Untouched

Risa was thankful that her new friend appeared to be teasing, and Risa dutifully followed her to the counter, where they could pay and get out.

Risa wondered what the agency had deemed so important they’d send one of their top field operatives. Daniel MacAlister was no lightweight—she’d worked with him before and she’d rarely met anyone so focused on his work, so determined to get the job done. He was intelligent, dedicated and lethal. Apparently, this time, his mission involved her.

If he’d come to kill her, she’d be dead already. A man like that wouldn’t bother wasting his time dallying in department stores; he could have picked her off cleanly, no matter where she was. She also knew, while MacAlister had killed in the line of duty, he wasn’t an assassin. So it had to be something else.

Hope sparked suddenly as her mind worked over the scenarios—maybe the agency had changed their position on her employment and had a use for her even if she didn’t have her superpowers. Could he have been sent to retrieve her for service?

“God, he’s incredible! Look at that butt….” Kristy sighed as she shamelessly ogled Daniel, who walked just ahead of them. Risa wondered if he’d heard; if so, he gave no indication. He was handsome, she thought rather experimentally; she wasn’t used to thinking about men in those terms. The only men she’d been around were Dr. Laslow and the operatives she’d worked with—or the terrorists and other subjects she’d had to examine. Needless to say, she’d never noticed any of their backsides. She tried not to notice MacAlister’s, but Kristy was right—it was nicely shaped. Toned, tapered, muscular. She felt her pulse pick up a little, and looked away, focusing on Anna, who walked at his side.

Risa was dying to get out of the store and get some answers. The security guards and manager were gone, crisis averted. As the clerk rang up her purchases while Kristy watched to make sure she received her forty percent discount, Risa moved closer to where MacAlister stood, silent and watchful.

“I’m not your fiancée.”

He shifted cool eyes to meet hers, and arched an eyebrow, shaking his head ever so slightly as if to say not now. How could she read him so clearly, without so much as a word spoken between them? The connection she had with him drew her, in spite of her worries about his presence.

“I don’t believe that’s your sister. Is she another agent—”

“I most certainly am not,” Anna interrupted. “I am his sister, one of two. Apparently, Daniel hasn’t told you much about the family he’s trying to convince you to join.”

Anna had rejoined them after breaking away to pay for her own purchases, and MacAlister’s very nice lips thinned as he realized his sister had overheard Risa.

Anna turned to Daniel. “Is this why you’ve come back to the Cape, Daniel? To tell us you’re getting married?”

MacAlister—Daniel—looked like a cat about to crawl right out of his skin. Risa crossed her arms and gave him the same cool look he’d been sending her. It was his story that they were engaged, let him deal with the fallout.

“Not exactly. That was a small lie, I have to confess.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Anna sounded dismally disappointed.

“Risa and I were in a…relationship. She quit and moved away, and we never had the chance to really share our feelings. Work was always in the way. I came here to remedy that.”

Risa turned, thinking she heard the sales clerk sigh—or was it Kristy? Still, she said nothing, holding his gaze in a dare. The next thing she knew, Anna was at her side, sliding her arm through Risa’s and hugging her close. Risa stiffened at the contact, ready to bolt, but Anna’s hold was firm.

The expectant mother shined at Risa, then at her brother. The reality sank in for Risa—they really were brother and sister. Anna was not an undercover operative working with Daniel, or some woman he’d randomly picked up in the store for cover. Everything took on a surreal blur that Risa couldn’t process.

Anna’s voice was joyful as she said, “Well, I don’t care what the reason is. The important thing is that you’re back, and if Risa is the reason for that, then we’ll all welcome her with open arms. She’s part of the family already, as far as I’m concerned.”

For the first time since this entire fiasco began, Risa saw uncertainty flicker in Agent MacAlister’s placid gray eyes. Smiling brightly in his direction, she capitalized on the weakness she’d found and hugged Anna’s arm closer.

“Well, Daniel,” she said his name deliberately, getting used to the less formal address, “I’m very interested in anything you came here to tell me.”

3

“CAN I ASK YOU something?”

Kristy’s voice interrupted Risa’s thoughts, scattered as they were. All she wanted to do was get back to her apartment and find out what the hell Daniel MacAlister was up to. He claimed that Risa was the reason he was staying in Falmouth instead of with his family in Harwich, but that was just a cover. Risa knew he had to be on assignment, and she needed details. She responded to Kristy absently, hoping there wasn’t going to be more talk about how attractive Daniel was.

“Sure, what?”

“Do you watch everyone in the building?”

“I’ll disconnect the monitors. I told you why I did it. I know it was wrong, but—”

“No, I don’t mean it that way. I just wondered. How did you do it? It’s sort of creepy, you know, in general. Someone can be watching you at any time, even in your own home, and you have no idea.”

She shuddered, and Risa felt terrible—guilt was an emotion that had been largely regarded as useless in her life. She couldn’t do her work if she was going to feel guilty about prying into people’s thoughts, etc. But it was different this time—most of the people she’d scanned before were terrorists, enemies, but Kristy was neither.

“I was good with technology when I worked for the government.”

She thought back to all the hours, days and weeks when she’d been glued to computer networks, sifting through a constant barrage of information, trying to catch any stray byte that would be meaningful to the analysts at the Pentagon. It was a more intense connection, more difficult to maintain, than reading people, and once she’d gotten inside of the stream of information, it was often difficult getting back out. She’d shorted out like an overloaded circuit several times before they figured out how much she could take. Even then, Dr. Laslow had pressed her limits, always reminding her how important her work was. After her parents’ deaths, her work became her purpose, the thing she held on to that was constant in her life. If she ever felt lonely, she’d learned to push it aside.

It was an added benefit that all the residual knowledge, all of her understanding of how computers and networks worked, had stayed with her. She knew computers as well as she knew her own heartbeat. This wasn’t something she could share with Kristy, obviously. For her friend’s safety, the less she knew, the better.

However, Risa had never really had any conflict about her work or about spying on the people in her apartment building. She’d been taught to do what was necessary, and that’s what she’d done. She herself was exposed and studied in every aspect of her life, by Laslow and the government; it was the norm for her. But Kristy reminded her that most people expected privacy.

“It’s not difficult to get basic surveillance equipment if you know where to look, and since the building already had a decent security system, I just worked with that and added some enhancements. Mostly at night, or when people were out at work, gone shopping, stuff like that.”

“Even Ben Richter, on the third floor?”

Risa turned her head, detecting a subtle change in Kristy’s tone—why was she asking these questions?

“Yeah, even him. Why?”

“I’ve been crazy about him for months, but he doesn’t even know I’m alive. He works at the same lab I do. He’s here for a year from Germany as part of Ridge 2000—the program studying the midocean ridges. I thought he was just shy, but I can’t seem to strike up a conversation, or anything,” she confessed hurriedly.

“Maybe he’s not into women.”

Kristy smiled, though Risa didn’t understand what was so funny. It was a logical deduction that if a man wasn’t interested in an attractive woman like Kristy, then one of the reasons could be that he was gay. Or married. Or both.

“Nah, thanks for the vote of confidence, but I don’t think I’m that irresistible. And I’ve seen him out with girls. Believe me, those looks combined with his accent—Oh, my God, just hearing him say ‘good morning’ turns my knees to water—any red-blooded woman within hearing distance is toast. I never would have thought a German accent would be sexy, but oh, my.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not gay.”

“How do you figure?”

“I read the minds of many men who had homoerotic tendencies, most of them buried in the subconscious. They didn’t even realize it themselves. Most of them were married or actively hetero. A lot of people simply can’t deal with those repressed feelings.”

Kristy shrugged. “I guess it’s possible. But I just have a gut feeling it’s not true in Ben’s case.”

Risa turned, interested. “Gut feeling?”

“Yeah, you know, an instinct. You just kind of know when something is true, even when all signs would indicate otherwise. Intuition, I guess. You know what I mean?”

“No, not really.” Risa scowled and looked out the window—she had sensed some things about people around her, Kristy and Daniel, but she found the vague indications of moods or tones aggravating after spending a lifetime accessing specific information. “I thought you were more of a scientific type?”

“I am. I am a solid supporter of the scientific method. However, the really big advances, the breakthroughs in science, are usually based on intuition. Those inklings can lead a scientist in the right direction.”

“If you say so.”