Love and the Laws of Motion Read online

  “Sorry. I tried to find you online first, but you’re not really online anywhere.”

  He waved away her apology. “You wouldn’t be online either, if you’d seen what I’ve seen. So, Livie—you said it’s Livie, right?—you know my aunt Gloria?”

  “She’s my neighbor.”

  Those thick, expressive eyebrows lifted in surprise. “You’re from the neighborhood?”

  “Yeah. I grew up there. Romano’s Bar? That’s my family’s place.”

  Nick let out a surprised huff of laughter. “Romano’s? That place is still around?”

  Hey. The Romanos might complain about the lousy business, but she wasn’t about to let someone else slag on the bar.

  “Since 1933, and still going strong.” Limping along was perhaps more accurate, but he didn’t have to know that.

  “I haven’t seen that place since I was a kid.”

  “It’s three subway stops away.” How could he be this close to home and yet his own aunt didn’t have a clue how to reach him? Her sisters could track her phone’s location at this very moment.

  The little line between his eyebrows came back. “I don’t get home much.”

  He turned and kept walking across the very large open-plan living area, passing through a door on the far wall, which led to a smaller room. This one, obviously his office, was tucked into the corner of the building, with walls of windows on two sides and the same spectacular view of the bridge. Up against the windows were two long black tables, meeting at right angles in the corner. And every square inch of their surface was covered with computer equipment. Livie counted four jumbo displays and at least three CPU towers buried in a snaking nest of cables and peripherals. Maybe this guy was good enough to tackle the project after all.

  Nick dropped into a black office chair and swiveled around to face her.

  “So what are you looking for?”

  Her eyes were still busy cataloging his setup. Top-notch research labs didn’t have this much computer equipment. There were pieces of hardware she didn’t even recognize. It must have cost him a fortune.

  “I’m looking for some help with a computer program.”

  Nick sighed. “I don’t know what you might have heard about me, but I don’t do tech support. Call Geek Squad.”

  She turned back to face him. Okay, he was extremely attractive and obviously successful, but did he have to be so arrogant? “It’s a little more complicated than that. I need to write a new program for my dissertation.”

  Nick leaned back in his chair, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles. Threading his fingers together, he rested his hands on his abdomen—which looked like it would be firm to the touch. If she were to touch it. How did this computer geek have a body that was so hard and sculpted and distracting?

  “Okay, pitch me.”

  Livie blinked, embarrassed that he might have caught her staring. “Excuse me?”

  “Tell me why I should take on your project.”

  “Um, well, I can pay you, of course.” Although she had the sinking feeling that Nick was a long way from the budget-friendly alternative she was looking for.

  Nick scoffed. “I don’t work for money. I’ve done that already.”

  What a ridiculous thing to say. “And, what, you earned money once and now you have all you’ll ever need?”

  Nick said nothing—he just hiked an eyebrow and smiled—a slow, crooked curling of his lips that had Livie’s toes curling inside her shoes in response. Butterflies set up a flutter in her stomach. Oh, he was way too attractive for his own good.

  It was too bad she was never going to see him again.

  “Okay, so you’re not interested.” She turned toward the door. “Thanks for your time. I’ll just—”

  “I didn’t say that,” he interjected. “I don’t know if I’m interested until you tell me what it is.”

  Taking a deep breath to marshal her thoughts, Livie turned back. “It’s for my dissertation.”

  “You said that.”

  “I’m getting there. We’re going to be receiving a lot of data.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “Me and my thesis advisor, Dr. Janet Finch. She’s brilliant. It’s her theory we’re attempting to prove.”

  “Okay, you’re going to be receiving a lot of data. What kind of data? From where?”

  “I’m getting to that.” Did he ever let anybody finish their train of thought? “There’s already a set of standard routines to sift through Hubble data. But what we’re looking for, what we hope to find, won’t show up in any of the standard analysis tools—”

  “Hold up.” Nick’s feet hit the floor hard as he sat up abruptly. “The Hubble? Like the space telescope?”

  “Yes. Did I mention I’m an astrophysicist?”

  Again, the corner of his mouth twitched with that toe-curling smile. “No, you didn’t. You’re going to get to use the Hubble telescope?”

  “We’ll need to submit a proposal, but that shouldn’t be a problem. We probably won’t get an observing time until next spring, so between now and then, I need to write this program. Do you know anything about astronomy?”

  “Not a thing. I’m in.”

  “Wait...you’ll do it? I haven’t even told you how much the budget is.” There was cheap and then there was what she’d been planning to offer him.

  “Don’t know. Don’t care. Writing new code for Hubble data...see, that’s interesting. I’m in. That’s the pitch I was looking for.”

  “We can’t afford to pay you what you’re obviously used to.” Well, they could, but then they might as well go with the guy they’d already scoped out and blow half the grant money on him. The whole point of this was to find a cheaper alternative.

  “I told you, I don’t work for the money. I mean, yes, people pay me, but the money doesn’t determine what jobs I take on.”

  Who was this guy? How did he start where she started and end up here, having built this life for himself?

  “What does determine it? I mean, what kind of jobs do you usually take?”

  He shrugged before leaning forward and hooking his ankle around another office chair and pulling it closer. “Have a seat. I do whatever appeals to me. A little banking, although not as much of that as I did in the past. Some government work, a lot of consulting. Whatever I’m interested in, really. And only what I’m interested in. I have no interest in doing some tedious corporate gig, no matter how fat the paycheck.”

  Taking the offered chair, she fiddled with the strap of her messenger bag and debated asking him any one of the hundreds of questions swirling around in her head. “I’ve heard some things about you.”

  Leaning back in his chair again, Nick smiled—a full-on grin this time—and his eyes sparked with amusement. His voice dropped into a lower register, something flirty and sexy. “Oh, really? Like what?”

  “You got kicked out of DeWitt.”

  If she’d expected him to get defensive, she was mistaken. His expression didn’t shift in the slightest. “Kicked out, quit—it’s all in your perspective. DeWitt and I chose to part ways.”

  “And you got arrested.”

  Again, not even a ripple of a response in his eyes. She envied his confidence, even if it scared her a little bit.

  “Unindicted,” he said with a careless shrug. “The government and I reached a mutually beneficial agreement.”

  “Which is?”

  “They didn’t file charges and in return, I did some work on their systems, to make sure nobody else can do what I did.”

  “Which was?”

  “I hacked into the Department of Defense.”

  “You hacked the government?” That was not what she’d expected to hear.

  Another shrug. “It wasn’t that hard. Which is why they needed me. I made it hard.”

/>   Well, he sure was confident in his own abilities.

  “So you’re a hacker.” Which was super illegal, when the hackee was the federal government. Growing up surrounded by the other side of law enforcement, she hadn’t so much as been chastised for jaywalking, never mind crimes of that level.

  “Only theoretically now, to keep my skills sharp.”

  “Because it’s illegal.” Surely he’d learned his lesson now, right? Figured out the difference between right and wrong?

  Nick scoffed, swiveling back and forth in his chair. “Legal, illegal. What does that even mean?”

  Apparently not. “Um, one is right and one is wrong.”

  He spun back to face her. “Right and wrong? Right and wrong has nothing to do with what’s legal or illegal. Everything in this world, every person you meet, every choice they make, is all a murky shade of gray. You figure out right and wrong for yourself, Livie.” The way he said her name was like he’d just whispered it in her ear, followed by something dirty.

  “I’m not sure I believe that.”

  He chuckled, and the sound sent a shiver down her spine. “I’m sure you don’t. And that is the difference between me and you.”

  That was far from the only difference between them. Maybe Nick came from the same neighborhood as her, and he had an Italian last name, but the similarities began and ended there.

  He was so...she couldn’t even come up with the right words to describe him. Good-looking for sure, but there was something more, some undeniable presence, something that pulled her in—enthralled her—in spite of his annoying arrogance. Charisma? That hinted at his power, but it didn’t fully explain it.

  She didn’t know what to do with all this nervous, humming awareness, as it had literally never happened to her before. Men—they were definitely out of her area of expertise. She wasn’t even casually familiar with the whole men/dating/sex thing. She hadn’t avoided men and sex on purpose, but she’d never felt compelled to explore it with anyone she’d met. And she wasn’t going to do anything just to say she did it. Now here she was, twenty-five and completely inexperienced with men. That had never once bothered her—until now.

  How did you talk to a guy like Nick? Oh, they were already talking—about her work and his life. But how did she talk to him? How did she—as a woman—engage with a guy like Nick—as a man? If there was an instruction manual on flirting with the opposite sex, Livie’s had gone missing the day they handed them out.

  Now, after all these years, she finally liked a guy and she had absolutely no idea what to do about it. Why did she like him anyway? Sure, he was attractive, but he was also practically a felon—arrogant, cocky—and then there was his alarming moral flexibility. But despite all that, she did like him. To a dangerous degree.

  And now they’d be working together, for who knew how long. She suspected he was way out of her league, but she couldn’t help the tiny spark of excitement—hope—that flamed to life in her chest.

  “So you’ll help me with my coding?”

  “Can’t wait to get started.” His grin turned that spark into a bonfire. He was talking about the computer program, but it felt like he could be alluding to so much more. “So tell me what you’re looking for out there in the stars, Livie.”

  She could feel herself smiling back at him, feel her body beginning to lean toward him. She might not have a clue what to do next, but she was definitely going to grill Jess tonight to find out. “Well—”

  Out in the other room, a door opened and closed, and a voice called out, “Hello?”

  A high, lilting voice.

  In moments, the owner of the voice appeared in the doorway to Nick’s office. She was tall, impossibly skinny, and stunning, with long, pin-straight silky dark blond hair and large blue eyes.

  “Oh, hello,” she said in surprise when she spotted Livie. “I didn’t know Nick was working.”

  She was British, too. Of course. Her accent was like something from Masterpiece Theatre.

  Nick hopped up out of his chair, practically sprinting across the room to the willowy goddess. If Livie had a single doubt left about who she was, the next moments crushed that. He leaned down to kiss her cheek before turning to Livie with a smile that lit him up from the inside. “Livie, this is Poppy, my fiancée.”

  Chapter Three

  The halls of the Astronomy building were barely controlled chaos on the first official day of classes. Undergrads wandered slowly, scanning room numbers looking for the correct classrooms, or they sprinted, desperate to be the first to throw themselves on a professor’s mercy and beg to be let in to an already full section. Livie neatly sidestepped one after another as she made her way to Janet Finch’s office.

  Her door was cracked open when she reached it, but Livie rapped lightly, out of politeness. “Janet?”

  “Livie?” she called out. “Come in! Come in!”

  Her heart sank as she stepped inside and looked around. Janet’s office looked like a bomb had gone off in it. She’d had this whole place organized and perfectly clean at the beginning of summer. All of Janet’s notes scanned and filed, all the books back on the shelves, organized first by subject, then alphabetically by author. Everything had been ready for their return to classes this fall, so they could dive right into Janet’s research without delay.

  Now she couldn’t even see her behind all the clutter.

  “Janet?” As the chair of the Astronomy department, the professor had one of the bigger offices in the building, but still, it shouldn’t be possible to lose her in it.

  Then Livie spotted her light brown flyaway hair, streaked with gray, behind a stack of books and a second later she popped up from behind her paper-strewn desk. “Livie! Sorry, I dropped my pen and then I couldn’t seem to find it.” Janet looked around as if she’d just noticed the mess.

  She seemed to exist on another plane for 99 percent of her life, which was why, Livie suspected, she was so brilliant. It was like she had some direct connection to the stars, seeing the universe with her naked eyes while everybody else had to guess at its shape by the tiny clues it left behind.

  During her senior year, she’d attended a lecture Dr. Janet Finch had given about her new line of research, and her imagination had been captured by all the potential. Livie had stayed behind afterward to ask some questions, and she’d liked Janet right from the start. When the offer came from Adams—delivered by Janet personally—Livie hadn’t been able to say no.

  There had been other offers, but shouldn’t you be passionate about the work, first and foremost? In the end, Livie had followed her heart and Janet and she’d chosen Adams. And now that they had the Skylight grant, it felt as if her gamble had paid off.

  “It does seem to have gotten a little cluttered in here,” Janet murmured, as if the papers mysteriously flung themselves around the room. “And after you had everything tidied up.”

  “No problem. I’ll get it sorted out.” Again. “You wanted me to stop by?”

  Janet looked down at the papers strewn around her desk and then back up at Livie. “I did?”

  “You did.” Livie bit back a smile. “Did you want to talk about the undergrad lab assignments?”

  That had to be it, even if she’d forgotten.

  “Undergrad labs? Yes...ah, yes.” She sifted through the papers on her desk and came up with a spreadsheet, peering closely at it. “Section two. Tuesday evenings. Does that suit you?”

  “Of course. Whatever you think is best.”

  “Section two is the good one,” she said, finally coming fully back to Earth and all its mundane concerns. “The Monday night sessions are always overcrowded and no one shows up for the Friday night ones. That Friday night slot is a waste of a perfectly good graduate student.”

  “Then section two is perfect. Have you checked your email yet?”

  Again, Janet glanced down at her desk,
as if she’d just remembered email existed. “Not yet. I got a little sidetracked this morning.”

  Janet’s “sidetrack” could possibly end up changing human beings’ understanding of time and space, so Livie was happy to overlook the small annoyances.

  “I emailed you an initial purchasing proposal. Let me know what you think.”

  Again, Janet briefly returned to Earth. “Oh, wonderful. I’d love to get started on purchasing equipment as soon as possible.”

  Livie took a deep breath before mentioning her other bit of good news. “And I may have found someone to write our program.”

  Finch looked up in surprise. Her wide, pale blue eyes were magnified by her oversized tortoiseshell glasses. With her tiny willowy frame and the dandelion fluff hair, she sometimes looked like a baby bird in a nest. But it was a mistake to underestimate the razor-sharp intelligence hiding behind her unassuming appearance.

  “Someone in the computer department?”

  Livie scoffed. “No, that was a dead end. If I wanted a first-person shooter game developed, they’d have been perfect, but analyzing Hubble data? Not a chance.”

  “First-person shooter?”

  “Never mind. Anyway, I asked this guy to come in tomorrow during your office hours to meet with you. I hope that’s okay?” She skated right past Nick’s unconventional résumé, hoping that he would so impress Finch at their meeting that she wouldn’t care about his qualifications. Or his police record.

  “Of course, of course.” Janet’s attention had been snagged by something in a report she’d unearthed from her desk, which meant the useful conversation was over for today.

  “Okay, I’m taking off.”

  “Good, good. Nice to have you back, Livie,” she muttered, already lost in the sheet of numbers she was examining.

  Livie paused at the door, glancing back at Janet, absorbed in the universe inside her head. Her advisor was going to be laser-focused during tomorrow’s meeting with Nick, though. He’d better be able to withstand the scrutiny.