But as Julia entered his mind, his smile vanished.  Arnold was unimportant.   All that mattered was finding  the woman who'd stolen his heart and left him a broken, bitter man.  

Anxious to see her, to touch her, he removed his gloves and shoved them in his pocket, feeling something hard in there. He extracted the object to find that it was a romance novel.   By the heaving and entwined flesh on the cover, it was a steamy bodice ripper. He tossed it aside in disgust, wondering how in the hell it got in there. Then he stepped over the giant and entered the mansion, spying a faint light that peeked from beneath the double-doors at the end of what had once been a grand hall.

Determination screeching through his blood, he plowed the worn wood floor to the doors and kicked them open with his black-booted foot to find himself in a large chamber with sagging yellow wallpaper and bright fluorescent lights.  A long metal card table dominated the room.  Around it sat an assortment of her "toys," who'd been in the midst of a poker game until his untimely intrusion.

They paused, cards in hand, to study him. As he waved the demagnetizer before them, cards suddenly fell, mouths gaped, and horror painted their pretty faces. Oh how he wished he could get a snapshot of it. The scene before him was definitely what he'd call a "Kodak Moment."

He smiled.  He'd caught Julia off guard this time. She must have felt safe and secure on this forbidden rock of a planet. She was a fool. There was no place in the galaxy where she could hide from him.  No place at all.

"It's okay, friends.  I won't use it if you take me to your leader--you know who I'm talking about, the bitch with the body that won't stop and the brain that you wish would."

The bot who looked like C3PO stood.  "We con't."

"You not only 'con,' but you better," said Adam,  his face curling iinto a vicious snarl.

"You don't understand," a big, muscular blond said, "Look, man, she's working on something important.  She won't see us either. She locked her lab door and hasn't seen the morning light in days. She might have swallowed the key for all we know. "

Suddenly there was a beep. Adam went into alert mode as a door behind him slid open with a "whoosh." His heart beat all the faster when a satiny feminine voice called: "What's going on here?"

Oh, yes, he should have known. She was watching her minions. Even in the heat of some important experiment that probably consisted of a building yet another hunk, she was watching her precious heaps of metal. Demagnetizer ready for action, Adam spun to face her.  One look and his heart pounded madly. He sighed.  How in the hell could she still have such an affect on him after all these years?