AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Grace’s lips parted against the brush of his thumb. How had her life gotten to this place? “Y-yes,” she stammered out, head swimming from his proximity. She was still floored by the fact that he had labored into the night to clean up Lou’s science madness, and all for her. “You’re a top-notch boyfriend, Kovalev.”
“I know.” He gave her a smile as he raised his other hand up to cup her face, and Grace forgot how to breathe. When he tilted her head back, fingers gentle but firm, she straight-up forgot how to think. Blessedly, she didn’t need her brain for what came next.
Her eyes drifted closed and Anton leaned into her, his lips claiming hers in a long overdue kiss.
She snaked her arms around his neck when she felt the brush of his tongue against her bottom lip. Her lips parted, and one of Anton’s hands moved to her hip, pulling her flush against him as he backed her into the table behind her, prompting a moan that most definitely told everyone within earshot that she was the type of woman to not only entertain lewd thoughts in public, but had the fortitude to act upon said thoughts.
Public. Oh, right.
Grace forced herself to stop, and though she hated every second of it, she untangled herself from Anton with a shaky breath. When they stood a safe distance from one another, she gave him an accusing look.
“I thought you weren’t good at this relationship stuff,” she whisper-screamed at him. “You bamboozled me.”
Anton shook his head and held out his hands. “I didn’t know. Besides, it’s not as hard as I thought it wou-”
“They stole it,” Elisha’s voice rang through the labs, causing Grace and Anton to spring back from one another in surprise. Lou paused in the act of double-fisting her coffee and looking over that morning’s reports.
“What do you mean?” Grace breathed, though she had a sinking feeling she knew exactly what Elisha would say.
“I mean that our latest data is gone. Every last byte of it has been wiped from the servers. We’ve been robbed.”
* * *
There was nothing quite like the feeling of someone coming into your home and taking your nearest and dearest possessions to put a damper on a lady boner.
Grace frowned at the computer screen in front of her. She had been staring at it with unseeing eyes for the past fifteen minutes under the guise of helping fix the mess they were in, except that she didn’t have the slightest ghost of a baby angel’s prayer of knowing where to begin in trying to “fix” anything.
She glanced up over her computer monitor to see Lou pacing and staring at the floor as she muttered to herself. Understandably, the scientist was in shock.
Elisha had been correct in her assessment that they had been robbed. At precisely 4:06 that morning, someone had swiped into the area that all of their unanalyzed data lived in. It was a room that required a high security clearance card, of which there were only four.
And of those four, one of them was in Grace’s possession.
She reached into her jacket pocket and fingered the slim plastic keycard to reassure herself that she hadn’t dropped it somewhere in the hallways of CERN for some thieving vagabond to swipe and use to wreak absolute havoc on her life. She pursed her lips in thought. Though she was certain the building had never even seen the shadow of a vagabond, it didn’t stop her from being sure only someone outside of their team could have been responsible for such a gutting loss.
The research that had been stolen had taken the better part of nine months to complete. They had been collecting it since they had set up in the labs. Lou was destroyed over the loss, not so much because of the data but because of the time spent.
Time was the irreplaceable resource that Lou swore she was in a losing battle with. It took no less than three weeks to observe a pulsar wave—or, rather, the pulsar timing array that clued them into the neutron star’s behavior. Some pulsar timing arrays had been in observation for decades and had proved more or less predictable. The ones Lou had her research sights set on were newly discovered, very young pulsars acting out of character for newly formed neutron stars. Their paths to either black holes or supernovae were still to be determined. Yet the energy outputs made no sense.
Every scientist on Lou’s team knew just how much the data sets they had spent weeks collecting meant to their end goal.
With every unpredictable behavior from pulsar waves and the uncertainty of observing the same exact output from the neutron stars more than once, the data was priceless.
And now it was gone.
A sniffle from Lou’s direction made Grace’s hands curl into fists.
“What’s with the look on your face?” Anton nodded at her and set a cup of coffee in front of her.
“Oh, this?” Grace indicated her face with a finger. “This is just my ‘getting ready to murder thieves’ face.”
“Murder?”
Grace punched a fist into her palm and narrowed her eyes. “They made my best friend cry. They’re lucky murder is all I’m going to do when I get my hands on them.”
Anton opened his mouth to speak, but paused and tilted his head to the side as he considered her threat.
“But isn’t murder the extreme of things you could do?”
