My body instantly rejects this—the last thing I want is to have to socialize with this stranger. A stranger who, no doubt, won’t last more than a few months in this position. Dane has been trying for nearly a decade now to find us an assistant who can manage three executives at a time, and who lives up to his impossible Rourke standards.
His hires have included Stanford graduates, eager young entrepreneurs, all looking like carbon copies of Dane, just twenty years younger.
None of them have been…this.
As we ride the elevator together, then exit and start walking toward the coffee machine, I wait for her to ask me how I like the weather, how my night is, or if I enjoyed my travel to Brazil. Any number of the small, irrelevant questions that normally trip me up. What is there to like or not like about the weather? It just is.
Yet again, she surprises me when she turns and asks, in a bright, curious tone, “What are you working on?”
I turn to look at her, and the action tugs me away from the project once more. I’m finding it hard to ignore her, to stay in my own head like I normally would around another person. Around anyone except Nico and Dane, that is, and even sometimes with them.
“…I’m working on the stabilization of the chemical properties of our coating materials, enough to suffuse them—or in-lay them, I suppose—with enough copper to boost the anti-bacterial properties.”
“Oh, like, to make it self-cleaning? Like, antibacterial?”
I squint over at her, adjusting my expectations. Maybe it’s sexist to assume she wouldn’t have any idea what I was talkingabout. Or, maybe not—I assume most people don’t have any idea what I’m talking about most of the time.
“That’s right,” I say as we push through a set of double doors together. “The problem lies mostly in the copper’s interference with the nano-bots within the toys. Particularly in the line that emulates oral stimulation, as it requires a much more precise algorithm than the others—the tongue is one of the most complex muscles in the human body. Not to mention the control of heat and pressure. In the oral line, the nano-bots number in the thousands, and even a slight deviation in their calibration from the interference could result in an interruption in pleasure. Our customers invest a lot of money in our products; they expect them to deliver the perfect release, every time.”
The more I talk, the faster my words come out. When I try to talk to Nico about my work, he pretends to fall asleep. Talking to Dane is slightly better, but he often finds himself frustrated too easily when he can’t find an answer right away.
Telling Lucy, however, feels different.
Especially when I turn to look at her, awaiting her response, only to see that her cheeks have darkened, red and patchy now. Her throat bobs, and she delicately bites her lip before releasing it.
Oh—she’s turned on.
I’ve studied enough human behavior around arousal to recognize its signs.
And the sight ofthiswoman, clearly experiencing something from me talking about my work?
It arousesme.
We fetch our coffees, Lucy fills her water, and we head back to the elevator. I’ve never been particularly gifted at reading the room, but even I sense the strange weight between us, that moment like it created matter from nothing.
Which is, of course, impossible.
Lucy surprises me once more when she pauses in blowing on her coffee, turning to me as we wait for the elevator up. “What if you didn’t use copper?”
My brow wrinkles instantly, “What do you mean?”
“If the goal is to make the product self-cleaning,” she muses, tipping her head to the side, “but the copper is going to interfere with the robots, then why not look for a different way? Like, maybe each toy could come with a case—sleek and pretty, like everything else. And it could use—oh, I don’t know—like UV light or something? To clean it? I’m not like a chemist or anything, but I had a friend who had a self-cleaning water bottle do that. It was really cool.”
When I say nothing, Lucy Sullivan turns to look at me, and I can’t stop myself from staring openly at her.
“What?” she laughs, shrugging and blowing at her coffee again. “Was that totally stupid? Sorry.”
“No,” I manage, mind already turning the thought of a cleaning case over and over. “Not stupid at all.”
Chapter 16
Lucy
Just like with Nico, Cole Davenport is completely different in person than he appears to be in the media.
He smells fresh, like laundry detergent, and his chocolate brown curls are long to the point of almost being shaggy. His appearance and the way he moves give the impression that his mind is on something else.
Cole is quiet and direct, focused. When he first found me in the office, I thought he was going tofightme. Then, he just turned and walked back into his office, like my heart wasn’t absolutely thundering in my chest at that point.
