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Grace.
“Fucking hell,” he muttered and stalked over to the windows overlooking the cityscape. There had been no reason for his poor showing that afternoon…it’s not like it was the first time he’d been hung over when the circumstances needed him sober. He’d managed to do a lot more than managing to keep his shit together while doing a meet and greet. But even as pissed as he was at himself, there was a reason for it.
The drinking, the asshole attitude, all of it.
He’d been robbed blind.
The schematics of his life’s work, his most ambitious to date, had been stolen from right under him. It did a lot to a man’s spirit to have countless hours of his life vanish in the blink of an eye. He’d spent years working his way to completing RED, only to have it ripped from him a few hours after completion. He’d poured himself a stiff drink, called Grace to celebrate, and even asked her out.
He’d kept telling himself it wasn’t professional,or not yet.There was far too much work to be done to be distracted by a woman like Grace. If he did…if he let himself go along with the feelings that had taken root in him with Grace he wouldn’t have met a single deadline. He knew it. But with RED done there had been nothing else left to stop him from asking Grace out.
She’d said yes and that moment,that fucking split second of yes,had been his happiest. He didn’t know what that said about him or his life, but he didn’t care so long as it was Grace that was making him happy.
She was sensational.
Smart, funny, caring, tenacious and curious. None of it had a damn thing to do with how she looked. And he’d dropped their connection right on its head the second he had her in front of him.
He’d fallen for Grace before he’d ever seen her. There had only been that one grainy video call where he’d seen her hand or arm. He didn’t remember. It had to do with her shoving carbs in Lou’s face and that’s all he could really remember. He’d resisted the urge to search her name on the internet or to pitch a video call.
He’d known she would agree and that…well, that would have shoved his ass right into being obsessed with her. She could have looked like anything, he wouldn’t have wanted her any less. He knew himself well enough to know that once he saw her that all pretenses of him keeping his thoughts on work would be 100% derailed.
Now that he’d seen her he knew his instinct had been right. Grace was beautiful. Gorgeous even, and he was obsessed, with no way to talk to her. Not after he’d fucked up that morning.
It seemed the thief had stolen more from him than just RED’s schematics. He scowled and scrubbed a hand over his face.
RED.
His life’s work. Gone and stolen out from under him. The thing he’d been working towards since he’d made the decision to get clean and fly right. Step one of that had been getting into MIT. It’d been easy enough given that his problem had never been grades or being connected. It was his willingness to do the hard work, but there had come a point in all of Anton’s drinking and…whoring, he’d call it, since why not call a spade a spade?
When Anton landed at MIT he’d spent a good portion of his education focused on enhancing the ability of modern telescopes to examine the vastness of the cosmos. Time and space were mysteries that fascinated him. They always had, even when he’d been a kid. And he’d never lost his fascination. Even blitzed out of his mind he would find himself staring up at the sky and wondering…what if?
After his graduation he devoted himself and the resources of his sizable fortune to improving and testing the boundaries of what telescopes could do. If he was going to have the family name and trust fund to go with all of his trauma, then why not use it for something that mattered?
It was better than the stupid shit he’d spent his money and time on before. And yet…
And yet in all those wasted years he hadn’t felt as empty or lost as he had in the days and weeks that had followed losing RED. The stolen schematic had been the product of three years of labor, and the loss had sent Anton to a dark place, a place he hadn’t visited since enrolling in MIT, not since his more colorful days. The infrared spectrograph he had affectionately dubbed RED should have allowed his company—KovT, or Kovalev Technologies—to examine thousands of galaxies...and not just that, but theearliestgalaxies.
RED was the key to looking at the beginning of everything.
Goddamned groundbreaking until it had been stolen, and after a panicked twenty-four hours it had reappeared as BLUE and in the hands of Orion Star, Anton’s greatest nemesis—you know, if astrophysics had that sort of thing.
Turned out Anton did.
His lips pressed into a thin line and his hands balled into fists. Those twenty-four hours had been some of the longest in his life. RED meant everything, not to just KovT, but to him. HewasRED. The time sunk, blood, sweat and tears that had gone into it…Was it messed up that he was just relieved to know where RED was? Even if it was in the hands of his arch nemesis?
It had been an absolute field day when the press had scrambled from the loss of Anton’s tech to the curious announcement of similar tech. There was talk of a mole, of a sticky-fingered bandit, that made Anton grit his teeth in press conferences. It wasn’t just talk. It was true. He knew it was, with the timing of RED’s disappearance being so neat. He’d barely had the completed project in his hands for more than a few hours before it was gone.
One of the questions had proved just too much for Anton to grin and bear in silence.
“Are you dating any new supermodels?”
“Excuse me?” Anton’s jaw had clenched so tight it would be a wonder if he had even a single tooth left that hadn’t been reduced to something resembling protein powder.
The reporter who had asked the question wavered under his intense stare but forged ahead with impressive confidence. “Are you dating any new supermodels?” they repeated.
“How does that have anything to do with RED?”
Anton had leaned back in his chair. He could feel his blood pressure skyrocketing, and he forced his body to adopt an apathetic pose. He deserved an Oscar for not throttling the reporter.
