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On his side, Gus had been amazing. To keep down the chatter among his fellow researchers, he had been the one who’d drawn her blood, taken her vitals, and run the tests. He had also asked her more questions than she could count about her medical history—and when she’d gotten cold and started to pull her jacket back on over her blood-draw sites and the electrodes he’d stuck all over her, he’d taken off the fleece he had on and draped it around her.
She hadn’t zipped it up. But like that made it any less intimate? At least she had kept her bra on the whole time.
C.P. checked the door. Still closed. No footsteps coming down the hall to it, either.
Tilting her head to the side, she brought up the fleece’s sleeve, closed her eyes, and drew in a deep breath.
What cologne did he use? It was incredible—
“Did I spill something?”
C.P. gasped and dropped her arm. “I’m sorry?”
“On the sleeve?”
She blinked at him stupidly and tried to translate the words he’d spoken—
“Ah, no.” She straightened her shoulders. “You didn’t.”
“I just washed it, actually.” He went over to the rolling chair and sat down. “Good thing I don’t like the cold, right? Otherwise, we would have had to wrap you up in layers of lab coats.”
“What kind of car do you drive?” she blurted as she sat down in the chair next to the desk.
Annnd where had that come from, she wondered.
Gus paused as he logged out of her sign-in and put in his own. “I—ah. I drive a Tesla?”
“Oh.”
He sat back. “Is that a problem?”
“Oh, no. It’s great.” She refolded his fleece over her torso, wrapping it all around herself. “Really.”
“Don’t tell me…”
As he refocused on the screen, she frowned. “What.”
His fingers hit the keys in a hard pattern. “You’re a car guy, aren’t you.”
“I’m a woman who likes cars, yes.”
“You’re a motor head, I mean. Who doesn’t approve of electric cars because you’re a dinosaur who refuses to give a shit about the environment.”
C.P. thinned her lips. “Guess you’ve got me dead to rights. Tell me, all that electricity you’re using, are you going to ignore the amount of fossil fuel that’s used to produce it?”
“You’re really playin’ like that. After gas-guzzlers have ruined the—”
“And anything that needs engine sounds piped through the speakers to—”
Both of them shut up at the same time. And she wasn’t sure who started laughing first. Maybe it was him, probably it was her, but either way, all of a sudden, she was wheezing and wiping her eyes while he was holding his belly, the release of tension like a sea change in her, in him.
When things had run their course and they were both sitting back in their seats and smiling, she was the one who refocused them.
“So,” she said on a sigh, “what do you think, Doc.”
Gus cleared his throat and brought up a couple of different reports, minimizing the windows so he could look at all of them at once. As his dark eyes went back and forth, it was like he was trying to read tea leaves in the numerical values in those columns, and though she was sure to know what some of the results meant, she wasn’t going to look.
Instead, she focused on his face, noting everything from the way his lashes curled up and his brows arched… to the cut of his jaw… and the curve of his lower lip. He’d had his ears pierced onboth sides, but he never wore earrings so the holes were just pinpricks that were slightly darker. And he had a chicken pox scar on his cheek.
