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“No. I told everyone not to come in today. We have the place to ourselves.”
I’m dumbstruck. “Colin, isn’t that, like, millions of dollars in lost productivity?”
He shrugs, and I know he’s chilled the fuck out because he actually doesn’t seem that concerned. “I’ll make it up.”
We turn down another hallway that looks a lot like the first one. He pulls open a door and stands back so I can walk inside. “Welcome to my office.”
He smiles like a kid staring at every snow cone flavor in the world.
I guess I was expecting—I don’t know—four walls, a computer, and a desk? His “office” is a lab containing several enormous telescopes, row upon row of tables with microscopes, computer screens lining the walls, and a glass-walled area that looks like a shower stall.
“What happens in there?” I point at the stall, which is lit by yellow bulbs.
“Clean room conditions in the next room.” Colin points at a set of windows separating this lab from another one. “To go in there, you need to gown up. We’ll save that for another day.”
All I can think is that I want to have sex in the clean room, and I wonder if that makes me a terrible person. It would probably ruin hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment, tosay nothing of the research, but my mind goes where it goes. And right now, it’s thinking that if Colin blew my mind in the helicopter, there’s no telling what he could do in a clean room.
As if he can read my dirty little mind, Colin shakes his head. “Not in there.” His eyebrows bounce as he glances around the lab. “But if one of these lab tables suits you, I’m in.”
He leans against a clean white lab table and crosses his arms. It’s impossible that a man could look this hot standing in a science lab, right?I rein in my horny desires and turn to face him. “Later. Turn me on with some science facts, baby.”
He laughs and pulls me in for a kiss.
“You are extremely beautiful. That’s a fact.”
“Sounds like an opinion.”
“Nope. Fact. Because facts exist on their own without needing to be proven.”
For the next hour, he tours me around the lab, explaining how everything works. “The telescopes show us where we’re headed, but we can simulate the conditions here and see how matter behaves.”
“Give me an example.”
“The environment on Mars is radically different from what we experience on Earth, but we can recreate the conditions here in the lab and see how atoms, molecules—even plant life—behaves under those conditions.”
“So you’re basically building a mini-Mars here.”
“Basically…” He tilts his head from side to side, considering the veracity. He swallows. “I guess, yeah.” His hesitation tells me I’ve vastly oversimplified his life’s work, but the smile lines around his eyes and his boyish grin prove he’s okay with that.
“I know I just dumbed it down.”
“Not really.” He takes my hand and leads me toward a different door from the one where we entered. This time, we’re in another hallway, but it’s shorter and leads to a set of doors,which Colin opens using his phone. “Come. We’ll head back here at night and look through the telescopes, but I need to feed you.”
The doors open to an empty indoor parking lot, save for one shiny black Porsche sitting in a prime spot. It beeps when Colin unlocks it and guides me to the passenger side. Opening the door, he plants a kiss on my lips, which turns into a longer, deeper kiss. I debate telling him we should skip lunch because this kiss is all the sustenance I need.
He pulls me closer, trapping our clasped hands between us and slipping his other hand along my cheek and into my hair. Angling my mouth against his, he delves deeper, winding his tongue around mine and sucking my bottom lip until my body trembles.
Kissing a trail across my cheek, he elicits another sigh from me.
“Junebug…” he rasps against my ear. I nod against his lips. I feel everything he’s feeling. It’s so good that I want to tell him we can do this forever.
But I don’t say anything like that.
The feeling has no place in our time together. There will be no forever for us, and we both know it. He’s taking a break from his life, and soon, he’ll go back to it.
Instead, I turn my face to kiss him once more. Lightly, sweetly. The kind of casual kiss you do right before you hop into the passenger seat of a Porsche and race out of the garage to head to lunch.
“I thought we were getting a burger or something.” I stare at the tiny seashells dabbed with horseradish cream, stone crab,and slivered almonds sitting on a bed of brined lemon slices and caviar.
