“I can’t,” he said again, his sigh almost shaking his entire body. “We have to find a way out of this room in the next two hours or everything changes.”
Jamie wanted to scream in frustration. He was less forthcoming than a monk who’d taken a vow of silence. But if he wouldn’t tell her what was going on, she’d do her best to help nevertheless.
Sitting with her legs crossed in the middle of the floor, she dug her cell phone back out of her bag. Jamie pulled up a search engine, then called out to the robot. “Herman, who did you say this lab belonged to?”
The adorable robotic ball rolled over to her side. “This lab belongs to Dr. Keith Lakewood. He has degrees in electrical engineering, robotic science, physics, computer science, and artificial intelligence.”
Jamie typed in the name and started searching the web for any information that might be useful in their current plight. “Looks like Dr. Lakewood won something called the AAAI Grand Challenge.”
Herman let out a few chirps. “Correct. Dr. Lakewood also won the Maslab autonomous robotics competition twice while a student at MIT.”
Drake ignored them, instead going over every panel inch by painstaking inch. Still, Jamie didn’t give up. “It says here that he was the youngest division head in NASA’s history, and that he’s being considered for the Nobel Prize in Physics.”
“Does it tell you what his override code is? Because if it doesn’t, then all of that is useless.”
Jamie scowled at his back. Drake certainly threw common courtesy out the window when he was upset. “I doubt Dr. Lakewood publishes his codes on the internet for the world to see.”
“Then you’re just wasting time.”
“And what exactly are you doing?” she bit back. “Trying to magically intuit how to override a lock designed by a guy who’s gonna win the Nobel Prize?”
Drake let out a snort. “Backwards humans,” she heard him grumble under his breath.
“We’re all backwards humans! But at least some of us are polite!”
He turned around, pinning her with his dark gaze. For some reason, whenever he looked at her like that, all serious and brooding, her heart started to pound harder in her chest. She wanted to blame it on fear of his temper, but if she had to admit it to herself, it was really excitement that made her heart race.
“You have no idea what you’re playing with, little girl,” he said, his voice low, his tone verging on savage. “But if we don’t get out of here soon, you’re going to find out.”
Jamie’s eyes narrowed at the threat, even as her pulse rate jumped. Although she didn’t consider him sexy when judging by his appearance, his confidence and the way he carried himself, with that edge of danger, it really turned her on. But she’d be damned if she’d admit it.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said, even if she wasn’t sure if that was true. “And I don’t know what you think is going to happen in the next hour and a half. Are you going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight like Cinderella’s carriage?”
“Oh I’ll turn into something all right,” he growled. “And you’d be lucky if it was just a pumpkin.”
“Oh Jesus Christ!” she yelled. “Will you just calm down so we can figure this out?”
“Calm is the last thing I can be.”
Jamie had had it. She’d been working for months to bring her sister home, and now, the first time she’d actually been able to take action, her partner turned out to be a spy with secrets. And an anger problem.
She’d been ignored by NASA, turned down by her fiancé, and was now stuck with a guy who had brought her to an amazing orgasm with his mouth but refused to use that same mouth for talking sense.
“Listen, you arrogant asshole! We aren’t going to figure anything else unless you calm the fuck down and talk to me. Dr. Lakewood seems like some kind of super genius, and to be honest, we’re not. The only way to try and get out of this is to think like Lakewood. So come sit down and help me think, dammit!”
He was stiff as corpse walking over to her and sitting down, his eyes burning with a fire that his body seemed to douse. “Lakewood should have left some kind of instructions for an override, if anyone was to get accidentally locked in.”
“Makes sense,” Jamie said. “Too bad we can’t just call him and ask.”
Drake stared at her for so long she became uncomfortable. She was debating asking him what he was looking at or just hauling off and slapping him, but before she could lift her hand, he spoke. “Maybe we can.”
He ran his fingers through his hair while working things out. “What if we called him pretending to be the cleaning crew? Explain that we accidently got locked in and did he know how to get out, so that we won’t fall behind on our cleaning schedule.”
Jamie laughed. “It could work. But what if he calls our bluff, or asks why we didn’t call down to the security desk?”
“We could make up another excuse, like the security desk lost the codes. I don’t think he’s likely to be that suspicious, as the code only acts as an override to unlock this door from the inside, right?”
“Even if we did want to call him, how do we get his number?”
