Free Tom Hyman by Jupiter's Daughter Page A

I’m sorry, Anne. Honest, I am sorry.”
     
    Anne felt cruelly deceived nevertheless. Life without children would be unthinkably empty. The following day Dalton made a lot of apologies and excuses and vaguely promised that if there was no other solution, they would adopt.
    Anne stepped out of the shower and dried herself. She felt slightly better. She stood in front of the full-length mirror on the bathroom wall and studied herself in the bright light of the ceiling heat lamps.
    Was she really beautiful? People always said she was, but she didn’t quite believe it. She thought of herself as very average.
    Maybe that’s all beauty was—being quintessentially average. At the moment she looked more bedraggled than beautiful.
    She wrapped a towel around her waist and walked back into the bedroom.
    She shook her head. It hurt. She was still drunk.
    She closed the drapes to shut out the lateafternoon light, then flung herself nude on top of the bed. The room felt hot, stuffy.
    Her eyes wandered to the ornate molded plaster border that defined the edges of the bedroom ceiling. The corners were the fanciest—a delicate scrollwork of leaf clusters and other design elements she could not identify. Suddenly she spotted a small face, a chimera, hiding among the leaves. It appeared to be leering down at her. She squinted her eyes, but the face remained. Silly.
    An illusion caused by the room’s dim light, she decided. If she opened the drapes or turned on a lamp, she knew, the face would disappear.
    She kept her eyes fastened on the small face until she began to feel dizzy again.
    She rested a hand on her breast and brought her other hand up between her legs. She closed her eyes and squeezed her thighs against her fingers. Through the haze of the wine, she felt a warm rush of desire.
    She squeezed her legs together harder and dug her fingers into her breast.
    Tears welled from the corners of her eyes. Why did she have to spend her life feeling lonely and unloved?

6
    Dalton Stewart came out of Goth’s lab and walked straight to his rented Toyota Land Cruiser, parked just outside the building.
    Waiting for him were his chief executive assistant, Hank Ajemian, and his chauffeur-bodyguard, Gil Trabert. Ajemian opened the back door for his boss and then slid in beside him.
    Stewart removed the gold fountain pen clipped to his shirt pocket and held it out. A miniature microphone and transmitter were concealed inside. Goth had refused to allow any recording devices inside his office, so Stewart had resorted to using a bug with a remote transmitter. “Did you get everything?” he asked.
    Ajemian picked up the portable laser-disk recorder from the floor and set it on his lap. “Came through perfectly.”
    Trabert started the jeep and wheeled it slowly out of the weedchoked lot. Prince Bandar’s jeep was already bouncing down the hill, trailing a cloud of dust. Yamamoto and Fairfield, who had come out behind Stewart, were just getting into their vehicles.
    Stewart craned his neck around to look back toward the lab’s entrance.
    He was wondering what had become of the baroness.
    He had hoped to speak to her, but she was nowhere in sight.
    Stewart looked at his chief assistant, slumped forward in his wrinkled suit. Ajemian was short, overweight, and bald. He suffered from allergies that caused dark circles under his eyes and gave his Brooklyn accent an added overtone of nasal congestion.
    He presented a dramatic contrast to his tall, slim, well-manicured WASP
    boss.
    “You heard it all,” Stewart said. “What did you think?”
    Ajemian closed his eyes and sniffled. Some plant pollen in the air was making his nose run and his eyes water. “Goth sounds a little off the wall to me,” he ventured.
    “You think so?”
    “Well, you asked the key question,” Ajemian answered, instinctively flattering his boss. “Where’s the proof? He said he doesn’t have any, so what the hell is he talking about?”
    “You think he’s a