Under Fire (Love Over Duty #1)(3)

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Six laughed. "Asshole," he said. He ran his hand over the cool glass, walked to the other side of the desk, and took a seat in the chair that was probably ergonomically designed, given that Mac had picked it. It was sturdy for his large frame, though, which was all that mattered to Six. He turned to face the window looking out over the parking lot.

Home.

He'd not only made it, but he'd survived.

So why did he feel so lost?

* * *

Someone has touched my files.

Louisa North blew her bangs out of her eyes and flicked through the folder one more time. There was something wrong with her notes, but she couldn't put her finger on exactly what it was. If she didn't know better, she'd swear someone had been through them. It wasn't anything obvious, but she was anal about lining up the corners of the pages before she closed any binder, and the pages were out of alignment as though someone had hurriedly flipped through them.

In the largest privately funded medical laboratory in San Diego, it wasn't unusual for researchers to collaborate, consult, and borrow information from one another in their quests to find answers to global problems as quickly as possible. But usually people asked permission.

She closed the file and pulled up her notes on her laptop. She bookmarked the article she hadn't yet finished reading on gene silencing and its possible effects on clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. CRISPR for short. While the findings were crucial to her research into treating Huntington's disease, the acronym always made her think of the salad drawer in her refrigerator.

Everything about her computer files and email looked normal. The last modified date matched the date she could last remember opening them. No emails were marked as read that she hadn't opened. While it was possible that her lab partner, Ivan, who was also the lab owner's grandson, had taken a look at her handwritten notes, it was very unlikely. After all their time working together, he knew better than to mess with her things.

She looked through the glass-fronted cleanroom walls to the two labs across the hallway that faced hers. Six to eight people shared space in each of them, a thought that made Louisa shiver. It had been a condition of her mother's investment in the laboratory that Louisa be given her own lab to avoid having to deal with people on a daily basis. It was a good thing too, because some days it was almost more of a drain than she could bear having only Ivan around. Cognitive behavior therapies had only gone so far in helping her overcome her chronic anthropophobia, but her extreme shyness still took over her life at times. While all the breathing and modifying thoughts enabled her to get out of bed in the morning and come to work, daily challenges like looking someone in the eye remained an issue. It was part of the reason she'd let her bangs grow so damn long, even though it aggravated the hell out of her mother.

Diligently, she straightened all the corners of the pages so they lined up and placed the binder to one side. She couldn't spend more time worrying about it right now, because there were other things that needed tackling.

Louisa pulled up the presentation she was supposed to give at tonight's fundraiser. Her palms began to sweat as she paged through it. It wasn't so much the presentation that made her feel ill, more the crowds who usually came to listen to what she had to say. And she knew she was a double whammy. Researcher who'd dedicated her life to understanding Huntington's-check. Potential carrier of the disease-check. She'd buried her beloved father, Isaiah North, a decade ago, when he'd finally succumbed to the disease, and she was well aware that there was a fifty-percent chance that she, too, was a Huntington's disease gene carrier. Like most potential gene carriers, she'd chosen not to be tested, a decision that those who were not in the line of fire rarely understood. In her mind, there was no point living under a storm cloud when she had the chance to dance in the sun.



       
         
       
        

The slide with her credentials popped up on the screen. Usually she hated talking about herself, but she knew that if she wanted to stand a chance of convincing some of the attendees at tonight's gala to part with even more of their money, she needed to prove that she knew what she was talking about. Thanks to her parents' generosity, Louisa had been afforded an education most people could only dream about. With an undergrad degree from Harvard University and an MD from Yale, she'd been on the fast track as a neurology resident and ultimately fellow in neuro-therapeutics and movement disorders at Johns Hopkins-until her phobia got in the way. When people asked why she'd chosen to bury herself in a lab, she offered them a vanilla answer about dedication and focus.