Page 68 of The Alpha Experiment
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A little after nine, Meredith and I walked over to the building where Kyle was, presumably, ensconced in the lab. “This is so exciting,” she hissed under her breath, looking around as if Greenwald might be lurking behind one of the campus’s many spreading trees. “We’re like spies. No! FBI agents, running a sting operation!”
I tried to laugh, tried to smile, even, but I simply couldn’t muster the enthusiasm the occasion deserved.
Colin should have been here. He’d have loved this. And I’d have loved pulling this off with him—and Meredith too, of course, but mainly with Colin. He’d have gotten into the spirit of it, probably giving Meredith a silly code name and singing the theme fromMission: Impossible.
Instead, Colin had gone home to his many responsibilities, to argue with his pack council and try to keep his unruly wolves in check and probably find a gorgeous, funny, big-breasted werewolf mate.
Someone he actually wanted.
I should want the same, or something similar.
I glanced sideways at Meredith, bouncing along next to me and still whisper-talking a mile a minute. She had amazing breasts, actually. Not huge, but round and perky. Did I still appreciate them? Yes, yes I did. I wasn’t going to stare at my friend’s tits like a perv, but I could definitely give them a thumbs-up. Or that pair of undergrad girls over there, heading for the giant glass-spaceship-looking student center across the quad.
Yep, very hot. The tall brunette almost made me wish I wasn’t a professor.
But neither Meredith nor those girls had me raring to go. They didn’t have what I wanted.
Well, you never knew, but the chances of any of them boasting an enormous alpha cock with a knot at the base were at best slim.
“Okay, we’re here!” I shook myself out of my thoughts and found myself at the front door of the lab building. “I’ll wait for you out here,” Meredith said. “Remember the plan?”
“Settle down with my work, wait twenty minutes at least, pull my phone out of my pocket, frown at it, and walk out while looking like I’m making a call,” I recited—for the fifth time. Meredith was a harsh taskmistress. “Go back in looking preoccupied, gather up my laptop in a hurry without seeming to notice the missing thumb drive, and rush out. And then meet you out here.”
“Exactly,” she said. “Now go get ’em, tiger.” She started hummingEye of the Tigerat me and pumping her fists, and I went for the door before I lost it.
Colin would’ve been doing the harmony.
Colin would’ve made me smile for real.
Less than an hour later, I stepped back out the door, laptop—minus the thumb drive—under my arm.
Meredith popped out of the shadows of a towering pine tree. “Well?Well?”
I gave her a genuine grin, because—damn. Wewerepretty cool. “He took the bait. The package is away, the eagle has landed…”
She threw her arms around me and hugged me close, and I wrapped my free arm around her shoulders and buried my face in her hair, savoring the fresh scent of her minty shampoo and the comfort of a moment of triumph shared with someone I cared about.
It didn’t have to be Colin.
Maybe I could manage without him after all, if I focused on the positives.
Chapter 21
Not a Trace
I didn’t manage without him.
Pretending only took me so far, and by the time I got home from work at the end of the day, I couldn’t keep up a front anymore.
By early December, five weeks and four days (but who was counting) after Colin left for California, I’d still only managed to go to sleep in my bed four times, and each of those nights I ended up on the couch by the wee hours anyway.
I’d bought a new mattress and thrown the old one away. The straps and cuffs went to the very back of my closet hidden in an old suitcase, because I couldn’t bear to throwthoseaway—and you couldn’t exactly return, donate, or sell used sex toys. That ranked right up there with video chatting in a movie theater on the list of ways to go straight to hell.
And I’d even moved the bed to the other side of the room, spending part of an afternoon shoving all the furniture around and completely rearranging.
It didn’t matter.
