Divorced for Being Barren, I Came Back Pregnant by His Rival novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Chief Scientist

Eliot walks into the rival's tower with one notebook page and argues the chemistry as an equal; August hires him on the spot, and in the elevator down Eliot feels slick for the first time in four years.

The security guard at the VanDusen Therapeutics desk looked at the cardboard box, and then at Eliot's wrinkled dinner shirt.

"Sir, you need an appointment."

"Tell him Eliot Standish is here about step six."

"Sir..."

"He'll know what that means."

It was Monday, nine in the morning, and the lobby was glass and white stone and twenty feet of ceiling.

Eliot had slept two nights in a hotel with his phone face down.

Grayson had texted fourteen times, and he had read none of them.

The guard picked up the phone, spoke briefly into it, and put it down very slowly.

"Floor thirty-one," he said. "Mr. VanDusen is coming down himself."

The elevator opened and August VanDusen stepped out with his sleeves rolled to the elbow.

He stopped when he saw the box.

"Step six," he said.

"Your team's route to the stable intermediate fails at scale," Eliot said. "I read your last paper in the hotel. You're losing forty percent in the crystallization, and you keep calling it a purity problem."

August didn't smile, but his eyes did.

"Upstairs."

The corner office had a long window on the river and a glass desk with nothing on it but a laptop and a cold coffee.

Eliot set the box down and took out the first notebook.

He opened it to a page near the back and laid it in front of August.

"That's not a purity problem. It's a solvent order. You add them backward."

August read the page.

He read it the way Eliot had never seen a man read, with his whole head bent, one finger sliding down the margin.

Four minutes went by.

"The reagent order is wrong in our process," August said. "And right in this."

"Yes."

"There's a date on this page."

"There's a date on every page," Eliot said. "And my advisor's signature, and a lab stamp."

August turned the notebook over and looked at the cover.

It said E. STANDISH, COLUMBIA, VOL. 1.

Something went through the room, very quiet.

"This route," August said slowly, "is the first claim in the Halcyon patent."

"I know."

"The Auchincloss filing is five months after this page."

"I know that too."

August looked up, and Eliot saw that he had understood the entire thing.

The marriage, the box and what they had done to him, all of it, in the time it took to read a margin.

He did not say he was sorry.

He didn't say anything soft.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"A lab. A budget. My own name on the door, and your lawyers on the Auchinclosses until they bleed."

"Chief scientist."

"What?"

"That's the title." August pushed back his chair. "You've told me for ten minutes how my people are wrong, and you're right. I'd rather have you inside the building than outside it."

He named a salary, and then equity, and Eliot's ears rang.

"That's three times what Auchincloss pays its chief chemist," August said. "I know, because I tried to hire him. Say yes."

Eliot's pulse was still unsteady, and he knew why.

That smell again, cedar and smoke, filling the whole room.

"I have terms," he said.

"Go on."

"One, work only. No touching in the building." He kept his voice flat. "Two, if a heat comes, and one will, I go home and nobody comes with me. Three, no marking, no bite, not ever."

"Why would a heat come?"

"Because I haven't had one in four years, and my blood is clearing."

August's jaw tightened.

He didn't ask who had done it.

"Agreed," he said. "Come meet your team."

The glass elevator carried them up to the lab floor.

Eliot stood against the back wall and August stood in front of the buttons with his hands in his pockets.

Thirty floors of the city fell away behind the glass.

The car was small, and the scent was heavy in it, and Eliot's mouth had gone dry.

He caught himself looking at the back of August's neck, the sandy hair cut close above his collar.

August turned his head.

His eyes dropped to Eliot's throat, and stayed there, and he took one step closer.

For a long moment neither of them moved.

Eliot could see the pulse in the thick neck, and the gold flecks in the gray eyes.

"Do you always sniff your new hires, VanDusen?" he said.

August's face went blank, and then, slowly, rueful.

"I'm trying very hard not to."

The doors opened on the lab, bright and humming.

A woman with auburn hair in a clip and rimless glasses was waiting there with a tablet.

"Audra Quill, general counsel," she said, and shook his hand. "I've been waiting four years for someone to say step six to him."

By two o'clock Eliot had a badge, a desk with a view of the Hudson, and a lab coat with his name stitched on it.

It had been stitched that morning.

August had asked for his size on Friday night, in a text to someone, before he had ever walked into the building.

Eliot noticed, and didn't think about it.

At six he went down alone.

The lobby elevator was mirrored and empty, and the doors slid shut with a soft hush.

He leaned his head back against the wall, closing his eyes.

Then heat rushed through his lower belly, hard and sudden, and something warm ran down the inside of his thigh.

He stood there with his hand over his mouth.

It was slick.

It had been four years, and he'd forgotten what it felt like.

His body had been shut up in a dark room, and somebody had just opened the door.

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