Jessica Andersen - Dr. Bodyguard

Genie shook her head and her drying hair shimmered in the light of the stained-glass lamp. How had he ever thought her hair was a nondescript brown? The metallic threads of bronze and gold glowed as she moved, and the natural waves washed almost to the place where her breasts pushed against the rapidly loosening terry robe.

Ordinary she was not. But that didn’t change the fact that she was a pain in the neck.

“That doesn’t make any sense. I would’ve known something was wrong if the developer wasn’t running properly. And besides, how did he just waltz back down the hallway, onto the elevator, and past security? Wouldn’t someone have thought it strange? I mean, sure it’s a hospital, but bleeding people tend to stick to the E.R., not the research buildings.

She had a point. “Well, there was blood in the sink. Maybe he washed some of it off.” Nick closed his eyes and tried to picture the ruined room. What was he missing? “How about clothes? A lab coat or something he could’ve put on over his other stuff? A baseball cap to cover a scalp wound?”

“A scalp wound would work,” Genie agreed, her eyelids drooping and her words coming more slowly now. “It’d bleed like hell but not do too much real damage. The clothes make sense, but where would he get them? Bring them with him? Why would he do that unless he was planning on getting hurt? And why was he in there in the first…” She trailed off and would have fallen asleep face-first in her leftover eggs if Nick hadn’t seen it coming and reached over to catch her chin in his hand.

Why indeed?

He stared at her face, at the translucent skin, the bloom of violent bruises, the obscene line of black stitches above her swollen eye. She looked like an angel who’d gotten the losing end of a bar fight. Why would anyone want to hurt her? Hurt their research? They found disease genes, for heaven’s sake. They didn’t clone dinosaurs, they didn’t work with embryos and they didn’t use lab animals in their experiments.

They tried to cure people. Why would anyone want to hurt researchers who were only trying to cure people?

Nick had no idea. Nor, it seemed, did either of the detectives working on the case. At least not yet.

Sighing, he picked up Dr. Watson and manfully rearranged her robe so it covered as much as possible. He carried her up the spiral staircase to her bedroom, flicked on a faux Tiffany lamp that lit the room in bits of sparkling color and laid her on the big brass bed. She didn’t wake when he slid her between the covers and tucked them all the way up to her chin, but she murmured and curled up with both hands beneath her cheek.

Her two cats, which he had previously noticed only as flitting shadows at the edge of vision, appeared on the bed as if by magic. The big black shorthair curled itself behind her knees and the tiny gray tabby, maybe two months old or so, purred like a locomotive as it marched up to her face and sniffed at the line of stitches. It licked her chin worriedly.

The kitten looked directly at Nick and mewed a question. He stroked its little head with the back of a finger, and said, “Yeah, I hear you. She’ll be okay though.” He stared down at the motionless woman, barely a lump beneath the bedclothes. “She’ll be okay,” he repeated. “I’ll protect her.”

He paused and said to nobody in particular as he stared down at the woman in the bed, “I’ll protect her. God help us both.”

While Genie slept, her brain, that precocious organ that had dictated much of her life up until this point, churned and spun in its liquid-filled housing and tried to make sense of the day’s events. A difficult task considering there was a large piece of that day tucked away in the back recesses of memory, protected by a twist of neurons and a few subconscious Keep Away signs.

She frowned; her sleeping self registering the pain of pulled stitches and ordering her face muscles to relax even as her dreams flickered red and black.

She had gone to the developer room, excited to read the films from the day before. They were about to begin analysis of a new Gray’s Glaucoma family and she wanted to see how the DNA samples were working, particularly since Molly had gotten a strange phone call from the family’s wealthy patriarch the day before.

The old man might just be a tube of DNA to the lab rats, but to the rest of the world he was a tycoon. A powerhouse. Someone that Genie wanted to keep very, very happy in the hopes that he’d donate generously to the Eye Center’s new wing. She made a mental note to return his call and be extra nice.

Placing a hand on the exterior port, she assured herself that the developer was running properly. The tray was hot to the touch, a puff of air ran across its surface to keep the films from sticking to the hard plastic, and the hallway was filled with the sound of turning rollers.

She glanced over the new cartoon taped to the wall near the darkroom door and a faint smile touched her lips. Dr. Nicholas Wellington might be a big, handsome jerk with no sense of protocol and an annoying habit of appropriating her equipment just when she needed it most, but his arrival had given the lab a certain sense of character. She glanced at his office door and grinned at a poster that featured a buff body with a cutout picture of Wellington’s head taped in place, the caption reading, Is This The Face Of Erectile Dysfunction? followed by an eight-hundred number for one of those new potency drugs.

Shaking her head, Genie grinned wider. Though she highly doubted that Wellington suffered from E.D., she had to give him points for leaving the poster where his techs had hung it.

He either had a great sense of humor or he was, so to speak, awfully cocky about his abilities.

Reassured that the developer was running, she reached for the spinning door and rotated it so she could step into the darkroom without letting in any white light. As she entered the light lock, she was surprised to see that the Occupied sign was lit. She sniffed. Wellington. She banged on the back of the light lock. “My turn, Beef. Check the chart!”

But there was no response. Maybe he’d left the sign lit after he was done. Genie snorted. Slob. She tried calling his name again before she entered the light lock, heard the rubba-thump, rubba-thump of the revolving door as she let herself into the darkroom—

She was in a field of daisies. Her cat, Oddjob, sat at her feet while Galore gamboled through the flowers, leaping in huge bounds to see over the stalks while he swatted at the yellow and black butterflies with kitten’s paws.

In her sleep Genie cried out in frustration at her brain’s refusal to show her what had happened in the darkroom. She twisted against the bedclothes and whimpered when she brushed a clenched fist against the ripe bruise on her cheek. Then The Voice returned and she stilled.

“Shh, sweetheart, it’s only a dream. You’re safe. I’m here.”

She struggled against sleep again, fighting to wake to tell him that she wasn’t afraid of the dream, that she was frustrated by the missing pieces. But the bed dipped as he settled beside her and she felt a whisper of a touch at her forehead that took away the pain. She sighed and snuggled deeper, turning her bruised cheek into his hand.

“Sleep now. I’ll keep watch.”

In the field, the cats purred and Genie turned her face up into the warm yellow sunlight. She felt Nick behind her and knew if she turned her head she’d see him, larger than life and twice as handsome—the high Viking cheeks, the flat blade of a nose and the warm blue eyes. But as she moved, something else caught her eye, a flash of mossy color at her shoulder. She looked down—

And saw that she was wearing green scrubs stained brown with blood.