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meaning to its charming, suggestive saying. Yesterday he’d suspected the tailored suit concealed a figure worth seeing, but this exceeded his wildest expectations. Just looking at her made his temperature rise.
    It took him a moment to adjust to the half light of the living room. Then he saw her. She was curled into a large, fan-backed chair in the far corner. Small and vulnerable, she tugged at a place in his heart that hadn’t been touched in a long time.
    He walked over to her cautiously, half afraid she’d bolt at his approach. The dimness enhanced the sultry mystery of her eyes and the dark softness of her unbound hair. “I’m glad you opened the door,” he said, meaning it.
    “I didn’t. He did.”
    “Who?” he asked, looking around.
    She lifted her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “There’s a radio receiver in the locking mechanism. Einstein just reverses the polarity on his digital channel, sends out a signal, and it’s open.”
    “Einstein? Are you saying the computer let me in?”
    Melanie nodded glumly.
    Chris was amazed. “Your machine made an independent judgment, without any prompting from you?”
    She shrugged helplessly. “Yes, unfortunately. I mean, if he’s going to let someone in, he should ask me whether
I
want him to let that person in. It’s common courtesy.”
    She’s nuts, Chris thought. Her computer had just performed an impressive feat of autonomous decision making, and she was worried about social etiquette. He wasn’t joining this project a moment too soon. “How about letting me see this disrespectful computer of yours? Maybe I could give him a lesson in manners.”
    The look she gave him dripped with disbelief. “Good or bad?”
    Chris smiled. He liked her ready wit and the guarded humor that sparked in her eyes. In this muted light one could almost consider her pretty. He thought about last night’s bravado pledge to teach this woman a thing or two about his field of expertise. He instantly regretted it. He didn’t know much about Melanie, but he knew she didn’t deserve to be reduced to the level of some arbitrary romantic conquest.
    Her strange, off-center personality intrigued him. She wasn’t his type of course—too cerebral—but he couldn’t help liking her. Nor could he keep his eyes from straying to her formfitting tank top. That bodywas made for sin, not statistics. It was a pure shame to put the soul of a calculator in the body of a walking dream. A pure shame.
    He turned his eyes and thoughts back to the matter at hand. “Okay, I’ll admit my manners aren’t the best. I shouldn’t have shown up on your doorstep uninvited. But you didn’t give me any choice.”
    He looked around for a chair. Finding none, he turned over one of the smaller crates and sat down to face her. “I want Sheffield Industries to develop Einstein as much as you do. Maybe more. To be perfectly honest, I
need
your computer.”
    She still didn’t trust him; that much was apparent in the set of her jaw and the tight posture of her body. But her eyes had softened. At least, he thought they had. He hoped they had. Trust me, he willed. For God’s sake, give me a chance.
    “Well,” she said with a sigh, “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to let you see Einstein. Just understand I’m not agreeing to anything. Okay?”
    “Of course not,” he answered smoothly. He could afford to be magnanimous. He knew he’d already won.
    Melanie pushed open the door slowly, afraid, as always, that even that slight movement would dislodge something in the densely packed room. Cautiously she stepped over thick snakes of cables that crisscrossed the floor, connecting the hodgepodge of machinery to the table in the center of the room. The table supported a small monitor screen, an ordinary computer keyboard, and something that resembled a palm-size version of a satellite dish. The antennae of the dish tracked her as she crossed the room.
    Chris gave a low whistle. “Dr. Frankenstein hadnothing on