“Because you believe in me?” he speculated, confused.
“Yes. And because back then we all had bets about who would get you to kiss them.”
A low chuckle rumbled in Cole’s chest beneath her ear. “And no one won,” he stated, understanding at once where she was going with that. With a smile in his voice, he whispered, “How much did you bet?”
His wife opened his shirt button and pressed a playful kiss on his chest. “Nothing. I only make idiotic bets in Las Vegas.”
They were on their way to the bedroom when Diana remembered what she’d brought to give him. “What’s this?” Cole asked, setting her suitcases at the foot of his bed. She handed him an envelope and a hand-decorated sack. He opened the envelope first and then the sack. Spencer Addison had sent him a brief history of Doug Hayward’s drunk-driving arrests, the last of which was while he was in law school and had resulted in serious injury to the face of the female passenger with him at the time.
Rose Britton had sent him a bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies.
* * *
Even after they had made love, Diana couldn’t sleep. With her head resting in the crook of his arm, she stared out at the colorful waterfall beyond the bedroom’s glass wall.
“I used to wear you out,” Cole teased gently. “Now you lie awake pretending to sleep. That doesn’t bode well for the next fifty years.”
“What’s going to happen at the SEC hearing?”
She sounded wide awake and very worried. “Would it do any good to tell you not to worry?” he asked.
“None at all.”
He hesitated, hating to talk to her about the details of the snare that held him powerless right now, but she had a right to know and to understand. Based on his recollection of her camping trip stories and the way she ran her business, she had a greater fear of the unknown than of a visible threat.
“I know how stupid this sounds,” she murmured in the darkness, “but you had a thriving company without the Cushman microprocessor. After everything that’s happened, I wish you could just give it back to them along with their whole company.”
“I didn’t buy Cushman to get their chip. Intel is the leader at the high end. The low-end market is already being carved up into smaller and smaller pieces by a lot of foreign producers. In my opinion, the world doesn’t need another computer-chip provider.”
Diana rolled over onto her side and propped her head on her hand, facing him. “Then why in God’s name did you go to all that trouble to buy them?”
“I wanted some patents they held and didn’t know how to use. They owned a tiny piece of a puzzle that we needed in order to produce the most desired commodity in the world right now. We had everything else put together.”
“Which is?”
“Which is an ultra-long-life battery that would power laptop computers and cellular phones for days instead of hours. Everyone is working on one, and everyone is getting closer, including us, but whoever brings that battery to market first wins the game—and the stakes are almost beyond comprehension. The scientist who’s heading the project for me used to work for Cushman and he knew about the patent. He works off-site, in secret, in a lab he runs with a few assistants who don’t completely understand what he’s doing. Neither do I, for that matter. His assistants think he’s working on a super-thin computer/monitor television set, which he is—in his spare time.”
“Could you possibly sell Cushman back their chip and keep the patents?” she asked helpfully.
“Not a chance,” Cole said sardonically. “They don’t want that chip. Based on what I learned from a friend the other night, Cushman wants the profits we’ll make from that battery. The only chance they have of getting their hands on those profits is if they can convince the court that I cheated them by forcing the value of their stock down before I bought it.
“The patents were and are a matter of public record, so they can’t accuse me of having insider information or anything like that.”
Diana smoothed her fingers over the muscles of his stomach and chest. “What do you need to get out from under this right now?”
“I have a team of lawyers working on it. We’ll find a way,” Cole said with absolute conviction.
Satisfied that he would, Diana curled up against him and promptly fell asleep.
Cole was awake until dawn, because he already knew there wasn’t going to be “a way.” His lawyers had already told him to expect to be charged with fraud and to stand trial. Nothing short of a miracle would keep that from happening, he thought grimly. But then, Diana was lying in his arms, in his bed . . . and that was a miracle. She had come to be with him when everything she heard and saw should have made her run like hell. That was a bigger miracle.
Chapter 57
AT NOON THE NEXT DAY—two days before Cole was to leave for his hearing in front of the SEC administrator—he made certain he wasn’t being followed and took Diana with him to see Willard Bretling’s laboratory.
Located in an old part of the city, it looked like a derelict warehouse surrounded by old Cyclone fencing and guarded by snarling dogs. The few cars that were parked outside looked older than the building.
Inside, it was antiseptically clean with every kind of state-of-the-art electronics equipment.
“This is right out of—of a James Bond movie,” Diana exclaimed excitedly. Willard Bretling was thin and tall with slightly bent narrow shoulders, wire-rimmed glasses, and a perpetual, absentminded frown. He was standing at a table in a corner of the lab, arguing with his two assistants about how to use their new toaster oven.
“Ah, Cole!” he exclaimed. “Do you know how these damned things work?” He apologized to Diana, who was trying not to show her reaction to his dilemma. “Such knowledge is limited to those with lesser minds than ours,” he said. He smiled at her, and it was the first time Cole had ever seen the eccentric old man grin.
“If that’s the case,” Diana said, downplaying her own excellent mind, “it should be right up my alley.” The most important scientific brain in the world stood back and watched—his Pop-Tart in hand—in tense expectation as she fiddled with a knob and pressed a lever. Nothing happened.
“Useless gadget,” Bretling stated.
“There we go,” Diana declared. She pressed down all the way on the lever, and the smell of a new electric appliance being put into use emanated from it.
“W
hat did you do?” Bretling demanded, looking a little affronted.
Diana leaned very close to him and put her hand on his sleeve; then she whispered in his ear as if she had sensed how sensitive he was about being made to look foolish.
He’d left Cushman Electronics because they’d made him look foolish by refusing to let him work on his patents and ultimately assigning him to work under a younger, less gifted scientist. Diana’s simple action made the temperamental Bretling into a teddy bear, right before Cole’s amused eyes.
While Bretling wandered around the lab, he chatted endlessly with her. Cole couldn’t imagine what they had to talk about. He could barely spend an hour with the man without feeling as if his brain were overloaded with scientific mumbo jumbo.
On a table off to their left was another of Bretling’s pet projects, an ultrathin television set with a perfect picture that Cole was determined to announce very soon and thus put to shame Mitsubishi’s latest introduction. At the moment, Unified Industries’ candidate for Television of the Century was a flickering, white screen.
Tables at the far end of the gigantic room were cluttered with rows of would-be ultra-long-life rechargeable batteries.
Willard Bretling watched Cole’s restless movements from the corner of his eye; then he looked at Diana as he said, “Your husband is not a patient man. He is a man of vision, though.”
Diana nodded, watching Bretling’s arthritic fingers handle a wire as fine as a human hair. “He thinks very highly of you, too.”
The fingers stilled, faded blue eyes stared sharply over the rim of his glasses. “Why do you say that?”
Diana told him all the things Cole had told her on the way there, and he seemed genuinely astonished. “He thinks you are going to ‘save the universe’ with that battery someday very soon,” Diana said.
“The thin television first, then the battery,” the old man announced stubbornly. “The Japanese already have one out, but the picture is not the same as a regular set. Ours will be.”