Chapter 1
Bianca Dimitriou doesn’t cry.
Not unless she’s really, really angry. She can’t even remember the last time something brought her to tears, but holy shit is she furious right now. Furious and disappointed. She doesn’t think she’s ever felt this way before. She’s pretty sure she hasn’t. Usually she can treat disappointment like an opportunity, something to chip away at and work through until she ultimately gets what she wants.
Oh. Right.
That’s why the tears are coming.
She’s disappointed and there’s nothing she can do about it. No problem to solve or question to dig into.
And even that’s annoying right now – that she’s this upset, this frustrated – and her mind refuses to shut off its logical thought process long enough to revel in her tears, to really feel the hurt and betrayal.
Because she’s not just Bianca Dimitriou anymore.
She’s Dr Bianca Dimitriou, PhD.
And her friends and family didn’t give enough of a shit to show up and celebrate with her.
Now that she knows that, it’s impossible to un-know it.
Bianca sniffs and shakes her head, trying to snap herself out of it, but all that does is make the tears gathering at the corners of her eyes blur her vision, catch against her eyelashes, and then fall to her cheeks.
“Fuck,” she mutters, wiping at them impatiently, knowing her makeup is probably a streaky mess.
“Whoa,” a deep male voice says from just over her shoulder and it takes everything in her not to groan in despair.
She knows that voice, knows the man it’s attached to and knows her night just went from bad to worse.
Crying in public was a low point.
Crying in front of Xavier Byrne is absolute rock bottom.
“Are you okay?” he asks, holding a cocktail napkin out toward her.
“I’m fine, it’s just been a long day,” she manages to say, even though she’s positive he can tell she’s lying. “What are you doing here?”
This bar isn’t really his scene. Not that she knows what his scene is. She just knows that in the five years they’ve been toiling away at their degrees in the same program, she’s never once run into him at Lorraine’s. Then again, he kind of fits in here. He’s handsome in a way that goes with the dive bar aesthetic, with his perpetual five o’clock shadow and a t-shirt that hugs his shoulders, broad and defined, leading to a trim waist in a ratio normally only seen in those superhero movies that she definitely needs to catch up on now that her thesis is finished.
His brows shoot up, green eyes wide with surprise. “I’m not sure whether or not I should be offended.”
Bianca shakes her head in confusion and a few more tears drop, so she takes the cocktail napkin he’s still offering and dabs under her eyes, only to come away with black smudges of her eyeliner.
Oh God, she probably looks like hell and of course it’s in front of him.
Not that it . . . not that it should matter what she looks like in front of him.
It’s not like they’re friends. Or at least they aren’t close, not anymore. But there’s more than a little professional respect there and maybe . . . more than a little bit of a lingering crush, at least on her part, that never quite burned out, despite it being a very, very bad idea.
Call it a generalization, but it’s not every day a super hot guy walks into your class when you’re doing a PhD in Information Science. A male librarian who sometimes doubles as an Indiana Jones type, with his undergrad and master’s in Archaeology, except he’s all aboutreturningthe artifacts instead of stealing them.
Extremely fucking hot.
But it just never happened.
Not that she expected it to.
They are . . . were . . . classmates, colleagues, friends of a sort, friendly colleagues? Too busy working for anything besides a casual hookup.
