Delphine Moreau was enjoying her time alone with Aric. Alone, that is, except for Alex and Carlos. Alone, as in no Edith or Carol. Mostly no Edith. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the Brit. She did.

  Mais tout est juste dans l’amour et guerre, she thought.

  All’s fair in love and war.

  They’d moved almost in unison, she and Edith, taking him under their wings. Making him feel welcome in a new country, and a new university. She’d remembered afterward, once her higher brain finally reasserted itself, that he was not just a ridiculously attractive man. He was something else, and it was their responsibility, their mission, their holy charge, to find out what.

  Whatever else she could discover privately on her own personal time with him was no one’s business.

  He was young. Not as young as the other undergraduates—he’d spent four years in the Armée des états-Unis, after all—but younger than she was. Younger than everyone on the team: all newly minted PhDs, already carving out reputations in their fields. Dr. Martell’s project would cement those reputations once it was complete. In Delphine’s case, it would secure her scientific one. Her professional reputation had preceded her to Engnd—and Surrey. No one else on the team had ever appeared in Vogue France or Madame Figaro.

  Notre propre Hedy Lamarr, Le Monde had called her, and not just because she bore a striking resembnce to the Hollywood star. Despite the many offers to do so, she had no interest in acting. But she would continue to model until the major publications lost interest, whenever her schedule allowed. It was still her primary source of income. Our own Hedy Lamarr.

  It was science that most interested her now.

  And their new test subject.

  She was used to beautiful men. Models. Actors. Athletes. The occasional politician that rose to that level of attractiveness. Regur men who thought they had a chance of getting her into bed. Some of them had been right. Most had been wrong, for various reasons.

  But Aric—

  His gifts ran far beneath his attractive skin. Power. Ability. Things that all men and women are supposed to seek. For their own sake.

  Not him.

  He seemed to be embarrassed by the gifts that something had given to him. Like he carried a prize meant for someone else. It was still early days, but she didn’t think he had a conceited molecule in his body—his body that she found herself thinking about far too often.

  In all the men she’d dated, she kept finding the same fw. Eventually, she stopped bming them. They weren’t broken. She just kept choosing the same model.

  Look at me. Admire me. If you’re lucky, I’ll look back.

  It wasn’t weakness. It wasn’t strategy. It was equal parts instinct and pattern. Her instincts chose them; her pattern discarded them. Sometimes too quickly. A few might have worked out, if she’d given them time—if she’d done the work. There was loneliness in that thought, but there was also wisdom. Why invest in maybes when another beautiful man was always waiting to be chosen?

  God had given her wit and beauty, and she used both to her advantage. As a sword at the beginning. As a shield at the end.

  But Aric hadn’t engaged.

  Her sword met no resistance—no parry, no csh. Only air.

  His charming smile. His absence of pretense. The quiet gentleness that didn’t disarm her so much as leave her exposed. She realized, in those first few passes, that she had joined the battle with the wrong weapons.

  All her old motions—so well-practiced, so often effective—failed her. The pattern was different. Foreign. And for once, she couldn’t read the rules.

  She found herself orbiting him—irregur, off-axis, drawn by a gravitational constant that belonged to neither of them alone, but only existed in the space between. Something new—an attraction that obeyed no formu she recognized. Nothing was familiar. No road signs to point her in the right direction. Just the quiet, unmistakable sense that the equation of state had shifted—and she hadn’t solved it yet. She’d been reading from her familiar script, the one she knew by heart. But he didn’t know his lines. He didn’t ask to be admired, or adored. She could barely look him in the eye without him blushing. He didn’t ck confidence. She knew that. He just hadn’t learned yet how to use his beauty as a shield. In a way she envied him his innocence in that regard. It had been years since anything penetrated her hard shell. Until Aric.

  With Aric… it hadn’t been instinct or pattern. Sword or shield. Fight or flight. From the first moment, it had been protect. Nurture. Keep him safe.

  It wasn’t rational. It wasn’t even romantic, not at first.

  But it had only deepened from there—slowly, unmistakably.

  And that was the danger.

  Because this time, the pattern was broken. She wasn’t pnning to leave.

  She was pnning to stay.

  And if she did, that meant cracking her hard shell and letting him past her defenses. No scripts. No well-rehearsed exits. No hiding behind her beautiful exterior.

  Delphine had never been shy about using her beauty. She knew it was a gift—and she’d learned its value early. It opened doors with barely a knock, just as it had for women since the beginning of time. When necessary, she wielded the sword: a well-pced smile, a touch on the arm, a subtle lean-in. The same skeleton key beautiful women had always used to unlock the world’s bounty. And when charm wasn’t enough, she wore her armor—the polished shield of practiced poses and pleasant deflection.

  Men were weak. That wasn’t cynicism—it was anthropology. Ancient. Enduring. And in no way her fault. Was it wrong to use her gifts? Was it wrong to live in the world as it was, rather than how it should be?

  But she knew the other side of that coin. Sex sold—magazines, clothes, fantasies. She was a sex symbol. An object to be wanted. To be collected, admired, devoured. A commodity.

  She knew what it was to be looked at, studied, appraised like merchandise, while the person inside drifted further and further away.

  Smile. Tilt your head. Lie perfectly still on a freezing beach.

  It was easier, after a while, to let her true self hide somewhere the cameras could never reach.

  But not here. Not in science.

  Here, it was her mind that mattered. Her intellect. The things that couldn’t be captured in a photograph or fttened into a billboard. Something that could still be admired—but not from afar. To admire that, you had to come close. You had to see her not as a symbol, but as a person.

  It was still too soon, of course. Too early to know what Aric saw when he looked at her. But she caught herself hoping—foolishly, perhaps—that someday he might see past her armor. Past the symbol. That he might see her.

  And if he did… she’d let him.

  Because Aric... he made her forget all that. Forget the instinct to perform, to guard, to shine just right for someone else’s gaze.

  With him, she didn’t have to be beautiful. When she was with him, she found something else inside her. Something that didn’t have to prove itself, or compare itself to others. Something comfortable and quiet.

  He was shy.

  Which she found so adorable she could barely stand it.

  And almost by osmosis, she became shy when she was around him. Shy-ish, at any rate.

  Something in her shifted—slow and almost imperceptible, like noticing the absence of pain only after it had been gone awhile.

  When she was near him, she didn’t have to be anything more than herself.

  Something quiet.

  Something at peace.

  She smiled as she watched him manipute objects, moving them back and forth. Turning water to ice and then back to water. Generating visible light from no discernible source. Alex and Carlos had a long checklist of tasks to get through while Hank sat in a separate room and recorded observations, blind to what was happening, only seeing what the instruments saw.

  She had no immediate tasks—only time.

  She spent it watching him.

  Admiring him.