His assurances soothe some of the incessant destructive thoughts rattling around in my head, and I relax in his embrace. “But…this isn’tnormal,is it? Feeling this much this fast?”
Nudging my chin up with the crook of his finger, he locks his gaze on mine. “When my parents adopted Dani,” he swallows hard, “and Gil, it was hard for them for a while. Dani in particular. She was this skinny kid, and they’d been in Texas for the first nine years of her life. Bounced around from foster home to foster home. Some of them…were truly horrible. But Dani? She was fierce as fuck.”
“I want to meet her.”
“You will, sweetheart. Soon.” We head for the couch, and once we’re sitting close enough our thighs touch, he rubs the back of his neck and shakes his head with a small smile. “One day, Dani came home mad as hell. She never cried. Just got mad and kicked a ball so hard, it broke a window.”
It’s a good thing I hadn’t taken a sip of coffee yet. Even so, I almost spill it all over myself. “Now Ireallywant to meet her.”
“She was so scared. Ran and hid behind the shed. But Mom always knew where she was. We all did, really. If she wasn’t behind the shed, she was at the summit of East Rock. After she and Trev started getting close, it wasalwaysthe summit of East Rock.” Austin chuckles again. “Those two were meant for one another from the start. Anyway, Mom found Dani, and I eavesdropped on them.”
“Austin!”
“I was fifteen. That’s all fifteen-year-old kids do. Break the rules.”
“Fair enough.”
“What Mom said to Dani that night stuck with me for…well, my whole life. Dani asked why she couldn’t be normal. Mom’s reply? ‘Normal is only a dryer setting. Well, fine. It’s also a city in Alabama. And Kentucky. A person can’tbenormal. Every single one of us is unique and special. Don’t let me hear you ever try to be normal. Be special.” He’s doing that thing again. Where he caresses my cheek and skims his fingers along the shell of my ear. It’s so intimate, so tender, that I’m left defenseless and utterly in love. “You’re special, Mik. What we have is special. Is it normal? No. But that doesn’t make it any less real.”
Draping my arms over his shoulders, I press my lips to his, and we fit together like we were always meant to be.
Maybe we were.
Austin
A little after two, Mik’s phone rings, startling both of us in the middle of a superhero movie with enough muscles on screen, I think I should be jealous. Except that Mik’s curled against me and from time to time, runs her hand over my abs or my thigh. We missed at least ten minutes of the beginning because she started kissing me and neither one of us wanted to stop long enough to find the remote.
“It’s my boss.” Her fingers only tremble for a second or two, but it’s enough. That and the expression on her face. “Howard? How are you?”
I lean close to her, and Mik rests her head on my shoulder with the phone between us.
“A little confused. A case of samples just showed up, but they’re not labeled like all of the other shipments. Your name’s on the manifest, along with the Department of Agriculture seal, but they’re not even in the standard packaging.” The man sounds exactly like his photo—the one I found on the Smithsonian’s website when Mik was upstairs. Older. Late sixties. A well-lined face, short white hair, decidedly on the thin side.
“How many cases have come in total?” Mik asks. “There should be…” Her eyelids flutter for a moment as she’s thinking, “seven.”
“There were. Today’s is number eight. Everything all right down there?”
Reaching for my hand, Mik links our fingers and holds on tight. “No. Not exactly. I’m…in Edgewater, Howard. And there’s a lot I need to tell you.”
“Dr. Salim, I think you’d better explain. Right away. And in person.”
“No,”I mouth. I don’t want her going anywhere near the lab until we hear from Wren.
“Let me put you on hold for a minute, okay? I’ll be right back,” Mik says, then mutes the call and turns to me. “This is my boss. He hired me. He went to bat for me with the board when they wanted to cut our funding. Right before we figured out how we could use the Blushing Note’s phytotoxin.”
“It’s still you out in the open.”
“The lab—really, the entire Smithsonian—it’s a fortress. So much research goes on there, it has to be. Keycard entry to the building, a ten-digit code to get into my lab, and we have a full security staff. You can come with me. Heck, Ronan too. I won’t be in danger there any more than I’m in danger here.”
“I don’t like it.” If anything happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself, and the urge to be an overprotective jerk again rears its head. If not for the look on her face. Mik’s every bit as headstrong as I am, and probably twice as smart. “But I suppose I can’t stop you.”
Her smile rights my world, and she says, “Nope,” before she unmutes the call. “Howard, it’ll take me an hour or so to get there. Do me a favor? Don’t tell anyone else I’m back, okay?”
“Mikayla, this had better be good. Otherwise, the World Horticultural Society and Johns Hopkins are going to demand we return money we’ve already spent. And your professional reputation? I don’t know that it’ll survive.”
“I understand,” Mik says quietly. “I’ll see you soon.”
Fuck. I thought all I had to worry about was her physical safety. But the way she talked about her research when we first met? So much of Mik, ofwhoshe is, comes from the kind of work she does. And while she’d survive losing it, the damage might be more than we could survive.
