It wasn’t how he’d meant to greet her. But was there any scenario in which their first conversation after…after… wouldn’t have left him floundering?
One eyebrow lifted. “Something on my face?” She swiped at her chin.
“A little higher. Just…” He set aside his carton before he spilled it. He shoved his fists into his pockets. “On your nose.”
“I got stuck behind a street sweeper on Oak Avenue.” She swiped again. “There?”
“No.”
“Great.” When she rolled her eyes, dust glittered in her eyelashes. “But are you just going to… maybe not harass people at the coffee machine today, but watch me waste my time like this, when we have project deadlines to meet? …or are you going to help?”
He freed one hand to offer her a napkin.
She ignored it, stepping closer. A smirk scrunched up her nose, pink with the wind of her ride—andGod, he wanted to touch her, to tap those tiny wrinkles and that speck of grit, to trace down her cheek to the corner of her lips, to swipe a finger across the chapped skin, savoring this evidence of her brash mastery of the road before slipping his thumb into her mouth, testing the sharpness of her teeth on his skin and the dexterous softness of her tongue—
“Really? No help?” When she snapped an elastic band around her hair again, its twang jerked through his groin, and her smirk widened with her nod at his brew cooling in the machine. “Then the least you can do is to brew me some coffee. Is that mine?”
Like she’d followed him into his own kitchen to retrieve a familiar mug from the dish drainer. He swallowed so hard that his ears popped. Heat flashed down his neck. “S-sure.”
“Thanks.”
“Um—milk?”
She turned with the mug cupped in her palms. She cocked her other eyebrow at him, cocked her hip against the counter, and slotted a second mug into place. “What do you think?”
I sometimes spike my creamer with coffee.
Hot and flustered, he hadn’t meant to laugh.
“Menace.” He upended the carton for her.
“A compliment from Dr. Ethan Meyer—forme?”
“Don’t get greedy.”
“I’m not greedy. I’m just…” she reached behind herself for his filling mug, eyes and lips bright, “…getting your coffee.”
Space-time reallywasbroken.
“Because you had a late night. Milk for you, too?”
“You don’t have any hands free for the creamer carton,” and before he could rationalize all hiswhy-nots, he took both mugs from her. He set them away on the counter. His fingers were steady.Almost. “You can’t send messages if you’re holding these. Since we’re only communicating by text outside of our project work blocks, you need your hands.”
“Then this must be a work block, if we’re talking at the lab. If my hands are free.”
He nodded. “We never resolved your question about the hutch’s lighting.”
“A critical inquiry.”
“Critical,” and he swallowed too hard again when her thumb hooked into his pocket, drawing him into her breath and her smile.
“I’m very focused on getting an answer from you, Dr.—”
“Meyer!”
Dr. Kramer.
His department head strode into the kitchenette. Ethan stumbled back against the refrigerator. But though Dr. Kramer’s glance identified their two mugs on the counter, his attention didn’t continue on to Erin beside the coffee machine. Instead, he stepped past her and selected black coffee from the on-screen menu. How could he not notice her?
