“Fascinating.” He gave her a jaundiced look, and she said, “No, seriously. This is the kind of thing I find utterly interesting. You never know when I’ll learn something that will show up in a book— Hey.Wait.” A spike of excitement rushed through her. “Maybe you can help me!”
He muttered something that sounded like “Oh, brilliant,” but she wasn’t certain. Either way, Teddy didn’t care. If there was one thing she’d learned about being a writer, it was that ideas—and plot solutions—could come from anyone at any time. She just had to be open to them.
“So I have my character in a real fix. I need to have him—”
“Let me guess. Save the world.” Even though he was facing the other direction, smearing something on a glass slide, she swore he rolled his eyes.
“Hey. Itsells.”
“So does sex. Or so they say. Why doesn’t someone ever write a book about the worldnotgetting saved? Just to see what happens—you know, the aftermath and all? What would it be like fifty years after the earth was destroyed, you know? Say if California fell into the ocean, and half the Vegas Strip ended up under the Pacific?”
“Wow. You sure are an optimistic kind of guy.” Teddy edged closer. “Are you always like this?”
“My former fiancée is getting married in ten days. Sorry I’m not in a great mood.”
“Oh, wow. That’s a bummer. I’m really sorry. Is she getting married here in Wicks Hollow?”
“No. Hell no. Do you think I’d stick around if she were? I left Princeton yesterday morning—I teach there—and came directly here. It was alongdrive.”
Princeton, huh? She was more than mildly impressed. “So you came here, equipment and all, to test the water from a hot spring in Michigan?” He grunted an ambiguous reply, and she said, “So, can I help?”
“I thought you were supposed to be writing.” But he gestured to a box of latex gloves. “I suppose I could use an assistant. Just don’t touch anything with your bare skin, and don’t sneeze or cough or otherwise spread germs.”
“Got it,” Teddy said with enthusiasm, then realized she was still wearing her sleep clothes. She’d better change before the poor guy noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra and put the wrong chemical into the wrong tube and blew up the place.
* * *
Oscar didn’t really need an assistant, but it was obvious the writer wasn’t going to leave him alone. And at least her incessant questions and poking around kept him distracted from what was happening back in Princeton.
Whenever Teddy pressed him about why he was testing the hot-springs water (did he really think the bad E. coli lived there?), he launched into a long-winded explanation about major cations and anions, and how the turbidity could be problematic if it was too high, and whether the total iron level complied with the expected presence of tardigrades and phages in the body of water, among other things, until her eyes glazed over.
He figured inflicting boredom was one way to rid himself of a pest.
And thank goodness she’d excused herself for a minute and changed into something less…distracting. He was a scientist, of course, but he was also a man, and, well, she had a lot of curves. In all the right places.
“I get the impression you don’t read very many action-adventure novels,” she said, handing him a petri dish he’d requested. “Oh,there’san idea.” Her blue eyes suddenly went wide, sparkling with interest. “The villains could be growing some random bad stuff—”
“Random bad stuff?” He lifted a brow. She was entertaining, he had to give her that, with a conversation that bounced from topic to topic. He found himself admitting her presence was less intrusive than he’d expected—though not the least bit welcome. And she smelled good too—minty (she must have taken the opportunity to brush her teeth during her change of clothes) and also something soft and floral.
“Well, we’ll have to figure out what it exactlyis,” she said.
“We?”
“But it’s something bad…and the bad guys have been growing it in a slew of petri dishes. They’re going to release it into the New York City water system—no, wait, they’re going to put it in the water pitchers at the United Nations! You know how they always have water for all the attendees at a meeting like that—you see those pitchers at their seats?”
“Right. Someone’s going to grow some… What did you call it? Oh, right, ‘random bad stuff’ in a bunch of petri dishes…and poison the water at the United Nations…and why are they doing this, exactly?”
She drew in a long, deep breath, then expelled it forcefully. “I don’t know. I haven’t the foggiest idea. That’s why I’m stuck. I’ve got my hero in New York City, and he’s got to save a bunch of people—”
“Besides, I hate to tell you this—even if they grew a variety of specimens of the RBS—”
“RBS? Oh, I get it.” She grinned, and her eyes lit up again. But this time, her whole face changed as she gave a low, husky laugh—and right then she went from being irritatingly entertaining and mildly attractive to a woman who totally pushed his hormone buttons.Crap.
“RBS. Random bad stuff.” She was still chuckling.
He found his voice. “Right. So. Even if they were growing a variety of these specimens, first of all, there’s no way to transport them safely—”
“Sure there is. We’d figure it out.”
