Romance: In Love With A Beast (Paranormal BBW Panther Shifter Romance) (Shapeshifter Mystery Alpha Werebear Romance Short Stories) (64 page)

"It's serious," Bruce had told her. He had actually--
actually
described his relationship with Elena as "serious." He had actually used the word for his relationship with this other woman that had applied to his relationship with Olivia, or so Olivia had assumed. Olivia felt utterly betrayed, and rightly so. The angry words that she shouted at him could have carried across three thousand miles without benefit of a wireless hookup. It was the greatest, most painful outpouring of emotion that she had ever allowed herself to vent in her life, and the memory of it still stung her even through a computer screen from a continent away. With a mighty effort, Olivia thought of her work, which was all there had been in her life since then, and the fact that Clive's company still held the purse strings to it, and summoned all of her civility and cordiality to speak to him.

"How's it going, Olivia?" asked Clive from his plush office in a Manhattan skyscraper.

Oh,
Olivia thought,
I'm still single and surrounded by hot young boys who if I paid them the wrong kind of attention would get me fired for morals and harassment, how about you?
But she said, "Things are going fine. I've got the samples that the
Phaethon
space probe brought back from Comet Roth-Kulkins in the isolation room and I'm ready to start examining them."

"That's good," Clive said. "I'm anxious to know what you find out, especially about that one sample you were mentioning."

"I'll be putting that one in the MRI first," Olivia said, in her most strictly businesslike tone. "There's another paper in this one at least."

"Probably a series of papers. And this will get you bigger grants, I know."

"Probably will," she agreed, reflecting back on what had been the most basic difference between them all along. To Clive everything had a dollar value. To Olivia, the value of her work was that of pure discovery, the value of a richness of thought and knowledge that made life more worth living. Their relationship had always been one of pair bonding, but not peer bonding. It never seemed to matter as much then as it did now. She felt more than just a continent between her and Clive now.

"I know how excited you've been about this project, Olivia. And I know it's going to bring you something good. That's what I really want for you." Clive sounded sincere, and Olivia knew he meant what he was saying, but it sounded hollow to her.

"Thank you, Clive," she said, simply. And she thought,
Well, it's not like I have anything else important going on in my life right now. Or anyone that's as important to me as work.

"I really mean it," he went on. "You know I've always been your biggest supporter with the Crescent Grant Endowment advisory board, with everything. I'll always support anything you want to do. You know that, right?"

"I know, Clive," she replied, flatly, drained of any feeling.
Yes, aren't you just my biggest fan?
She could feel the complete absence of any smile on her face or any warmth in her voice. She felt as cold as space. Her voice was every bit as flat and chilled as she felt inside as she asked, "How is everything over there...with you?”

Clive gulped, seeing her utter lack of expression and recognizing it as the coldness left in the wake of her explosion at their long-distance breakup. They had talked together so easily, so effortlessly--before he broke her heart. "Everything's good. You know it'll be...next month."

"Then we both have something to look forward to," said Olivia. "I should be getting to the lab now. I'll E-mail you my report."

"Of course," said Clive. "It'll be brilliant--like everything you do."

Right,
she thought,
like my choice of men. I really know how to pick 'em, don't I?
"Thank you again, Clive," she replied. "And...," she trailed off, any personal words failing her. What was she to say to him?
Have a good life? Have a great wedding? Enjoy your honeymoon--with Elana?
She'd be damned if she'd make herself say any of that. She simply, civilly told him, "Goodbye," and exited the chat.

With Clive vanished from her computer screen--the perfect metaphor for his place in her life now--it was all that Olivia could do to sit still at her desk and wish she could cry. She felt empty, even of tears. Her heart felt like the space between the stars, which not an hour ago she had told her students was "rippling with life". She could only wish that she felt as full of life as cold, airless space.

Chapter 4

Olivia's laboratory was on the opposite side of the ground floor of the Science Department from her office. It was a bit of a walk, which gave her the chance to clear her thoughts to whatever extent she could. By the time she was inside the lab, which had the look of a recording studio, and had slipped on her white coat, she had put Clive on his assigned shelf in her mind and was ready for the thing that made her feel the best in her life. She sat down at the desk looking out into the isolation chamber, turned on the computer and the iPad, and set herself to work. Behind the large, thick glass panel in the wall lay treasures that to Olivia were more precious than diamonds and rubies. On the table where they had been laid, they appeared as nothing more than a lot of common stones. But from an earthly perspective there was nothing common about them. They had come from billions of miles, possibly even light years away. They were treasures of the universe.

Arrayed about the table with the samples of rock and dust that the
Phaethon
probe had collected from its landing on the comet were trays of test tubes and petri dishes, measuring devices, and beakers of chemicals and distilled water. The center of Olivia's attention was the largest sample on the table, an oblate ball of black and grey rock that she had unofficially named "the cometary sphere." An electrical armature from which mechanical servo arms extended was poised over the table. Tapping on the computer and running her fingers along the surface of the tablet, Olivia made the servo arms reach down and carefully pick up the sphere. At her guidance, the arms reached a few feet away to the other most prominent object in the room, the Magnetic Resonance Imager, and loaded the sphere onto the bed of the device. Smiling in the way she smiled only when thoroughly engrossed in work, Olivia had the MRI slide its bed and the treasure that it held into the round, hollow chamber of the device. How many times, she wondered, had she thought there was an undeniably sexual aspect to this procedure? The MRI's sliding bed was analogous to a tongue or something even more intimate and distinctly male, and the comparisons of the donut-like imager of the machine were just as obvious. She had heard male students whispering about it once during a visit to the lab, and noted that they were boys of the Levi Adams/Bruce Foster type. It was the sort of mentality that wanted to laugh at the sound of the word "panspermia." How many female students, Olivia couldn't help but wonder, had they examined and probed like horny young MRIs?
Lucky girls,
she thought.

The scan of the MRI brought up a false-color image on her screen. It showed the structure of
Phaethon's
find as it was inside. Olivia focused her most rapt attention on what she was seeing, as if she could penetrate the object in the MRI with her own eyes. She studied the picture of the inside of the sphere and smiled broadly with creased lips at it. If she were interpreting the picture correctly, what she was seeing was something very much like a terrestrial geode, a round, hollow formation of rock with crystals grown on the interior surface. Her heart somersaulted a bit at the thought of places that were known to exist in the universe, where certain critical conditions had produced worlds made of, or filled with diamond. She wondered if, perhaps, carefully cracking open her "cometary sphere" might just reveal the most precious stones on Earth--precious because they came from someplace far beyond Earth. Such diamonds would without a doubt be
this
girl's best friends.

The false colors of the scan came through as mostly blues and violets, but one part deep in the center of the scan was yellow. To Olivia's puzzlement, while the rest of the scan was flat and unchanging, the little yellow part started to fluctuate. She watched, curious, uncomprehending, as the yellow on her screen throbbed and pulsated. She furrowed her brow, not knowing what to think. Why would it do that unless some process were at work inside the sphere? A physical process? A chemical one? She leaned a bit back from the screen to steady herself, guarding against the next obvious place for that train of thought to take her.
Easy there, Olivia,
she admonished herself.
Don't get ahead. Don't start hypothesizing yet. Check for a glitch in the system or the hardware.
Tapping on the keyboard again, she entered the commands to call up a diagnostic of the computer system.
First check the computer, then run a diagnostic on the MRI. Rule out a problem in the equipment.
But as she prepared the computer to go through its self-examination, her eyes darted back and forth, curious, wondering, between the window on the screen where her commands were appearing and the other window where that strange yellow part kept pulsing--and appeared to be getting larger.
What IS that?

The next thing Olivia knew, there was nothing on her screen at all. No windows of data and RAM, no picture from the MRI--only static, a rude jumble of incoherent visual noise. She frowned more deeply now. "What's going on?" she whispered, still curious and now frustrated. That was when she looked back up inside the isolation chamber itself, where something new caught her eye. Within the donut of the MRI scanner, a light appeared; a light that had no business being there. It was a yellow glow that throbbed and flickered just like the yellow part of her image scan. Olivia drew in an anxious, mystified, and frightened breath--the kind of fear that only something unknown can bring. A cold feeling ran up and down her back. Carefully, her eyes fixed on the interior of the chamber and the pulsation of the glow inside the MRI, she brought herself up out of her chair. The computer and tablet were forgotten now. Her full attention was on the thing she did not understand going on behind the glass.

Olivia was only dimly aware that she should be calling for help. As she watched the MRI, something that she could interpret only as a serpentine coil of light extended from inside the device... No,
not
just inside the device. It was coming from the object resting in the bed in the device. Olivia's lips parted and she could feel both her breath and her heartbeat quickening. She was transfixed, wanting to bolt and run, but mesmerized at the sight of something utterly mysterious twisting up and out into the isolation chamber like an animated galactic spiral, as if a piece of a galaxy had broken off into space. She gulped and took just a step backward, watching it undulate and coil about in the air. And then--it moved faster.

Everything happened at once. The coil of light lunged like a huge, striking python; leapt forward right at the glass divider between the chamber and the outer lab. At the same time, Olivia let out a yelp and shock and fright, flinched backward, and threw her arms across her face. Her entire world turned to a blinding and palpable radiance that glowed from yellow to ghostly white. The whiteness surrounded her, engulfed her, penetrated her with its light. The last things she felt were a Sun-like warmth enclosing her like a pool of glowing water--and her body hitting the laboratory floor.

There was no pain when Olivia's eyes fluttered open again, only an unaccountable sense of calm. She felt the floor under her and saw the ceiling above her. And then a face loomed into her view. A pleasingly male face. She blinked, focused--and recognized whom she is seeing. She also realized that the figure looming over her was stark naked. Olivia let her eyes travel down the tower of young, muscular maleness standing over her until her eyes came to rest on what hung looking ample and awesome between the twin trunks of the legs--and suddenly she bolted up, shocked and startled, and crawls away on her bottom until she was sitting with her back to the wall, looking up breathlessly at an incredibly beautiful and very naked Levi Adams.

He wore an expression that she can only describe as a curiosity like what she had felt watching the MRI scan. Not prurient, not aroused or desiring, not threatening, just curious and far more childlike than she had ever imagined Levi Adams to be. He softly called to her: "Professor Monroe...?"

"Levi, what are you doing here?" she blurted. "What are you doing like that? This isn't appropriate. You shouldn't be...we shouldn't be... Do you know what happened in here? How did you get in?"

Levi looked into the isolation chamber. "I was in there," he said.

Inching her way up from the floor, her back still to the wall, Olivia looked, uncomprehending, from the isolation chamber to the naked boy in front of her and back again. "What do you mean you were in there? There's nothing in there but...but..." She remembered the sample from the comet and what she was doing before the strange phenomenon lit up the lab. She remembered that something came out of the MRI. No, not the MRI--something, she realized and remembered, came from the sample.
From the sample!
She was hardly able to say what she knew had happened. "You...you're not really LeviAdams, are you? You," she gestured to the MRI, "were in there."

"I was asleep," said the living effigy of Levi. "Asleep in the stone, in the...what you call a comet. Sometimes we travel freely in space. But we sleep in such things as the comet. We may sleep for a very long time. Something awoke me and I came out of the stone. And you were here. I became this, something that I saw in your thoughts. Something that you...like."

Olivia studied the effigy, her eyes narrowing as her mind scrambled to take in what was happening and what it was saying. "Something...
that I like?
You know what I feel, what I think?"