Trust Me

faithful wife whose husband, Othello, didn’t trust her?” Stark asked thoughtfully. “As I recall, she came to a bad end.”
    “I know.” Desdemona made a face. “I told you, I was only five at the time, and I liked the sound of it. I admit that if I had it to do all over again, I might have chosen another name. Helena, maybe, from All’s Well That Ends Well.”
    “So your mother and Northstreet eventually got divorced?”
    “Mom started the paperwork, but Northstreet died before it was finished,” Desdemona said quietly.
    “How did he die?”
    “He shot himself in the head.” Desdemona shifted slightly, as though shaking off a dark, smothering cloak. “Look, if you don’t mind, I’d like to change the subject.”
    “Sure.” There was more to the story, Stark thought. But he sensed that he had pushed far enough for one evening.
    He was vaguely surprised that he had probed at all. It wasn’t like him to go digging into someone else’s private life. He had always guarded his own privacy well and respected it in others. But for some reason he needed to know everything about Desdemona. Sooner or later, he promised himself, he would get all the answers.
    Desdemona gave him a determined smile. “Enough about me. Where did you learn that neat trick you used on poor Tony? It looked like some kind of martial arts maneuver.”
    “It is.”
    Desdemona tilted her head to one side. “I don’t think of you as the Physical type.”
    Stark gazed at her without comment.
    She blushed. “I mean, you look physically strong, but I don’t think of you as the kind of man who would study the martial arts. I see you as a brainy, scientific type. More intellectually oriented, if you know what I mean.”
    “I also lift a few weights,” Stark said dryly.
    Desdemona’s eyes skimmed over his shoulders. Blatant feminine approval gleamed in the blue-green depths. “Now that I can believe.”
    Stark felt himself grow unaccountably warm. “I don’t spend all of my time in front of a computer screen,” he said gruffly.
    “What, exactly, did you do before you came to Seattle? Your ex-fiancee said something about a high-tech think tank.”
    Stark raised his brows. “You and Pamela discussed me?”
    “Well, yes. Sort of. Only casually, if you know what I mean.”
    “No,” Stark said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Never mind.” Desdemona gave him an overly bright smile. “It was nothing. Just something Miss Bedford mentioned in the course of a business discussion.”
    “A business discussion,” Stark repeated in a deliberately neutral tone.
    “Right.”
    “About me.”
    “No, not about you. About your wedding reception plans.” Desdemona waved that aside. “Tell me about the think tank.”
    “It’s called the Rosetta Institute.”
    Desdemona’s eyes widened. “I get it. Named after the Rosetta stone? The artifact that gave the first clue to deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphics?”
    “Yes, that’s right. The Rosetta Institute is a small, loosely knit group of people who work in the science of complex structures.”
    “You mean chaos theory? I’ve heard of that.”
    “It’s a lousy catchphrase,” Stark said, irritated. “I prefer the term ‘complexity’. Chaos implies absolute meaninglessness. Complexity, on the other hand, exists at the edge of chaos, a frontier where there is still meaning. There are patterns in even the most complex systems. They’re just hard to find and identify, that’s all.”
    “What did you do at this Rosetta Institute?”
    “My specialty was the study and development of encryption techniques. Most of the projects I worked on were tailored for intelligence and research applications.”
    “Wow. That’s impressive. Were you a government agent of some kind? Did you help track down terrorists and hijackers?”
    “Hell, no,” Stark muttered. “At the most, I occasionally acted as a consultant on technical matters.”
    “Oh.”
    Stark smiled. “Disappointed?”
    “No, just curious.” Desdemona tilted her head to one side. “So why did you lift weights and learn the martial arts stuff?”
    “The Institute is located in the Colorado foothills,” Stark explained patiently. “It was a long drive to Denver or Boulder or anywhere else for that matter. There wasn’t a whole heck of a lot to do except work. But sometimes a person needs a break. When I did, I worked out with weights and took the classes in martial arts.”
    She gave him an ingenuous look.