party,” Trent answered. “Can’t remember the last time I saw Aiden so happy. He’s a lucky man.”
“Maybe you should find yourself a nice girl and settle down, too.”
He laughed. “Not me. I’ll never slow down enough for any girl to catch me.”
“When you least expect it, one’s gonna come along and trip you all up, buddy.”
Visions of a blonde accountant blowing his mind in bed flashed through his head. “Nah,” Trent replied. “Not me. It’s not like I can give any girl a life evenly faintly resembling normal.” Hell, he couldn’t even promise to give a girl children. With his inherited disorder, careful genetic counseling would be necessary to ensure that his condition—spinal muscular atrophy—wasn’t passed on to his offspring.
“Okay, Trent. I’ve got a preliminary report on our girl. She’s a certified public accountant. Just finished a master’s degree in forensic accounting. Company called Paradeo filed a W-2 on her about six months ago. But they’re an investment firm, not forensic accountants.”
She’d said she was freelancing. And there’d been that reference to taking a company down. Must be investigating her employer for someone else. “Where’s this Paradeo company headquartered?”
“San Francisco. No satellite offices. Anything else you need to know right away, Trent?”
“Do you see anything at a glance that could explain someone trying to run her down in a large SUV?”
“Other than some rich, pissed-off CEO she might have put in jail? Nope. You don’t suppose it has anything to with Code X, do you?” Novak asked.
The controller’s question made Trent’s blood run cold. That was the one place he’d been mentally avoiding going this morning. He’d known it would give him exactly the headache he felt coming on. “I don’t know. Keep digging and let’s see what you come up with before we go there.”
“Roger. I’m on it.”
Trent paced the spacious room restlessly. He never had been able to sit still even before he’d accepted the experimental stem cell therapies that were both his miracle cure and the heart of the Code X project. Toss in a liberal dose of stress and worry now, and he could forget sitting down, let alone being still. He changed out of the clothes he’d donned only minutes before and into running gear. It was early enough that he should be able to stretch his legs a little without anyone seeing him.
He jogged down the stairs, too jumpy to wait for the elevator, and restrained himself until he’d cleared the lobby of the club. But when he hit the sidewalk, he couldn’t contain the bursting energy any longer. He exploded into motion, sprinting down the street with strides that grew longer and faster with every step. In moments he was flying along at twenty-five miles per hour, the wind ripping through his hair and making his eyes water. God, it felt good.
Every time he ran like this, he remembered the early onset of his disease, the progressive muscle weakness, the loss of tendon strength, the continuous respiratory infections, the pain. And the fear. Not knowing what had been wrong with him was the worst of all as his body had literally wasted away before his eyes. It had taken over a year to get the diagnosis. SMA usually showed up in infants and small children, and it threw the doctors off when his case waited until adulthood to present itself.
A delivery truck backed out of an alley in front of him and he dodged around it with a lightning-fast move a professional football player would have envied.
He accelerated again, reveling in the flow of muscles and sinew and blood working in extraordinary harmony, his quick twitch muscles reacting completely off the charts for a normal human. But then, he wasn’t normal at all. Not anymore. Not since Jeff Winston had called and suggested that there might be a radical cure for Trent’s disease. It was highly experimental and had side effects, of course. He’d grabbed on to the lifeline his old friend had thrown him and never looked back. He was entirely and for the rest of his life a creature of Code X.
He ran for nearly an hour, slowing only when people began to emerge onto the streets and he risked someone seeing him race along at world-class sprinter speed for block after block.
He’d turned around to head back to the club when the cell phone in the breast pocket of his skin-tight running shirt vibrated. He slowed to a walk to take the call. It was his boss and friend, Jeff Winston.
“Hey, Jeff. What’s up?”
“Couldn’t you at least sound out of breath after tearing around like you do?” Jeff groused.
Thankfully, along with his quick twitch muscles had come extraordinarily quick oxygen uptake. “Sorry, bro. I’ll try to huff and puff a little. What can I do for you? It’s early for you to be up, isn’t it?”
“I need you here at the club ASAP. Take a cab.”
“I can get there about as fast if I run.”
“I don’t need you drawing any attention to yourself just now,” Jeff answered in clipped tones.
“What’s going on?” Trent was alarmed. It was completely unlike Jeff to be this terse.
“When you get back.”
Trent spotted a taxi stand and jogged to it at normal human speed, chafing at the slowness of the pace. He jumped into the first cab in line and gave the club’s address. Had Novak uncovered something else about Chloe? Something that would explain her attempted murder? What on earth could it be?
The first thing Chloe became aware of was that her brain felt twice its normal size inside a skull that hadn’t expanded one bit. Every beat of her heart sent throbbing pain through her head. As she swam slowly toward consciousness, she registered lying on her stomach among wildly tangled sheets and blankets, which was strange. Usually she was a quiet, neat sleeper who didn’t disturb her bed much. And the rest of it registered. She was naked.
That startled her the rest of the way to full consciousness. She never slept in the buff. What if there was a fire and she had to race outside to safety? She rolled over onto her back and groaned as her entire body protested, sore. God, she felt like she’d been run over by a truck. Vague memory of that exact thing nearly happening tickled the edges of her fuzzy brain.
Memory of Trent came back to her. He’d been such a smooth operator, and she’d been so blessed eager to have him seduce her. Where was he now? Peeling one eyelid open, she groaned as sunlight creeping insidiously past the curtains pierced her skull like a sword. Agonizing pain exploded behind both eyes. No sign of Trent. He and his sexy tuxedo and bedroom eyes were gone. It was as if he’d never been here and knocked her world completely off its foundation.
The old hurt stabbed at her heart. Everybody always left her. Every time she took a chance on caring about someone, she ended up all alone. Her parents. Her foster families. Even Sunny. They all abandoned her sooner or later. An urge to cry nearly overcame her. Was it too much just to want a normal life? To find a nice man, settle down in a modest home, have a few kids and a dog, and be happy?
By way of an answer, her stomach gave a mighty, and threatening, heave. Moaning in pain, she forced herself upright and ran for the toilet. After duly worshipping at the throne of the porcelain god and emptying what little remained in her stomach from last night’s binge, she felt a few inches further away from death. But that wasn’t saying much. A shower sounded good, but the idea of listening to the pounding of water sent her back to bed showerless.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a hangover, and she’d never had one that even began to compare to this. Prepared to sleep for another, oh, decade, she crawled back into bed and threw an arm across her eyes.
A jangling noise that nearly split her skull in two made her swear and dive for her cell phone on the nightstand. “‘Lo,” she grumbled.
“Hey, sis! I missed you leaving the party last night.”
Oh, God. Did Sunny have