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I lean against the doorframe and clear my throat softly.
Finn’s head lifts. The second his eyes land on me, his whole face lights up in that shy, genuine way that always makes my stomach flutter.
“Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” I step inside, closing the door behind me with a quiet click. “Got room for one more in here?”
I walk over and sit on the edge of his desk, angling my body so we can both look out at the beautiful garden beyond the windows.
“It’s pretty out there,” I murmur. “I need to go explore it soon.”
“We could go now,” Finn offers, already starting to stand. “I was thinking it would be nice to have a picnic date with you.”
“No,” I say, reaching out to stop him with a gentle hand on his arm. “I think I’d rather sit here with you for a while and talk.”
He looks up at me, soft blue eyes curious. “About what?”
I tilt my head. “Tell me about your research. How’s it going?”
Finn leans back in his chair, relaxing a little as he explains. “We’re in the middle of the legal negotiations for the business Graham and I started. Paperwork, mostly. Figuring out who owns what, how the patents will be structured, that kind of thing.”
I raise an eyebrow. “What do you mean? You get half. Graham gets half.”
He laughs softly. “It’s not quite that simple. The university will get its cut. There are investors. Licensing agreements. It’s… complicated.”
I nod, feeling a little dumb. “Yeah. I should have thought. It’s not like I don’t know business. I just—” I shrug, suddenly a little embarrassed. “I want you to get yours, you know?”
Finn’s expression softens. He reaches out and gently squeezes my knee, thumb stroking over the bare skin. “I feel like I already have.”
His quiet honesty makes my heart beat faster. “Me too,” I whisper, smiling.
The words feel big, but they’re true. I look at him for a long moment, then say softly, “Tell me about yourself. I feel like we’ve gone about this backwards. I want to know everything.”
Finn looks embarrassed but he doesn’t pull away. He rubs the back of his neck and starts talking. “I hate crowds,” he says. “And public speaking. Genuinely abhor it.”
I laugh. “I figured that out on my own.”
He chuckles, the sound warm and shy. “There was this one time,” he continues, “at an important fundraiser for the university. Graham was supposed to speak to the crowd. He’s excellent at that kind of thing. But then Lark’s heat hit suddenly, right in the middle of everything. Graham shoved the microphone into my hands and basically ran offstage to get to her.”
Finn shakes his head. “I stood there. Frozen. Staring at hundreds of people waiting for me to say something. I couldn’t even get a word out. Finally, the university president came up, started applauding like I’d said something brilliant, and everyone else followed. I got off that stage as fast as humanly possible.”
I laugh, leaning into him. “I would have paid good money to see that.”
He grins, looking relaxed. I rest my chin on my hand, studying him. “How did the pack form?”
Finn’s expression turns thoughtful. He keeps playing with my fingers as he talks, like touching me helps him open up.
“Piers and Beck met first, back in college at Duke,” he says. “Beck was there on scholarship. Piers had family money. They were frat brothers. Beck was basically brought in to keep the frat’s average GPA from tanking.” He smiles faintly. “Piers was the spoiled rich kid. Somehow they… clicked. In that way that happens with packmates, I guess.” He pauses, thumb stroking over my knuckles.
"They recruited him for his grades?" I grin, delighted. It's so obvious once he says it. Beck plays the cocky, backwards-ball-cap surgeon so well that people forget the surgeon part is the hard one. But I've watched him call a diagnosis off a medical drama before the actors even got their lines out, then explain everything the writers got wrong, all while eating dry cereal straight from the box. My cowboy is scary smart, and he'd rather you not notice until it's too late.
Finn nods, all sincerity. “Oh yeah. He’s got a genius-level IQ. Piers said he could party harder than anyone and then ace his test the next morning.”
"Sounds about right," I say. That's the whole trick of Beck, the machismo and the boyish charm sitting right on top of a genius-level brain, and half the fun is watching people underestimate him.
“Beck and I met later, at Northwestern in Chicago. He was finishing up his surgical residency. I was a post-doc. We hit it off right away. He introduced me to Piers not long after.”
“And Leith?” I ask.
