I’ve never seen a lab with a wall border of lambs, kitties and ducks.”
She glanced around at the large lab, white and sterile-looking except for the wall decorations. The products were displayed on long, waist-high worktables with specifications printed on neat cardboard signs. Cole followed her gaze until it rested on a huge photo of Zack and him as kids. They were floating on an inflated water ship, one of Bailey’s colossal failures thanks to a tendency to sink when the passengers weighed more than forty pounds.
“That must be you and Zack!” Tess walked over to the glossy framed blowup. “You were adorable! Oh, and look at this one!”
She walked over to a shot of a gap-toothed Zack crawling out of an inflated imitation of a sewer pipe while Cole sat astride the top.
Either his mother or his grandfather had hung the damn twins photos everywhere. Tess walked around the room pointing out advertising poses he’d erased from his consciousness long ago. His masculinity did a nosedive as she cooed over each and every cutesy curly-haired image.
“Did you get to keep every toy you posed with?” she asked.
“Not after we sliced up the inflated giant beach ball with a dagger from Marsh’s World War II collection. Seems as though all our toys were metal after that. I thought you wanted to see the new products.”
He liked babies but hated their equipment. Just being around all the baby stuff made him nervous, even though he could shingle a roof three stories up without a qualm. The world of bottle liners and diaper bags gave him the willies. His grandfather had tried for years to snare him into the family business, but both he and Zack were adamantly opposed to having any part of it. It was a measure of Cole’s indifference that he’d never been in this lab.
“There are handouts for every product,” he told Tess. “You can take one of each with you.”
He was actually enjoying her interest in the stuff, following her and taking in her reactions. She commented on everything she saw without a single cloying oh or ah.
“Here’s a winner,” he said skeptically.
She slowly wandered over to see what he was pointing at.
“An inflatable potty for traveling. It’s ingenious.” She took a sample disposable liner and one of the handouts. “Where’s the baby-wipes warmer that plays lullabies?”
“I wouldn’t know one if it came up and bit me on the butt,” he said, grousing.
“You’re really not interested in any of this, are you?”
“Nope.”
She lingered beside a Swedish-designed stroller that sold for more than his first car in high school, then exclaimed over a state-of-the-art high chair in screaming neon lime green. He was bored out of his socks by the displays but found himself enjoying the way she moved around the room. Her khaki walking shorts showed enough leg for him to see hers were sleek and smooth-skinned. Her waist was tiny, not much larger than the span of his hands. It had been criminal to bulk it up with yards of pink material at the wedding reception. Tonight she was wearing a blue knit T-shirt. With eyes like hers, she shouldn’t wear any other color—they shone like a pair of pricey sapphires.
Easy as she was to watch, he couldn’t share her enthusiasm for the products. He knew Bailey Baby Products was a highly lucrative business, but he didn’t want to be lured by the prospect of easy money. He wanted to build his own designs, well-constructed, pleasant, affordable homes for people who’d never see the inside of a pretentious mansion like Marsh Bailey’s. Cole and Zack had hopes of winning some commercial bids that would put their business on a firmer footing.
“Here’s the baby-wipes warmer!” she said enthusiastically, her voice amplified and made lyrical by the silent vastness of the lab.
He walked over and watched her pick it up. A little beeping sound went off and didn’t stop when she put it down.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“The timer on my watch. Time to enter the code. It will just take a sec.”
He had thirty seconds. No sweat. He went to the wall panel in the lab, trying to recall the code—three-seven-five-eight-nine, or was it six? Marsh had deliberately made it as random as possible. Why couldn’t he use some significant sequence like family birth dates? The system was supposed to keep out thieves, not grandsons. He reached into the back pocket of his jeans and took out his billfold, where he’d stashed the code, counting seconds and pretty sure he was running out of time.
The dull thud he heard wasn’t reassuring.
“What was that?” Tess asked.
“The locks engaged.”
He punched in the code his mother had given him, but nothing happened. The door wouldn’t open. He tried again in case he’d made a mistake. Still no results.
“Can’t you open the door?”
“No.” He tried a third time, but it was futile. He should have set his watch to allow extra time, but thirty seconds had seemed plenty long enough to punch in the code even if he had to look at the paper. Why did Marsh have such an elaborate system? Any thief who knew enough technology to get into the building could probably figure out a way to get out, but here they were, trapped in the lab. Unfortunately he wasn’t a professional burglar and anything he might try could result in costly damage to the system.
“There has to be a way out,” she said.
“Not if Marsh’s damn anti-spy gadgetry works. I wish his James Bond DVD collection would self-destruct!”
“Do industrial spies really steal plans for baby stuff?” She sounded more curious than panicked.
“How would I know? I haven’t had anything to do with the business since Zack and I gave each other haircuts to get out of posing for the catalog.”
“What do we do now?”
“Wait for the baby police, I guess.”
She laughed. He glowered at her.
“I don’t suppose you have a cell phone in your purse?” he asked.
She shook her head. “No, but isn’t that a phone over there?”
He walked over, annoyed because he’d been too rattled to notice it. It was dead.
“The phone service must cut off when the doors lock,” he said.
“Why?”
If this were a spy thriller on the big screen, the heroine would be clinging to him like spandex. He could imagine Tess in a role like that, unlikely as it seemed.
“Probably so anyone trying to steal the butt warmer can’t call a cohort to pass on the secret design,” he said in a husky whisper. He had an odd notion he wanted to hear her laugh again.
“What do we do now?” she asked.
“Good question. Let me see if I can short out the system.” Nuts to Marsh. If he ruined something, it wasn’t his fault.
This was a lab. There had to be tools. He opened one of the cupboards under every workstation and found a screwdriver and a pair of pliers.
“Isn’t there a night watchman or something?” she asked, hovering behind him as he removed the casing from the control panel on the wall.
“There’s a whole crew of security people, but I’d rather get out of here before anyone comes.”
“You said we weren’t sneaking in.”
“We weren’t.” He didn’t want to look like a dope for getting the code sequence wrong, but the jumble of bunched wires was a puzzle with no solution.
“Look at all the colored wires. Just like a movie where the right one will deactivate a bomb and the wrong