Lost and Found (Masters & Mercenaries: The Forgotten #2)(20)

He watched as she unscrewed the top of the bottle of wine. “Not really.”

She tipped the bottle his way. “I am. A little. Don’t worry. I won’t flip my shit on you or anything, but I’m going to start on this bad boy before it gets warm.” She looked at the green bottle in her hands. “Thank you, New Zealand, for your grapes and your rejection of pretentious corks in your wines. I would be seriously fucked if I drank red.”

She tipped that sucker up and drank a surprising amount of Sauvignon Blanc.

She was not what he’d expected.

He glanced down at her. What had he expected? Certainly not a woman who looked like a sweet librarian and talked like a bloody sailor. Who had an MD and drank like a fish and talked about male strippers like she knew a couple or wanted to know a couple.

She was a walking contradiction. Well, a sitting one.

He put his back to the opposite wall from her and let his body slide down. He pulled the strap of the messenger bag over his head and settled it into the corner before reaching into his jacket. She was speaking his language now. He pulled out his flask and opened it, holding it up because a Scotsman knew how to toast even a clusterfuck of a situation. “Cheers, lass.”

Robert wouldn’t be able to drink with her. The man was far too in control. He didn’t carry around his whiskey. He was all proper like and drank in bars out of posh glasses and not a flask.

Was Robert the right man to get close to this woman? He was starting to think they’d read her wrong. She might not need a serious, intellectual friend.

She might need a bad boy.

Her lips tugged up and she held up her bottle. “I bet you get a lot of women with that accent alone. Cheers.”

They clinked beverage containers. “Less than you would expect.” A lie, but he didn’t want her to think he was a complete manwhore. There were bad boys and then there were walking venereal diseases. He certainly wasn’t going to tell her about the women he’d gone through during his recent stay in Dallas. He’d run through the single subs at Sanctum in quick order. “So you live here?”

Small talk. They needed some small talk. Maybe he could find out a thing or two, prove he wasn’t a complete moron.

She wasn’t some file or a picture on the wall. She wasn’t a bunch of degrees or the sum of her education and her job. She was a woman.

They forgot that at their own peril.

She nodded, taking another drink. “Yep. I’ve been living here for about two years and this stupid elevator is broken more than it works. Apparently it’s an antique and the historical society doesn’t want it to change. The historical society doesn’t have to hoof it up seven flights of stairs.” She frowned. “There’s a more modern elevator at the back of the building, but I’m too lazy to walk to it. My laziness foils me again. I could be watching Doctor Who right now.”

And she was a geek, though he shouldn’t be so surprised since he knew about her secondary job. He had to pretend like he didn’t, of course. “Is that why you wear spandex? You like science fiction and comic books?”

He took a swig of his whiskey and felt the familiar burn down his throat. Normally it would relax him, make him look forward to the next drink, but this time, he was focused on her.

“I love them,” she said, her eyes lighting up. “When I was growing up, all I read were comic books and medical texts. I’m still a Marvel girl. I suppose you could say I didn’t have a ton of friends. I was always the youngest person in my class. And the oddest. I was the weird kid who fell madly in love with viruses at a young age.”

He could feel his brows rise. “Viruses?”

She nodded. “They’re the true supervillains of the world. Snakes only kill fifty thousand people a year. Influenza? Over six hundred thousand in the world every year. We’re scared of sharks and shit? They got nothing on a good VHF.”

He was getting his flu shot. Tucker had been pestering him about it and he’d viewed the kid as a mother hen, but perhaps he knew what he was talking about. “VHF?”

“Sorry, uhm viral hemorrhagic fever,” she explained, pushing her glasses up her nose. “VHFs come from one of six virus families, all nasty. I’m a particular fan of filoviridae. Filovirus virions are pleomorphic. That means they can come in different shapes. Some are like a six or a U. They have these long filaments. I remember the first time I saw one under a microscope. Zaire ebolavirus. I stared at it. So small and so destructive. We still aren’t certain exactly how the fuckers replicate.”

He had no idea what she was talking about. “And you were a child studying this?”

“Yep. My dad was a doctor. My mom was a college professor. I got a bunch of brains,” she admitted. “I used to follow my dad around on rounds. The patients thought it was sweet at first, and then they would get disconcerted when I would offer a second opinion. Having a kid in pigtails arguing diagnoses is apparently scary. I was hell on teachers. Now I kind of wish I’d studied engineering and mechanics. I don’t suppose you know how to fix an elevator.”

“I could shoot it if I had my guns,” he admitted, not bothered at all with his slight lie. She wouldn’t be as comfortable with him if she knew how well armed he was. “I’m quite good at close combat, but it doesn’t have a throat I can go for or balls I can kick.”