Programmed for Peril

activities. The colds that had occasionally plagued her vanished.
    Accomplishment was contagious. He spun off sub-projects to her, telling her to handle them. She did. Her technical knowledge arced up in a grand curve. Her specialty within his inspired cottage industry was mini- and microcomputers. She understood she couldn’t imitate his creativity, the inspired soarings of imagination that turned the familiar inside out, but once he explained even the most general task, she could hurry on alone to move specifics toward the objective.
    The initial awe in which she held Carson never completely disappeared. She did, however, spice it with respect and, in time, tenderness. She was in love with him months before daring to admit it to herself, and finally to him. Beneath that special emotion lay the sense of security that he brought to her life. The roots of her need for it, she suspected, led back east to Marylou, who had managed her life like the most enthusiastic stage mother. Now Trish needn’t ever take her orders again.
    She could take Carson’s.
    She had moved into Castle Carson six weeks after the party. “A holdout record,” Carson mumbled. She asked him how many women had lived there with him. He tossed off a red-browed glower instead of an answer.
    Carson’s energy, of course, extended to lovemaking. He knew as much about women’s bodies as he did about circuit theory. She couldn’t help but respond to his artful, fleshy intrusions. Yet she sensed he held back physically and emotionally. As though waiting for... she didn’t know what. No matter. From the silver strands of her own upward-spiraling spasms she wove gaudy ornamentation into the secret fabric of her love.
    By the fourth month of their stay together she accepted his expectation that they spend all their waking time together. At first she had resisted. She did have a few friends with whom she sometimes visited. When he refused to go with her to their homes and insisted she not go without him, she surprised herself by consenting. She felt strangely relieved—delighted even—at having pleased him by giving up another small piece of her freedom. She moved all the closer to the center of his life, twined around him like a morning glory on a mailbox post.
    Standing before an exposed circuit board one day, she was surprised when he abruptly interrupted his explanation of its function. He put down his nonconducting pointer. He turned to her, green eyes glowing and narrowed with what she had already learned to recognize as desire. “Do not move!” he said.
    “What?”
    “Do not play stupid, Queen of My Heart!”
    “All right. I won’t move, Prince of My Pleasure.”
    “And you won’t talk!” He touched her chin. His face loomed, eyes like lanterns in their intensity. “You won’t make any noise at all.”
    He put his hands in her hair, stirring the bangs. Fingertips touched the curling cartilage of her ears. They moved back into her hair. He was in no hurry. Her initial anxiety faded. She could trust Carson.
    In slow time his lips found their way to her forehead, brows, temples bared of their scrim of hair. He licked her lashes and the curve between her lower lip and chin. When she raised her head for a kiss he said, “No!” He seized her chin in firm fingers. “You do not move!”
    She froze.
    He gripped the jumpsuit zipper ring in his teeth and pulled it down to her waist. The soft sponge of his tongue washed around her neck, missing not one square inch of so-sensitive skin. Goose bumps erupted down her right side. There was one movement she couldn’t stop, she thought.
    With her hands at her sides he had no trouble sliding the jumpsuit off her shoulders. His fingers and lips took their own maddening time cruising her collarbones, sweeping thoroughly into depressions and across the curve of her shoulders. So slowly he went. So... slowly.
    He freed her wrists and slid sleeves down her arms. Jumpsuit top fell away to dangle from her waist to the floor, suggesting abandoned marionettes and tattered Raggedy Anns. He turned his patient attentions to her back and chest around the satiny bra. Around and around, but never . She wanted to ask him to go ahead but knew he wouldn’t like it. She understood they were playing a game but didn’t mind. It was... interesting.
    From the workbench he took a pair of pruning shears, waved them before her face. She was startled. He pressed them against her lips. Instinctively she kissed the flats of