She was shocked, in a good, swirly rush kind of a way. Tentatively, she reached around his waist and clung, just for a moment. Okay, maybe two moments. Two and a half. The heat and pressure of his body against hers were comforting and arousing in equal measures. And he had back muscles. Latissimus dorsi, originating right under her fingers. She bet if she let her hands travel, his rectus abdomini were even more adapted to supporting her fingers.
Before she could start drooling and reviewing anatomy by Braille, she released him. He let her go and stepped back.
That big hand was in his hair again, pushing it off of his forehead. “Okay. Umm…I guess…” He didn’t meet her eyes right away, and then he did.
She tried not to drown in the dark pools. Clearing her throat, she said, “Okay, well, thanks. You know, for…coming to the lab today. And for taking care of the possums. And for hugging me.”
He smiled. “You betcha. Have a good night.” He turned and walked away, the early fall evening shadows stretching away from him, as tall as Superman could leap.
Damn. She had even less understanding of what was going on, but found that the likelihood of getting away from Mike Gibson without her feelings involved was slipping.
…
Mike sat in his parked truck to watch his house for a few minutes before going inside. Dylan’s silhouette moved behind the kitchen curtains, confirming the text he’d gotten a few minutes ago telling Mike he’d meet him at home. The kid was probably microwaving something from the frozen pizza department. He needed to confront Dylan about what had happened in Lauren’s lab, but he needed to sit there and avoid the confrontation for a few minutes first. He went back over the events of the day, from hearing about the damage, to finding the Devil’s Rangers gang tag on the lab wall, his inability to get any information about the Rangers from his old co-workers, to seeing Lauren outside of the biology building.
He’d meant to ask more questions when he’d seen Lauren outside of the lab, to see if he could figure out who—hopefully, not Dylan—might have been hanging around her lab. Someone who would know what to steal. He knew she wasn’t responsible for the drug thefts. She’d explained about the bag of pellets she’d taken from the building last night, and it was a dumb enough story that he believed it. He even understood why she hadn’t told Crawford about the missing algae pellets. She had no reason to trash her own lab—unless she was completely bent, and he didn’t get that kind of vibe—but truthfully, he had little objectivity where she was concerned. And Dylan had access to all of it.
Still. Why did he have to go and fucking hug her? What was wrong with him? She’d just looked so…vulnerable, after her cool competence when he’d gone into the lab with her earlier. Fuck.
He couldn’t get attached to her. He didn’t do relationships. Relationships came with responsibilities, and he already had enough to distract him from his work. He got out of the truck and slammed the door. It thunked shut on the first try for a change. He hoped that was a good sign.
Through the kitchen door window, he could see Dylan bent over his phone, leaning against the counter. The door screeched when he pulled it open, and Dylan’s head whipped up. He punched the blackout button on the screen and shoved it into his pocket, then hooked his fingers in his belt.
“S’up,” Dylan said, nodding.
“Hey. Did you eat?” Mike asked. That was neutral. Good start.
“Yeah.” Dylan jerked his head toward the stove, where the leftover half of a formerly frozen pizza sat. “That’s from yesterday, I just re-nuked it. I’m done, help yourself.”
Mike took a slice, holding it with one hand while he opened the refrigerator and took out a Diet Coke with the other. He deftly popped the tab and sucked down half of the soda, trying to figure out how to ask his brother if he was doing drugs. Or dealing them. Or both. “Where’s the cat?”
“Hiding behind the dryer, last time I checked.”
“Seriously? How does it fit?”
Dylan shrugged. “You’ve got something you want to say to me?”
Was he that obvious? Mike shoved half the slice into his mouth, chewed maybe all of three times, then swallowed. Grandma would kick him in the shin if she could see him right now. Standing up to eat and choking down store-bought pizza. Grandma would also know how to talk to Dylan. If she were still here, Mike wouldn’t even need to have this conversation, because his brother never would have gotten into trouble in the first place.
Dylan waited, defensive shields up and ready to deflect. When Dylan reached up to scratch his neck, his shirt gaped at the waist. Mike caught a glimpse of the scar that he knew extended from his brother’s collarbone to his belly. Appetite gone, he threw the rest of the slice of pizza in the trash.
Dylan watched him but didn’t say anything. He probably knew how reminders of that scar, and Mike’s role in it, made Mike feel.
“You know what happened at your boss’s lab overnight?” Mike asked, deliberately shifting the conversation.
Dylan nodded. “I heard about it.”
“Do you know how it happened?”
“Don’t you mean, ‘Did you do it?’”
Yes. “No, I mean, do you know anything about it?”
Dylan sighed. “I know that someone broke in and trashed the place. I heard that some chemicals were stolen, and that the police are questioning everyone with access to the Biology building. Including students and maintenance staff.” At the last, Dylan raised an eyebrow at Mike.
“I’ve already talked to the police.”
“Well. Are you sure you aren’t involved?”
Mike took a breath, let it out slowly. This wasn’t working. He wouldn’t learn anything about Dylan by talking to Dylan.
He could pump Evan for information, but Evan didn’t trust Mike any more than Dylan did. He was just going to have to watch and listen. But he was going to be watching like a hawk with a satellite hookup.
First, he had to try one more thing. “There was graffiti on the wall of that room your boss uses for growing her algae.”
“The cell culture room?”
“Whatever. There was a weird threat about killing things, but that’s not what struck me.”
“No? Please share.”
Mike walked over to Dylan and flicked up the sleeve of his T-shirt, revealing the tattoo that he had yet to have removed.
Dylan jerked away, but not before Mike tapped him right in the middle of the Devil’s Rangers gang tag inked into his brother’s skin.
Dylan’s expression was a mixture of fear and revulsion. “Dude. I didn’t do this. I swear. Dr. Kane is awesome. I wouldn’t do this.”
Mike wanted to believe his brother. He wanted to believe him so much that he could have cried. But he couldn’t ignore the evidence. Lauren’s face flashed through his consciousness, along with the feel of her in his arms.
He tossed the Diet Coke in the sink and replaced it with a beer.
Chapter Nine
Saturday morning, Lauren put her giant mug of Earl Grey tea on the little table outside the lab and wondered for a moment if that was a good idea. ’Cause you never know when someone’s going to walk by and spike your drink with radioactive thymidine while you worked. Nothing like some senseless vandalism to turn up the paranoia to eleven.
The double door at the end of the hallway clanged, and Lauren looked up to see Dylan White clumping down the hall. “Dylan!” He’d never just shown up out of the blue before, and especially on a weekend. Weren’t college kids supposed to be sleeping off hangovers on early Saturday mornings? “What brings you here?”
The young man ducked his head. “I feel bad that I didn’t come by yesterday. I had a…thing…and I got caught up in that.”
“That’s okay. It wasn’t your day to work anyway.” She looked at him closely, trying to find a resemblance to Evan or Mike. There was something about their eyes, a sort of tilt to the eyelids, maybe. Dylan also had the same straight blade of a nose, but it was still too big for his face. And he had
that ridiculous chinstrap beard. He’d grow into the nose, but the beard? Hopefully, he’d outgrow that.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing. Yesterday was kind of crazy, anyway. I take it you heard—”
“Yeah, I heard. That’s really fu—messed up.” Dylan hiked up his baggy plaid shorts and grimaced. “I should have been here to help yesterday. But maybe I can work today and help you out?”
“Well—”
“We don’t even have to put it on my timecard if you don’t want. I just thought…”
He looked so earnest, with his big brown eyes and even bigger nose, that Lauren’s heart—already pretty mushy when it came to Dylan—melted a little more. “Well then, strap on a lab coat and glove up. Maybe you can show me how this computer tracing GPS app thing that IT put on my laptop is supposed to work.”
“They did that for my computer when they set me up with a campus log on,” he said. “Is your laptop here?”
“It’s at home, but the tracking program is on my desktop over there,” she said, waving in the general vicinity of her desk. “And on my phone. My scientific competence doesn’t extend to computer literacy.” A fact that Alex the Ex had mentioned on more than…a dozen occasions.
“My computer skills are second only to my ability to scrape algae off test tubes, and equally at your service,” he said with a flourish and a bow.
Lauren laughed. He was a good kid.
When he entered the room, he brought with him some sort of too-piney-too-sandalwoody whirlwind of scent, and she sneezed.
“Uh oh,” Dylan said.
“What is that? A new cologne?”
“Yeah.” His cheeks were red. “It’s called Rebel Max. It’s supposed to have women falling over themselves to get close to me.”
“Um…” She sneezed again.
“I guess I need to stay downwind of the ladies, or they’re going to be falling over themselves to get away.”
How to be diplomatic? “Um…maybe you should work over by the fume hood, so the smell gets sucked out by the ventilation system.”
Once they found a configuration where Dylan’s cologne didn’t send Lauren into anaphylactic shock, they got busy putting the lab to rights. Working for an hour or so, they chatted about television shows and YouTube videos. At about six-feet-two and about a hundred and sixty pounds, Dylan shocked Lauren when he told her he’d be playing rugby in the spring. Not only was the kid way too skinny for that kind of a contact sport, he seemed a little too—hip, or cool, or something—to go out for a gritty sport like rugby.
“Wow, that sounds…challenging,” she finally said.
“You’re too nice. My brother’s words were ‘bleeping stupid as bleep’.”
Lauren wanted to know about Mike’s relationship with Dylan—and Evan for that matter—but she didn’t know how to ask without sounding like she was fishing. Which she was. Which she shouldn’t be, because she had no business thinking about Mike Gibson under any circumstance.
Well, except that he’d hugged her last night. And sort of, maybe, almost kissed her the night before that, in front of the animal shelter. That moved their relationship to some sort of level above “just met,” she figured. Not that she should be figuring out anything to do with her and Mike.
What she needed to figure out was how the heck she was going to get her algae back.
While Dylan went to check on some items that he’d put in the autoclave, Lauren’s cell phone rang. She checked the caller ID, saw that it was from the animal rescue group, took the call, then spent the next ten minutes trying to pay attention as she was relayed the sad life story of a recently deceased race horse and the miniature pig that had been its companion. The pig was in mourning after the death of its horse friend and wasn’t getting along with the other pigs that it was being fostered with. She was needed to drive the pig to a new home in Ohio.
When Dylan walked back into the room, she was desperately trying to explain why she couldn’t drive a pig around various counties on a Saturday. She broke off when Dylan waved at her, trying to tell her something.
“I can do it,” Dylan told her. “If you don’t mind me driving your SUV.”
“Are you sure? It’s a good forty-five minutes each direction.”
“No prob. Just give me directions.” When she nodded, he took his phone from his pocket and started madly hitting buttons, then stepped into the hall.
Lauren got the details from Lee and followed Dylan out to give him the Post-it with information on it.
“Can’t you make up a story?” Dylan was saying, then suddenly, as if realizing he was no longer alone, added, “Okay, gotta go. See you in a few.”
“Everything okay?” Lauren asked, sneezing again when she got near him.
“Uh, yeah,” Dylan said. “It’s cool if my friend rides along with me, isn’t it?”
“Sure, as long as you remember to roll the windows down to air it out when you’re done. The pig smell probably won’t bother me as much as that cologne.”
Dylan left with Lauren’s keys, and she went back to sorting slides. Unfortunately, the work was boring enough that her mind wandered into dangerous territory, and she found herself thinking about Mike. Again.
About that hug last night. About how the hard planes of his chest had felt against her softer self. Biologically, she knew that the contrasts between men and women—the mass of male pectoral muscles and female breast tissue—had different evolutionary origins, but she had to wonder if maybe God had thrown some of that hard/soft, strong/gentle business in there as part of the magnetic force that drew opposites together. Argh. Again, with the magnets.
She wasn’t sure, mostly because she wasn’t good at this stuff or had a lot of empirical data with which to compare, but she kind of thought Mike felt the same pull she did. There wasn’t any room in her life for a relationship—part of it was that her career was too time-consuming right now, but it was more about the fact that he was a little too…too large and in charge, with the potential to suck the life out of her ambition. But boy, she was enjoying the heck out of imagining what it would be like to be with him, to ignore all the reasons she shouldn’t.
…
Mike clenched his fingers tightly around the steering wheel of his F-150 as he drove toward campus. He’d been on the computer at his house all morning, trying to Google “fake heroin,” “Dino Romain,” “Devil’s Dust,” and “Tucker University,” and had gotten nowhere. No connections were on the internet, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a connection. After slapping the laptop shut, he’d gone to wake up Dylan and get him to help give Possum her morning pill, only to realize the kid wasn’t there. Instead, on the floor in Dylan’s room was a note saying he’d gone off to work.
Yeah, right. On a Saturday. At least he’d already dosed the cat.
So Mike did what he did best—hit the streets on the hunt for information—and headed over to Tucker U. He wanted to find out what was happening in Lauren’s lab, and wanted to know what the hell his little brother was up to. He’d lain awake far too long the night before, trying to come up with a good reason for Dylan to have lied about being in the lab with Lauren the night before the destruction. And then he just thought about Lauren.
Damn.
Feeling her soft curves against his body yesterday, even though it was just a moment… No wonder he couldn’t sleep last night.
He parked, noticing Lauren’s SUV in the lot next to Dylan’s car. Was that good or bad that both of them were there? Seeing Lauren was a distraction…but she also might have information he could use, especially if Crawford was in communication with her. Mike couldn’t contact Crawford, but he could talk to Lauren. See what she’d been told by the local police. He stepped out of his truck into the late morning sunshine just in time to see Dylan drive out of the parking lot in Lauren’s SUV. What the—?
“Hey!” he called, but Dylan either couldn’t—or chose not to—hear him. He tried calling the kid’s cell phone, to ask where
the hell he thought he was going, but his call went straight to voicemail.
Dylan had no business driving her car. No business driving anyone’s car. The kid was on probation. Getting caught could send him back to jail.
Blood boiling, Mike stormed across the green to Lauren’s building, then had to scan his access card three times before the door opened. He strode down the hall, then swung open the door to Lauren’s lab.
Her head jerked up at the sound, and she nearly knocked whatever she was working on off of the counter. “What on earth is wrong?”
“What the fuck is Dylan doing in your vehicle?”
Lauren put the slide box down and stood, fisted her hands on her hips, and faced him. “Good morning, Mike. Nice to see you.” She turned her back to him and wrote something in a notebook.
He came into the lab, undeterred by her deliberate attempt to point out his rudeness. He strode to where she stood. “Where did Dylan go in your car?”
“Is there some emergency that prevents you from asking nicely?”
Okay. He was being an asshole. But he only backed up half a step. Just far enough to cross his arms so that he didn’t accidentally smack her in the head when he moved. The smell of her shampoo took some of the wind out of his spinnaker, although he still vibrated with tension. “Good morning, Dr. Kane. Might you be so kind as to tell me where my brother—who is on probation and only supposed to drive to work and school—is going in your vehicle?”
“What?” Her pen clattered onto the counter. “What’s he on probation for?” She pushed Mike away and walked halfway across the room before stopping. She looked through the window to the parking lot, as though someone out there would be holding a sign, explaining things to her.
“Didn’t you already know this?”
“No. Why should I?”
“Because he works for you.”
“He’s a student worker. He walked in here and asked for a job, and I told our business office to put him on my grant. We don’t run the kids’ fingerprints through IAFIS to clean algae tanks.”
“Does he have a key to your lab?”
Deadly Chemistry (Entangled Ignite) Page 7