The Klone and I: A High-Tech Love Story - By Danielle Steel Page 0,35

didn't want to hurt you. I thought we should start slow at the beginning … and work up to a triple … even a quadruple…. It adds something very special to a beautiful moment between two people, don't you think?”

“I do.” I was still more than a little breathless, and amazed we hadn't hurt each other. But he was unharmed and unruffled as he lifted me gently back onto the bed, and tried it again. We actually achieved a triple, sometime early that afternoon. We never made it to the exhibit of Old Masters at the Met, but by then I didn't care. I was living in Nirvana somewhere, suspended in a world of his creation, my body the instrument he played like a Stradivarius, or something very delicate and precious. And as we sank into the bathtub together afterward, all I could do was close my eyes and dream. I was so pleasantly exhausted, so sated and well loved, that I didn't hear the phone ring, and when I did, I didn't care.

“Steph … sweetheart …” he whispered, as I drifted slowly to earth again, and looked at him. “You should answer the phone. It might be the kids.”

“What kids?”

“Yours.”

I couldn't have remembered their names at that point if he asked me, but I knew I should answer the phone. But he had cast a spell on me so powerful, he was all I could think of. Him, the triple flip.

“Hi, there.” A familiar voice sounded buoyant, and hearing him so energetic and alive, I winced. I looked straight at Peter in the tub across from me, and wondered how he did it. If it was a recording of his voice, the timing was very good. He was playing the phone game with me, but this time I knew I would catch him at his own game. I had figured out that morning that the way he did it was by having such an ordinary conversation with me that my answers would be entirely predictable. And I would never realize it was a recording, and not a real person on the phone, talking to me.

“Hello, Peter.” I played the game with a wink and a broad grin.

“How are you, Steph?”

“Pretty sexy,” was my answer, instead of “fine.”

“What does that mean?” he asked. Another standard response to anything I might have said.

“I'm just lying here in the bathtub. We've been making love all afternoon.” There was a moment's pause, which made me smile. He had obviously left a space in the recording, which was clever of him.

“He's bionic, Steph. He's not real. He's entirely man-made, synthetic from head to toe, and he doesn't mean a thing he says. And whatever he does, it's strictly a mechanical performance.” From my experience, that made him fairly typical of his breed. Nothing unusual about that, or about what Peter was saying to me.

“We just did a triple flip.” Try producing a standard response to that. The conversation was slipping rapidly away from what Peter might have expected when he made the tape.

“He wasn't supposed to do that, Steph. He was just supposed to keep you entertained till I got back. That isn't what we programmed him for at this end. It sounds like things are getting out of control there.” He sounded worried and I grinned. The joke was on him now.

“I'd say things are very much ‘out of control’ at this end.”

“You're making me jealous, Steph. You sound as though you think he's real.” He didn't sound pleased about it. In fact, he sounded almost sad, which unnerved me.

Touching vastly impressive parts of him gently with my foot beneath the water in the tub, I nodded with a mischievous grin. “I believe he is real.”

“Well, he's not. We programmed him for that ridiculous little stunt, just for the hell of it, but I told him not to try it. He could hurt someone. Besides, I never expected him to do that with you.” This was not the standard answer I expected, and listening to Peter at the other end, I frowned.

“What did you just say?” I asked, feeling nervous suddenly, and staring at Paul in the tub with me, as he closed his eyes innocently, and looked as though he was drifting off to sleep. Maybe he was a ventriloquist, or, if nothing else, psychotic. A sociopath at the very least. But how could this be? This didn't seem like a recording I was talking to, it sounded much too real and