Deadly Chemistry (Entangled Ignite) (2 page)

Chapter Two

Lauren let herself into the lab after her class, and heard the radio she kept on her desk playing. Weird. She didn’t remember turning it on earlier. Especially not to a news station. Probably another issue with her electrical wiring.

“A dangerous new drug is hitting tri-state streets and sending addicts to the emergency room in record numbers. Cincinnati police say they don’t know where this drug came from or—”

She snapped it off. Thank God she lived in tiny Tucker, Kentucky—Cincinnati was almost an hour away. It was a college town—hardly immune to recreational drugs, but hopefully the big, bad stuff stayed out of reach in the big city.

She dropped her briefcase next to her desk and booted her ancient laptop, longing for the day when her project was well-funded and she could update her old equipment.

“Hi, Lauren,” came a familiar voice from the cell culture room.

Crap. Alex Barker.

She whirled around, frowning. Dealing with the ex-boyfriend-turned-former-coworker was
so
not on her to-do list today. “What are you doing here?”

“I need a flash drive I must have left when I moved out. It’s got all my notes from last year on it.” He wore a pink, long-sleeved dress shirt, un-tucked, over expensively distressed jeans, and shoes that looked old but probably had been purchased last week at twice Lauren’s monthly paycheck.

Huh. He’d aspired to Abercrombie-dom back when he hadn’t quite been able to afford it, now it looked like he could. The new University of Cincinnati gig must either be paying pretty well, or he was still living on the edge of his credit limit.

“Oh. I put all that stuff in here.” Lauren dug a plastic storage box from under her desk, then handed it to him.

“And I’m popping in for old time’s sake.” He smiled ruefully, running a hand through his blond hair. Lauren was surprised his fingers didn’t get stuck in all the product he used.

“How’s the new job?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear about it. The higher paying job at a bigger university apparently had come with the bonus of an expanded ego.

“Good.” He started to sort through the miscellaneous junk and didn’t look at her when he said, “I could still use a co-investigator. I can see about bringing you on, if you like. You know that if we collaborated, we could do twice as much than we do separately.”

“Thanks, but I’m not really interested in starting all over somewhere new. I’m happy here.” Besides, Alex’s offer of a good word probably came with the expectation that they would resume their “friend with half-assed benefits” relationship, which had
not
helped her career.

He nodded as though he’d expected her refusal. “I really hope you’ll change your mind.”

“Alex…”

He crossed his arms and looked at her. “You’ve got to get over this misplaced fear of losing your seat on the board of directors of Feminists ‘R’ Us. Working with a man isn’t going to wreck your career.”

Wow
. He’d really never understood her, had he? She counted to ten. Working with a
man
wasn’t a problem as long as she wasn’t involved—currently or formerly—with him. Working with
Alex
was a problem. He’d tried to take over her projects in the past, which was eerily similar to what had happened to her own mother.

After all, how many times had she heard the story about how her dad had shown up one day and offered to help her mom, a budding scientist, with her project? Nine months later, Karen Kane was a stay-at-home wife and mother—with a useless Ph.D. In addition, only two of Lauren’s female friends from grad school had gotten married. The first spent
way
too much time reassuring her husband that she was working in the lab after hours and not cheating. Another had gotten married to another scientist, but then quickly divorced when they couldn’t find jobs in the same time zone. Lauren had grown up knowing she wanted to be a scientist, so her option was to give up relationships. She’d tried to have both with Alex, and that hadn’t worked. He’d wanted to “help” her—right into obscurity.

She forced a smile. “Thanks anyway, but I think I’ll stick around here for a while longer.”

Apparently giving up on finding his USB drive, he put the box down next to a pile of lab notebooks. One binder fell off the table with a flutter of pages. “Are you still keeping all of your notes on paper?” he asked, replacing the notebook on the precariously stacked pile. “That’s terribly inefficient.”

“This is still working pretty nicely.” She didn’t bother to explain that she’d already started recording her newer data on the computer—he’d probably stay and tell her how to do it right.

Alex wandered over to the complex system of bubbling flasks and tubes that constituted Lauren’s research career. “How’s the algae growing?” he asked.

She had developed a strain of algae that was going to make her name famous. Actually, the algae
had
her name.
H. kanus
. “It’s slow,” she said, excitement building the way it did when anyone asked about her algae. “It’s growing well enough, but when I process it from step one to step two, I don’t get as much product as I was getting a few months ago. At first I thought my student worker had made a mistake, but then I tried it myself and had the same problem. There’s something going on during that overnight step, but I’ll figure it out.”

He nodded, thoughtfully.

Damn
. Why’d she go and tell him all that, anyway?

“What about the third step? Is that working?”

“Sure. That seems to be working great. But if I can’t get enough of step two to make this commercially viable, the Pemberton Society will never invest in my project. And if I can’t get seed money for more preliminary data…”

“You’ll never get the NIH past the abstract of your grant.” Alex nodded in sympathy. “I heard that the building is having some electrical issues. Maybe that’s what’s causing the problem with your process.”

Lauren shrugged. “Maybe. Evan said he called maintenance to come look at the circuits.”

“How
is
Dr. Nerd doing?”

Lauren bristled. “I wish you wouldn’t call Evan that.”

Thankfully, Alex changed the subject. “What are you going to do if you can’t get the Pemberton Group on board?”

“I’ve applied for every small grant I can think of. Nothing’s come through. This is my last chance.”

“What about a grant from the Tucker Foundation?”

Lauren laughed. “Miss Emmaline’s Kentucky Jelly money?” The elderly woman was well known at Tuck U, having made a success out of her own career as a scientist, studying ways to increase local fruit production. She’d also kept the town of Tucker alive, having provided employment to about half the population—those who didn’t work at the college—at her factory.

Alex nodded but frowned. “Why is that so funny? She’s got some sort of grant set up for faculty research, doesn’t she?”

“Yep. And it comes with conditions that I don’t meet.”

“What do you mean? I never applied for one of her grants, but I know it’s there.”

Lauren thought of the eccentric old lady, whom she’d met at a faculty luncheon not too long ago, then explained her reasoning. “The one for this department is for a female scientist who is married.”

“Married? Why? I thought Miss Emmie was a feminist before her time or something.”

“I think it’s designed to help faculty that are married get jobs at the same institution.” Miss Emmie’s heart was in the right place, but Lauren only saw marriage as a fast track
out
of research. After all, her own mother was living proof.

A frown marred Alex’s forehead, then disappeared. “You know, we could still—”

“Excuse me.” A deeply male voice came from the doorway.

Lauren turned to see Mike standing there, in all of his maintenance man manliness.
Dang
. How did he find shirts to fit shoulders that broad? She stepped away from Alex, feeling oddly uncomfortable about talking to her ex-boyfriend…and oddly glad to see the rescuer of possums and all-around perfect male specimen standing in her lab doorway.

…

The preppy guy in the pink shirt gave Mike a dirty look, but Mike ignored him. The pretty possum-terrorizing scientist smiled in greeting, and something warm landed in Mike’s gut.
Oh, no.
He had a couple of jobs to do—fix shit and find shitty drugs. And he didn’t have time to be distracted by Doctor Beautiful.

“Um, hi,” she said. “Did you—is the possum family okay?”

“Possum?” asked Pink Shirt, turning to stare at Lauren. “Are you still wasting time with needy wild things?”

Mike looked at the guy, who was now staring at him with a raised eyebrow. The implication was clear. Pink Shirt thought Mike might be one of Lauren’s charity cases. What—because he was dressed in a maintenance uniform? What a douchebag.

Lauren caught his gaze with hers. “It’s a long story.”

Mike couldn’t help himself, he winked.

“Uh-huh.” Pinky looked from Lauren to Mike, frowning. This was a guy who didn’t like being left out of the joke—if he even had enough of a sense of humor to get it in the first place.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t find your flash drive,” Lauren said to Pinky. “If I run across it, I’ll shoot you an email.”

“I can stop by any time,” the guy told Lauren. He was clearly reluctant to leave, but he’d been dismissed. Shut down. Kicked to the curb.

Mike stepped up to bat. “I’m here to check your circuits.”

It sounded like Pinky said, “I bet you are,” as he brushed past on the way through the door.

When Lauren’s visitor disappeared, Mike returned to the reason he was there—business. “You say you’ve got alarms going off for no reason?”

“Yes! Please, come on in,” said Lauren.

“Your possums are fine, by the way,” he said. “Possum? Possum
s
? I don’t know what’s right.”

She tilted her head, then shrugged. “Oh, who cares? Thanks for taking care of them.” She waved her hand in the direction that Pink Shirt had gone. “I have a soft spot for animals.”

“Is the guy in the pink shirt one of your critters?” Mike heard himself ask, then mentally slapped himself upside the head. What was he saying? The only fishing he should be doing was to find whoever was making Devil’s Dust. “Sorry. None of my business.”

Lauren laughed. “No, he was…um, he isn’t one of my critters.”

“He wants to be.” Damn. More words out of his mouth. He needed to stop that.

“He had his chance.” Her clear brown eyes held his for a second before she cleared her throat and said, “So, um, what do you need from me?”

Mike nearly groaned at the thoughts that entered his head—not scratching, biting possums or squealing alarms, but soft touches, sighs, and whispers. He managed to say, “Just going to check your connections. Make sure nothing is sending out too much juice.”

“I’ll let you get to it,” she said then and went to do something to a complex arrangement of glass containers full of bubbling green stuff. Something that involved her bending over to flip a switch on a power strip.

Nice pants. No panty line. Plenty of time on the elliptical trainer.

She straightened and turned.

He thought he pulled his eyes back into his head in time, but wasn’t sure. He got his tester out and started checking outlets. “What is all this stuff?” he asked, gesturing to the test tubes. “What kind of research do you do?”

“I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you,” she said.

He laughed. “It looks like pond scum.”

“It
is
pond scum.” She smiled. “Fancy pond scum. I genetically engineered blue-green algae to produce a morphine analog.”

A jolt zinged through Mike that had nothing to do with electricity or sexual attraction. He’d just hit the jackpot.

“Did you say
morphine
?” he asked. “Like, heroin?”

Chapter Three

Wow
. Lauren gulped. Her sexy maintenance man was funny and nice and looked at her butt when he thought she wasn’t looking. And now he was asking about her research. Her heart
thunked
into her diaphragm, which sent a weird
bloop
into her stomach. And something was happening a little lower, too, but she wasn’t going to pay attention to that.

Mike looked at her, clearly waiting for her to say something.

Um, what was the question? Oh, yeah, if her algae made morphine. Duh. “Oh. Sorry. Zoned out for a minute, I’m—getting up too early to deal with all these false alarms has me a little kerfluffled.”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded for her to continue.

“So, my algae. Um, so, it’s genetically engineered to produce an opioid drug, like heroin or morphine or codeine. Those all come from poppies.”

He nodded to show he understood.

“But I put the gene for the drug into the algae DNA. I grow it in these flasks, and then strain it out and dry it down into pellets.” She showed him one of the little round chunks of dried algae. “This is called step one. Then there’s an extraction step that produces a purified liquid drug. I call that ‘step two’, because it’s, you know, like the second step in the production.” God, she sounded dumb. She had an IQ of 161, a perfect score on the ACT, and had made a 2350 on the SAT. But she couldn’t talk to this perfectly normal human being without sounding like she’d fallen out of a mall.

“So you make fake heroin. Isn’t there already a bunch of stuff like that out there? Like methadone, that kind of thing?”

“Yes. There are several options, and they all have drawbacks. Either they don’t work as well or they’re also addictive. And unfortunately, step two isn’t any improvement over the original drug. I found that if we dry it into a powder and use it that way, it’s actually
more
addictive and has a higher mental impairment factor than either morphine or methadone.”

He shifted. “How do you know that? Did you try it?”

“Oh! No!” She laughed. “We’ve given it to mice. They love it. But then they can’t remember anything. Like where their food is or who their cage mates are.”

“So what the hell are you doing with this stuff?” He seemed tense, as though her answer was going to determine the fate of the free world.

“We process it into step three. It’s perfectly safe when it becomes step three. At least for the mice, anyway. It’s not addictive, it seems to function perfectly as a pain killer, and it doesn’t have any mind- or mood-altering activity.”

“Not addictive.”

“Yeah,” she said. “At step two, it’s still addictive and is too much like heroin—gives the same transcendent and euphoric experience along with blocking pain like heroin does
and
has the same highly addictive qualities as heroin, too.”

“Huh.” Mike leaned back and ran a hand through his thick, dark hair. He stared at her for a moment.

The light feeling in the room had fled.

“It’s not going to do anyone any good if I can’t figure out why my yield is so much lower now than it used to be, though,” she added.

His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“I’m not getting as much step two as I should when I do the refining step from step one. I set it up to run overnight, and then in the morning I concentrate it and measure it. But there’s just never enough.”

“Where’s it going? Is someone stealing it? It seems like, if it’s a drug, it would be attractive to someone wanting a buzz.”

She’d wondered about that herself. She remembered the story she’d heard on the radio about a new drug hitting Cincinnati. God, it would be awful if something like that happened with her drug. But there was no way. “No, it’s not being stolen. There’s always enough extraction liquid in the vial, just not enough product dissolved in the solution. I even tested to make sure someone wasn’t taking out the chemical solution and replacing it with water, like mom and dad’s liquor. It’s all there.”

She shrugged. “Anyway, after it’s processed, I keep step two locked up. Besides,” she added, “I don’t think the average person would know what to do with step one. It’s pretty gross.” She tossed the little chunk she’d showed him into a big black zipper bag full of pellets and held it out for him to see. “It looks like rabbit food, but smells like something you’d feed fish.”

He leaned over and sniffed, then drew back, nose wrinkled. “So, the drug is in there?”

“Yeah. When we first transfected the gene into the algae, we fed the pellets to the mice. They weren’t too crazy about it. We thought about vaporizing it…you know, like medical marijuana, or something, but that was before we realized how addictive it is in its native form.”

“So you could smoke it?”

She paused and stared at him, wondering why he was so interested.

He shrugged. “I watch a lot of
CSI
.”

“Oh, me, too! I love
CSI
.” And
Law and Order.
And
Bones.
And
NCIS
. But he didn’t need to know every show she watched. “I guess you
could
smoke the algae, though I think it wouldn’t taste very good.” Not to mention the fact that the binding agents she’d added would be poisonous and could cause brain damage.

“Drug users don’t really care about that.”

Drug users didn’t care about much except scoring drugs, at least according to the news. And
CSI
and
Law and Order
and
Bones
and
NCIS
. She narrowed her eyes and examined Mike. He was dangerous-looking, though she thought he looked too fit and clear-eyed to be a drug user himself.

“How do you get the drug out of the dried junk?”

There was another bag of pellets on the counter, and he started to reach for it at the same time she did. Her hand covered his before she could change direction. The heat of his hand, big and rough-knuckled, beneath hers, seared her palm.

Their eyes met for a split second before she casually extracted the bag from his hand. At least, she hoped she looked casual. That touch had turned her more upside down than she’d want to admit. She put the bag into a plastic bin marked with the day’s date. She’d have to remember to take it with her when she left. Nodding to a bench stocked with centrifuge tubes and bottles of buffers, she said, “I use a bunch of chemicals to extract the compound, some others to alter the structure, then concentrate it.” She stopped, wondering if she’d gone into too much detail. At least she hadn’t started naming molecular formulas. But the way Mike stared, he seemed to still be interested. She pointed at the little safe. “Then I stash it in the safe until I test it.”

“Are you the only worker here? Or do you have an assistant, or whatever?”

What was with all the questions? Was he uber nosey, bored with work, or flirting? Probably not the third option, although she wasn’t sure she’d even know what flirting looked like, it had been so long. As in, so long that the last hot guy who flirted with her was…imaginary. “If I can get the grant I’m hoping for, I’ll have enough to support a graduate student and a technician. I have a student worker in the meantime. Dylan White. He’s great…ten hours a week, and he does the work of a full time technician.”

“Wait—Dylan works for
you
?” Mike’s jaw tightened and his brows lowered, eyes narrowing.

“Do you know him?”

“He’s my little brother.”

His
brother
? Why was he so…unhappy? Dylan was the sweetest kid—and the best student worker she’d ever had. Okay, so he was the first one she’d had to herself, but as a grad student and post-doc, she’d supervised quite a few useless occupiers of lab coats. Dylan wasn’t one of the slackers, and she was going to defend him. “No kidding? That’s so cool! Dylan’s awesome. I really like having him here.”

Mike didn’t seem to know what to say to that. “Oh. That’s…great. I guess.”

Then something struck Lauren. “So if Dylan’s your brother, and Evan Adams is Dylan’s brother, that makes you—”

Mike sighed. “Also Evan’s brother.”

“But you told me your last name is Gibson.”

“Yep. We have three different dads. Had. Different dads.”

Well, Lauren had certainly stepped in something here. She hadn’t pried into Dylan’s family history, other than knowing that his brother was the professor across the hall. They seemed to get along okay, although it would be a challenge for anyone to be close to Evan. He was so…uptight.

“So you all grew up here in Tucker,” she said.

“More or less.”

She was treading close to
The Land of Getting To Know You
, and warning bells chimed in the distance, but the
Here’s A Guy Who Listens To You Without Telling You What To Do
monitor shushed them. “Did you work for Kentucky Jelly, too?” Tucker was home to the Kentucky Jelly plant, the only other business in town besides the University.

“Miss Emmaline was one of my grandmother’s best friends, and she put me to work as soon as it was legal for me to get a paycheck. I think that if you didn’t put in your time in the bottling plant, you didn’t get a high school diploma.”

“That’s awesome. I grew up in Columbus. Not exactly The Big Apple, but too big to know everyone, unlike here.”

“Is your family still close by?” Mike asked.

Oh, goody. And here he came, meeting her in the demilitarized
Zone of Small Talk
. “Close enough. My dad’s on the faculty at Ohio State. I think maybe I should have gone a little farther than two and a half hours away,” she said.

“I have a feeling that family finds us no matter how far we try to go.”

Lauren laughed, liking this flirting thing in spite of herself. This
was
flirting, right?
Ye gads
. How was she supposed to know?

“So is your dad a scientist, too?”

It must be flirting, because why else would he be asking all this mundane get-to-know-you stuff?

“Yep.”

“That’s cool. You followed in his footsteps, huh?”

“Well, more like picked up where my mom left off. She was a scientist, too, before she had me.”

“And raising a baby human took the place of raising lab rats?”

“Something like that.” Well, not exactly, but it wasn’t like she was going to share the story of her mom losing her career to motherhood with Mike The Hot Maintenance Guy. At least her mom had made her childhood fun. She smiled, thinking of the white mice she’d been allowed to keep when she was a kid. Watson and Crick.

He smiled back at her. His eyes held hers for just a moment longer than was strictly necessary. She realized she was standing a little closer to him than strictly necessary, too, and that she had a strand of hair twisted around her index finger. She unwound it and tucked it behind her ear.

He cleared his throat and stepped back. “Listen, I think your electrical circuits are fine. There’s got to be something a little deeper in the system going on here. I’ll get Jason to call the electrician the university has under contract.”

“Okay. Well, thanks for stopping in. And for, you know, chasing Alex off.”

“Thanks for telling me about your project. You must be a good teacher, because even a grunt like me understood most of that.” He picked up his toolbox. “We’ll figure out where your step two product is going, one way or another.”

Something about the way he said that gave her pause. Since when had Tucker University started hiring maintenance men who doubled as research consultants?

…

Of course, Mike ran into Evan when he left Lauren’s lab. Almost literally.

“Watch where you’re going, Michael!” Evan said, stepping aside. He smoothed an imaginary stray hair back in place.

Mike took a deep breath and let it out slowly, refraining from biting the head off his anal-retentive brother. He was still reeling from the knowledge that he’d been stumbling around Tucker University for a week trying to find out where the hell Devil’s Dust was coming from and his own punky little brother was working with it every day. In fact, both of his brothers were in spitting distance of the drug. Although Evan couldn’t have been considered punky since…ever. He
could
be considered someone Mike had no desire to talk to right now, however.

He wanted time to let his mind chew on the information he’d just taken in and digest it into something that made sense. How was it that the adorable scientist Lauren Kane was the one making the formula for Devil’s Dust? And more importantly, how was it that the drug was getting off the campus and onto the streets?

“Where’s the inferno?” Evan asked, then when Mike glared at him, he amended that to, “Is something wrong?”

“Did you know Dylan was working in a lab where dangerous drugs are being made?”

Evan’s lips tightened. “Yes. And I’ve spoken with him about it. He assured me that he’s keeping his nose clean, and I believe him.”

“Really?” Mike wondered if it was his own suspicious—okay, paranoid—nature that made Evan seem so naive.

“Really.”

“Does he have keys to everything? Can he come and go at all hours?”

Evan blinked. “He can get into the building any time with his student ID, but he’d have to have a key to the lab. I think he only works when Lauren’s working.”

“I don’t like this.”

Evan opened his mouth, then closed it again, like he wanted to say something more.

“What?”

“Are you really in a position to judge?”

Part of him—the proud, defensive part—wanted to make Evan understand that he wasn’t the fuck up that everyone believed him to be, but he didn’t see any point.

Ironic. He could only
ask
someone to believe that he hadn’t been responsible for the fuck up that had cost him his job—and nearly gotten Dylan killed. Until he could prove who was making and distributing Devil’s Dust and bring them to justice, that is. And right there, smack dab in the middle of his brothers, was a lab making some kind of heroin alternative. His gut said Lauren was innocent, but his instincts had failed him in the past.

He needed to find out more about Lauren Kane.