Chapter four

Seven o'clock in the morning, and the main lab already had three people in it, the coffee was made, and every single member of my team who was supposed to be present was present.

Every single one except Ivy Laurent.

I checked my watch, looked at the empty doorway, and checked it again. I had been explicit yesterday evening. Seven o'clock. Those were the words I had used. Not seven-thirty, not whenever she felt like it—seven. I had even had Caleb relay the message a second time because I had not trusted her to retain information she found inconvenient.

I set my coffee down.

"Has anyone seen her this morning?" I asked the room.

Sofia looked up from her workstation with the careful expression of someone who had already correctly assessed the situation and wanted no part of what was about to happen. "I haven't seen her come down."

Of course she hadn't come down. She was twenty years old and had spent the last two years treating the entire world as a stage arranged for her personal entertainment—why would seven o'clock mean anything to a person like that? Why would my time, my project, my clearly stated expectations mean anything at all?

I pushed back from the desk and walked out of the lab.

The hallway leading to the residential wing was quiet, morning light coming in flat and white through the narrow windows. I took the stairs and walked the length of the corridor to her door, and I knocked exactly once—a sharp, professional knock—and waited approximately four seconds.

Nothing.

I turned the handle and opened the door.

And then every single thought I had walked in with evaporated completely.

She was standing in the center of the room with her back partially to the door, a towel on the floor at her feet that told its own story about the decision she had apparently just made not to use it. Her hair was wet and dark against her shoulders, water still trailing in slow lines down the curve of her spine, and she was entirely, completely, unapologetically naked.

She turned at the sound of the door.

Her eyes went wide for exactly one second—and then she smiled. That particular smile, the one that meant she knew precisely what she was doing and had catalogued the effect it was having.

"Good morning," she said, making absolutely no move to cover herself.

I did not respond.

I was aware, in some distant and increasingly irrelevant part of my brain, that I needed to respond—needed to say something clipped and professional and immediate—but the instruction was not reaching whatever part of me was responsible for forming words, because every functioning piece of my attention had been completely, catastrophically overtaken.

She was beautiful in a way that my imagination, which had already been doing considerable damage over the past two years, had still somehow failed to accurately prepare me for. The elegant line of her collarbone giving way to the full, perfect curve of her chest—her skin still damp, still warm-looking, catching the morning light in a way that made rational thought feel like a distant and slightly theoretical concept. The flat plane of her stomach. The bare, smooth line below it, not a trace of anything to interrupt it, and something about that specific detail sent a heat through me so immediate and so complete that I actually had to physically tighten my jaw to keep my face from showing it.

She was not a girl.

Whatever I had been telling myself for two years—whatever careful, heavily maintained narrative I had constructed about her youth and my own restraint and the appropriate management of an inappropriate feeling—it had no jurisdiction in this room. She was standing in front of me looking like every dark and meticulously suppressed fantasy I had ever had about her made real, looking at me with those eyes that always seemed to know exactly how much damage they were doing, and the only coherent thought I was producing was that I wanted to cross the distance between us and find out what the water on her skin tasted like.

She is your step-niece.

She is twenty years old.

I dragged both hands down over the thought and buried it.

I cleared my throat. "Get dressed," I said, and my voice came out with considerably more control than I had any right to claim credit for. "You have seven minutes to be downstairs."

I turned around and walked out of the room at a pace that was brisk and purposeful and had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that if I had stayed in that doorway for another ten seconds I could not have guaranteed my own behavior.

I made it to my own room, closed the door behind me, and stood in the silence for a moment with one hand flat against the wood.

Then I crossed to the bed, sat on the edge of it, and pressed the heel of my hand against my eyes.

I was hard. Completely, insistently, pointlessly hard—had been from approximately the second she had turned around and smiled at me, and showing up to my own lab in this condition was not an option I was willing to consider. I had a meeting in thirty minutes with Sofia about the phase two timeline, two funding calls this afternoon, and a team that looked to me for a standard of professional conduct that I was not currently demonstrating, even privately.

I reached down.

The moment my hand closed around myself I exhaled sharply—it had already been too long and my body was making its grievances known with considerable emphasis. I moved slowly at first, jaw tight, staring at the ceiling with the grim focus of a man performing necessary maintenance rather than doing something he was enjoying.

Except that was a lie.

Because when I closed my eyes, she was there immediately. The image I had just walked out of—the water on her skin, the line of her body, that smile—it was waiting behind my eyelids with the patience of something that knew it had already won. I tried to redirect. I ran through every impersonal, abstract alternative my mind could produce and my mind rejected all of them with complete indifference.

There was only her.

My hand moved faster, my breath coming shallow now, the tension coiling low and tight and inevitable—and when I finally broke apart, the word on my lips before I could stop it, before I could intercept it or swallow it or pretend I hadn't thought it—

"Ivy."

I sat very still afterward, breathing hard, staring at the ceiling.

This was a problem.

This was a very serious, very specific problem that six months of forced proximity and apparently zero functional self-control had just made considerably worse—and the woman responsible for all of it was currently, somewhere down that hallway, getting dressed.

In my facility.

On my island.

With nowhere for either of us to go.