Finder's Keeper (27 page)

“Dr. C?”

Stephanie stood in the doorway, the all-too-careful expression on her face screaming that she’d been trying to get Mia’s attention for more than a few seconds.

“Yes, Stephanie?”

“Did you, um, did you get that email with the scans Nasrin and I did? Cuz usually you reply right away with confirmation, but we’ve sent them a few times and you didn’t…”

Mia flushed, embarrassed to find herself distracted from her work. She hurriedly pulled up her mail program and saw the emails waiting for her, in triplicate. “There they are now,” she said hurriedly. “Must be a glitch in the server.”

Stephanie smiled, obviously relieved by the excuse and the reassurance that Mia wasn’t dead—which would previously have been the only reason she wouldn’t have given her utmost attention to her work.

“Do you want me to call IT and file an error report?”

“No, no. I’ll take care of it. Why don’t you and Nasrin, uh…” Crap. What could she have them do? She never felt so inept at running her team. What was it Chase had said about sex interfering with her results? This obviously wasn’t what he’d meant. “Carry on with your…work.”

Stephanie nodded, hesitating in the doorway. “Is Chase coming for lunch again today?”

Mia frowned. “No.”

“Oh.” Stephanie still didn’t budge from the doorway.

“Was there something else, Stephanie?”

Stephanie beamed, clearly taking that as an invitation to step back into the room. “Nasrin and I were just thinking…well, that is, we just wanted to say that we really like Chase. He seems like a good guy and he takes care of you and we just wanted you to know that we like him. And he’s superhot, which Nasrin says shouldn’t matter but we both know totally does. So good for you, Dr. C.”

“Is this you giving us your blessing?”

“Well, yeah. Sort of. How many times are you gonna find a guy who will rig a bet with you so that
you
win and get what you want? Men can be selfish pricks, but—”

“Wait. What do you mean? The Science versus Magic challenge? He rigged it?”

“Sort of, I mean, he threw it. We, um, we kind of cheated and told him where to find it, but he let you win anyway. Not that science wouldn’t have won anyway,” Stephanie went on hurriedly, “just that, you know, we had stacked the deck and he threw it just to see you smile. How sweet is that?”

“That’s…something.” She just had no idea what. Why had he done it? What had he hoped to gain? A smile? Seriously? She’d gotten to experiment on him…and that had eventually led to sex in her overnight room, but he couldn’t have known in advance that he would get laid from it. Could he?

Mia was barely aware of Stephanie bouncing out of her office and back to her own cubicle. The scans in front of her might as well have been invisible for all she saw of them. She couldn’t stop wondering what the hell Chase could possibly have meant by throwing the challenge.

What kind of person cheated so he would be sure to lose? It wasn’t logical. People did not act outside of their own perceived self-interest, so what was his angle? Though wasn’t that what she was studying? The defiance of obvious self-interest in the pursuit of emotional satisfaction of love? But Chase didn’t love her. He couldn’t. It was too soon, wasn’t it?

But was there a time limit? How did love even form? What changed in a person between lust and that something more?

When did attraction become a warm kernel of happiness deep in your soul, wrapped around the mere thought of one person, the idea of him? When had Chase started meaning so much to her? Was it Occam? The support he gave her with her family? The need he had shown for her in dealing with the memory of his own? When had chemistry become…

Mia went still, every molecule in her body holding as if waiting for a conductor to wave his baton and send them into a symphony.

She was in love with Chase.

Cymbals crashed, violins swelled, trumpets sounded—a silent explosion of realization. The scans on her screen suddenly snapped into focus. Scans of people in love.

“Stephanie! Nasrin!”

Her chair crashed back, smacking into the wall and nearly taking her down with the rebound as she staggered hurriedly around the desk and burst out of her office. She loved him.

Occam yipped and danced around her feet, nearly tripping her. Her research assistants’ heads popped into the corridor and Mia ran toward them.

“Scan my brain!”

This was it. The moment of realization. When love hit. The actual instant when brain chemistry was altered by emotion. She had to capture it.

“Dr. C?”

“Hurry! Scan me now! I love him!” She flung herself into the exam room and the chair Chase himself had occupied only days earlier. Frantically scrabbling with the sensors, she struggled to focus on the way she felt about Chase, rather than on the adrenaline rush of a potential scientific breakthrough. She had before pictures of her brain—having scanned herself as a baseline more than once. Now she would have after pictures. After love.

She couldn’t think about the sex. She couldn’t think excitement or lust or infatuation. Instead, she tried to center her mind on the warm, tingly feeling wrapped around her chest, combined with something deeper, something that lent a weight of permanence to the sensation. Comfort merged with giddy delight, all of it twined around him. This was it. What the poets wrote about. What songs were written about. It was Chase.

Mia slapped on the last of the sensors and hit the button to start the scan, sitting very still and thinking very hard. About the man she loved.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The Moment of Truth

“There’s an offer on the house.”

Chase’s stomach plummeted without warning. “Already?”

“It’s a lowball offer,” Brody clarified, and Chase was instantly comforted by the thought of rejecting it. “But the agent says there’s definite room to deal.”

Brody began rattling off numbers and terms and Chase zoned out, tilting the cell away from his ears so the words became indistinguishable, blending with the sound of the ocean.

The waves were good today, the sun shining. He hadn’t checked in with Karma. He hadn’t called Mia. He hadn’t wanted to do anything but ride the waves. So he had. Until his skin was soft from absorbing water, his eyes teared from the constant glare of the sun and his scalp itched from the salt. He’d ignored all those minor discomforts and paddled out again and again, each ride to shore somehow failing to match his standards for the perfect cut, the perfect curl, leaving him unsatisfied and dragging his arms through the heavy water as he hauled his body and his board out for just one more.

Eventually hunger had gnawed a hole in his gut and he’d come ashore to grab his wallet from his glove compartment so he could buy a burrito from the taco truck down the street, only to see his cell flashing with a voicemail. For a moment he’d hoped it would be Mia, not even sure what he expected her to say, or Karma ragging on his ass, but it had been Brody, proving today had fallen right back into last month’s routine.

Now, as he listened to Brody ramble about closing costs, replacement furnaces and inspection guarantees, he almost wished he hadn’t returned the call. He wouldn’t have to be making this decision if he’d just ignored his hunger and kept surfing. The break looked fucking perfect, curling and holding that sweet curve as it rushed toward the shore.

“Chase?” Brody’s voice interrupted his contemplation of the surf. “What should I tell her?”

Tell her I’m not ready for this.
It was too much, too fast. Mia, the house. Sure, he’d been the one punching the accelerator, but last night it was like he’d suddenly realized his brakes were out and he was racing out of control. He couldn’t do this.

“Tell her no.”

Brody didn’t miss a beat. “How do you want to counter?”

“No counter. Just no.”

“Chase. Man. You can’t—”

“It’s my house. I can do whatever the hell I want with it. Later, Brody.” He flipped the phone shut before he had to listen to more of his friend’s bitching and pitched it through the open door onto the passenger seat. Chase absently brushed the sand off the elbow of his wetsuit, watching the surf, jealous of everyone carving the waves. He slammed the door and grabbed his board, heading back for the break, needing the water more than he needed a burrito. Life could wait.

When the scan completed and Mia expanded her focus from her myopic concentration on the love sensation sending happy hormones through her bloodstream, she found Stephanie and Nasrin wedged in the doorway—Stephanie beaming like she’d just given birth to a unicorn and Nasrin gaping at her like she’d grown a second head.

“Chase?” Nasrin asked.

Feeling suddenly awkward and defensive, Mia shrugged with studied nonchalance as she began plucking off the sensors. “I love him.” The words sounded strange this time. Uncomfortable. She had no idea how he felt.
It’s all fun and games until someone is vulnerable to having her heart ripped open.

Stephanie was oblivious to her misgivings, squealing and bouncing in the doorway, her ponytail bobbing wildly.

Mia flinched at the shrill sound and kept plucking off sensors. “I guess the watch works. Even when it’s stolen.”

Stephanie’s shrieks cut off abruptly, her mouth snapping shut with an audible click.

Nasrin’s eyes flicked sideways and up to her cohort. “Stolen?” There was a strange note to her voice and Mia belatedly remembered how fascinated her assistants had been by the supposed magic of the watch when she’d first taken custody of it almost a year ago.

Just a few days shy of a year ago. Maybe her family would forgive her for losing the watch if she had Chase. It might soften the blow to know that it had worked. And if not, at least she wouldn’t be alone when she told them.

Provided he felt the same way she did. But he had to, didn’t he? He’d been the one flirting and seducing from the start. She certainly hadn’t encouraged him. He had to want her if he’d gone to so much effort to attract her.

“You mean your family’s watch?” Nasrin asked, bringing Mia back to her surroundings. “The magic one?”

She nodded absently, spotting Occam in the corner twisting his neck to try to get a better angle to chew on a low cupboard door. “It was stolen out of my house safe. That’s how I met Chase. I hired him to track it down. So even though I resisted the magic, the watch still managed to do the one thing determined to get me with the man I needed—by vanishing on me.”

Her research assistants were suspiciously silent as she climbed out of the chair and bent over the computer, checking the data had been recorded from her first love scan. She was engrossed in the data within seconds and was surprised when she looked up—what must have been almost fifteen minutes later—to find Nasrin and Stephanie still huddled in the doorway, whispering furiously to one another.

“You have to tell her,” Nasrin hissed.

“I never meant for it to go on this long,” Stephanie whined quietly in reply.

Mia frowned—more annoyed by the fact that they were blocking her path to her office than actually curious about their discussion. “Is this about Chase rigging the bet? Because Stephanie told me already.”

“It isn’t that,” Nasrin said instantly, shooting Stephanie a meaningful look. “Tell her.”

“I…” Stephanie twisted her hands and avoided meeting Mia’s gaze until Nasrin elbowed her hard enough to send her ricocheting into the doorframe. “I borrowed your watch,” she blurted.

“You?”

Stephanie paled and the rest of the story poured out, the words running together in a jumbled rush. “I never meant to keep it or anything. I just wanted to take it to this guy who said he could make a duplicate of it if he saw the original. Who doesn’t want a magic love-finding watch, right?”

Mia
hadn’t wanted it, and from the guilty glance Stephanie shot her, her assistants had known that, but Steph kept hurrying through the story, her pale complexion looking almost gray with her distress.

“It was last May, remember? When the computers went all wonky and we lost all those files on the server? You sent me to your house to get the back-up drive from your safe and there it was. The magic watch. You’d been talking all about how you weren’t going to ever wear it and I swear I never even considered keeping it for a fraction of a second, but it was right there and I thought I’d just return it to the safe the next time you sent me to grab something and you’d never even miss it. But then you never sent me to get anything else and I couldn’t figure out how else to give it back to you without telling you that I’d borrowed it without asking and I didn’t know what to do so I told Nasrin—”

“Only after you’d kept it for three months!” Nasrin protested, clinging to any pretense of innocence.

“But she didn’t have any ideas and short of breaking into your house…” Stephanie’s frantic voice trailed off. “I’m sorry. It was stupid.”

Her assistant looked like she was waiting to be fired, but Mia barely heard her confession. Her heart was thudding too hard at the prospect that she hadn’t irrevocably lost the watch. “Where is it?”

Stephanie waved down the hall. “In my desk. I’m so sorry, Dr. C. I swear we didn’t know you were looking for it or we never would have tried to keep it a secret—”

“Go get it.” Blood rushed in her ears. Hope was trying to rise up, but it was weighed down by the ballast of her fear that somehow it wouldn’t still be in Stephanie’s desk. That somehow the damn thing would have slipped away from her again.

Stephanie nodded stiffly and rushed down the hall. In her absence, Nasrin took a half-step forward. “Dr. C, we never intended to lie to you. I cannot express how profoundly sorry I am for my part in the deception.”

“Did Stephanie get her duplicate?” Mia asked, her mind circling, spiraling, and landing on random tidbits of the story, fitting the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. She’d forgotten sending Stephanie to get the back-up drive, but she remembered it now as sharply as if it had happened this morning. It made sense. And her assistants were among the few people she’d complained to about the mumbo-jumbo watch, the few people who could have suspected its unique value.