went into the ice.

“Never mind. All that matters right now is that the U.S. halted top-secret U-2 overflights of Russia in 1960, right after Francis Gary Powers bailed out. You don’t have to guard your identity or that of your unit with your life. They’re history. You’re history,” she added more gently.

A muscle worked in the side of his jaw. “What brought Gary’s plane down?”

“A surface to air missile.”

“Bull! The Dragon Lady flies too high and too fast for Soviet SAMs to reach her.”

“Maybe in your time, but by 1960, the Soviets had significantly improved their missile capability. So had the U.S., for that matter.”

“How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

“You can pull up information about Powers’s trial on any computer. Or look him up in the encyclopedia,” she added, remembering just in time Stone’s reaction to the station’s desktop PCs.

In his day, computers were gargantuan monsters that filled an entire room. He’d regarded the smaller, exponentially faster versions of the old vacuum tube models with both suspicion and an awe he’d tried his damndest to disguise.

“Powers served two years in a Soviet prison before being exchanged,” Diana said briskly. “I think he wrote a book about his experiences before he died in a helicopter crash in the seventies.”

For an instant, just an instant, she glimpsed a desolation as bleak as the vast Arctic emptiness in his face. Stone had lost both parents while he was still a kid. With no brothers or sisters, he’d made the military his family, his fellow aviators his kin. Now most of them would now be gone, too.

Diana could only imagine what it would be like to wake up and find yourself alone in an alien world, without friends or familiar landmarks. Steeling herself, she fought the urge to lift a hand and stroke his cheek. He hadn’t asked for comfort or condolences, and probably wouldn’t appreciate either.

“Why don’t we sit down, Major Stone?”

She took a single step, only to come up short as two palms slapped the wall beside her head. His arms caged her. His body formed a solid, immovable wall.

“I want a few more answers first.”

“All right. But just so you know, this type of primitive, caveman behavior went the way of the poodle skirt and the Studebaker.”

It took him a moment to process her acidic comment. When the meaning registered, a look of almost comical dismay crossed his face.

“Are you saying my Golden Hawk is obsolete?”

“It is if it was produced by Studebaker.”

“Well, hell! I’ve only made two payments on that baby.”

With each passing moment, Diana felt less like her mythical incarnation of a huntress and more like the legendary Cassandra, the deliverer of doom and evil tidings. Not only had she broken the news his buddy had died, but now she’d hit him in one of an American male’s most vulnerable spots…his car.

She gave him a moment or two to mourn before prodding gently. “What else did you want to ask me?”

Shaking off his gloom, he pinned her with a hard look. “What’s your connection to Irwin Goode?”

Surprised, she answered truthfully. “I suppose you could say we’re colleagues, although that would be stretching matters considerably. Actually, he’s way out of my league. He won a Nobel Prize for his early work in bionetics. Even today, his pioneering study of the effects of certain toxic agents on red blood cells is standard college-level textbook reading.”

Stone remained silent for so long Diana had to fight the urge to fidget. He was too close and too…Too male. Nothing at all like Allen.

The thought popped into her head before she could stop it. She flushed, feeling disloyal to her steady date of some months and more than a little irritated by Stone’s sledgehammer impact on her senses.

“Did you know Dr. Goode back when you were flying the U-2?” she asked.

He opened his mouth, snapped it shut again. Evidently he still wasn’t ready to admit he actually flew the supersecret spy plane. With a sigh, Diana tried to move away again.

“I’m not done with you, blondie.”

“I’ll tell you what,” she said with a determined smile. “If you refrain from calling me blondie, I’ll refrain from tossing you flat on your back.”

A speculative gleam entered his eyes. “Do you think you can?”

“I know it, pal.”

For a moment he looked as though he intended to put the matter to a test. His gaze made a slow slide from her face to her throat, then lingered in the vicinity of her breasts. To Diana’s surprise and considerable annoyance, her nipples tingled under her silk long johns, and the queerest sensation gripped her belly.

Oh, for heaven’s sake!

In today’s parlance, Stone certainly qualified as a world class hottie. But as much as Diana might admire his sheer animal magnetism, muscle alone had never particularly turned her on. Unlike the athletic, popular Stone, she’d been the serious, studious type in high school. She’d come out of her shell a bit in college, and discarded it completely when Maggie Sinclair recruited her to work for OMEGA. Yet she’d always found that brains, not brawn worked better when it came to wiggling out of the most desperate situations.

And, she reminded herself sternly, brains, not brawn, had attracted her to Allen McDermott. They enjoyed a comfortable, mutually satisfying relationship, one that stemmed as much from their similar tastes and shared professional interests as from any physical need.

But she’d never felt a need quite like this one, a nasty little voice in her head whispered.

Not with Allen.

Not with anyone.

Ruthlessly, Diana suppressed the insidious urge to rise up on tiptoe and give Charlie Stone his first kiss in more than forty-five years. She was here to do a job, one that demanded all her concentration. She’d be no use to OMEGA or to the major if she didn’t maintain a level of detachment.

“If you’ve finished with your questions,” she said coolly, “I have a few I’d like to ask.”

His arms dropped to his sides, and a steel mask descended over his face with an almost audible clank. “I don’t trust you enough to give you any answers.”

“Well, that’s honest. Let me know when you change your mind, will you?”

“Yeah,” he replied, heading for the door. “I will.”

Charlie made it out the door with his shoulders squared and his back straight, but his insides felt as though he’d just gone ten rounds with heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano.

Everything he’d seen since he opened his eyes hit him like a hard, bruising right to the gut. Everything he’d heard had rocked him back on his heels. Sheer willpower alone had kept him from grabbing his so-called rescuers by the throat and choking the truth out of them.

He didn’t want to believe them! Christ, just the thought that he’d been on ice for the past forty-five years made his stomach cramp.

He braced himself against a packing crate, unable to stop the shakes, unable to blank out the terrifying memory of his plane nosediving straight down. Desperately, he tried to pierce the blackness that had claimed him mere seconds later. Had he come down inside Russia? Was this all an elaborate KGB scheme to get him to talk?

No. Even the KGB couldn’t cook up something this fantastic.

Slowly, Charlie’s vision cleared. The disbelief he’d so stubbornly clung to these past hours was fast giving way to grudging acceptance. He wasn’t ready to admit it. Not yet, anyway. Until he found out what the hell had happened to his aircraft and why his life support system had failed, he wasn’t about to admit to anything.

Particularly not to blondie.

Man, oh man! They sure didn’t build biologists like her where he came from. If she was a biologist. None of the scientists he’d ever worked with came equipped with luminous green cat’s eyes and a tumble of silver-gilt hair, not to mention those long legs displayed so temptingly in her curve-hugging pants. Those pants certainly left little to the imagination, and his worked overtime until a muffled thump from inside his room broke into his thoughts. With a grunt, he entered the room and opened the metal locker.

The young research tech hopped out, glaring at Charlie over the tape sealing his mouth. More tape bound his wrists and ankles.

“Sorry, kid.”

Freed of his bonds, the technician stomped out. A moment later, Charlie heard him hammering on a door farther down the corridor. In an angry voice, he recounted the details of his incarceration.

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