And Rue could clearly see his fury. “Eli,” she said. Not scared, or distant. Just compassionate as her cool fingers wrapped around his cheek. Like she actually cared. She rose as tall as she could and pressed a featherlight kiss to the base of his jaw.

It was a brief, beautiful moment of hope, and it twisted Eli’s heart until he couldn’t bear it.

“No,” he said. He forced her to retreat, and when the backs of her thighs hit the conference table, he spun her around.

They were both immediately, inexplicably winded.

He barely waited for Rue’s palms to find the table. He spread her legs with his foot, tore at the opening of her pants, and pulled them just low enough for what he had in mind. He unbuckled his belt, loud in the quiet room, and slid his cock out of his slacks, pulling her underwear to the side. He teetered, pressed against the wet lips of her cunt, nearly breaching her hot entrance, ready to push inside and show her that she was his—

He was out of his fucking mind.

In the hallway, mere feet and a single unlocked door away from them, someone was discussing weekend plans. Eli’s thumb grazed Rue’s clit.

She shuddered. “Do it. Please.”

He shook with restraint, his vision blurry with want. Rue bucked back, and he had to grip her hip to avoid sinking inside her.

Fuck.

He wrapped his arms around her stomach, hugging her to himself as tightly as he could. He would have taken any excuse to let her go, but she was mellow in his arms, and when he buried a pained groan in her throat, she wrapped her hands around his forearm and held on to him as firmly as he held her.

Eli’s rage dissolved into soul-deep resignation. He had no right to resent her for being the best and worst thing to ever happen to him. And if his heart wasn’t going to survive her, then so be it.

He extricated himself from her slowly, not meeting her eyes as he readjusted her clothes, then his. When he was done, she leaned back against the table, a fine tremor in her hands, and met his gaze head-on.

In the hallway, people laughed and said their goodbyes.

“Eli.”

The things I want from you, Rue—you have no idea, and maybe never will.

“I’m sorry.”

He almost laughed. “For what?”

“For wanting to ask Hark instead of you. It’s just . . .” Her voice was low. “He was the safest option.”

His eyes narrowed, and she gave him one of her what don’t you get? stares.

So this was falling for someone. A ruthless expansion of the senses. The meticulous, unintentional cataloging of a person’s head tilt, the shape their hand made around a wineglass, the little tells in their gaze.

“If you think you can trust him more than you can trust me—”

“It’s because I don’t trust him.” Her lips trembled. “Whatever Hark tells me about Florence, I can choose not to believe. With you . . . once you tell me, I’m not going to be able to walk away from it.”

Eli was going to have to hurt her, and he hated that even more than anything Florence had done.

He nodded and crossed his arms again, fingers drumming against his biceps. “We were Florence’s grad students.”

Rue nodded. “It was in the deposition.”

“Minami was her postdoc. Hark and I didn’t originally come to UT to work with her, but she took us on when our mentor left unexpectedly. It was not a passing acquaintance. If she says she doesn’t remember us, it’s a deliberate lie.”

“And then Florence left you, too? And now you’re looking for revenge?”

God, he fucking wished. “Then she stole our work.”

Only a single, slow blink betrayed Rue’s surprise. “Not the fermentation tech. That was her idea.”

“The fermentation tech was Minami’s idea. Florence’s idea, the one she’d gotten millions of dollars to test, dead-ended in year one of the grant. Florence had to pivot. Hark and I needed a new lab, and no one else had the funds, the expertise, or frankly the will to take us on. Florence was barely older than us, had never had graduate mentees, but she was obviously a talented engineer. We had to choose between working with her and leaving the program. It was a no-brainer.”

“And then?”

“For two years, we worked that sometimes shitty, sometimes rewarding grad student life. You know what that’s like. A lot to be done, but the process we’d isolated was promising. Then we had a breakthrough.”

“Was Florence an active member of the research group?”

“Short answer, yes.” He thought about it. Tried to collect his opinions in shapes that were as fair as they could be. The things I do for you, Rue. “I might be biased, so you’ll have to compare and contrast with Florence’s recollection. Mine is that, intellectually, Minami was very much leading the project. Florence was a great sounding board, but was busy. We never stopped asking her for advice, but over time we transitioned to mostly reporting our progress. Her grants covered stipends and materials. She also rented off-campus lab space. Which did seem odd, but she said that renting pre-equipped labs was less expensive than buying new equipment, and the funding institute had recommended it. Fair enough, we thought. We were done with classes and didn’t need to be on campus. You know what grad school’s like after comps—no formal oversight. We ended up mostly isolated from the rest of the department. Our codependency origin story,” he added dryly. He had no clue whether Rue believed him—his fathomless, enigmatic girl.

“And when the tech was ready?”

“We had a breakthrough two years in, before the summer. By this point we were off-site students, virtually no contact with anyone at UT. We got a month off for the summer. Hark and I backpacked in Europe. Minami had just met Sul. We came back, and it all went to shit.

“At first we just couldn’t get in touch with Florence. She wouldn’t reply to emails, answer phone calls. We were worried about her, so we went to our department head. That’s when we discovered that Florence had quit, and there was an ongoing dispute between her and the university regarding the rightful owner of the tech. Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and that shit. Meanwhile, the three of us are glancing at each other, wondering what the fuck is going on.”

“What did Florence say when you next saw her?” Rue asked.

“You were there.”

“What do you mean?”

“The next time I saw Florence was at Kline, last month. Florence refused to meet us, or to otherwise acknowledge our existence, for the past decade. There was no closure for us, which made it even harder to move on. Once, Minami waited by her apartment, hoping to confront her. She went on her own, figuring Hark and I might come across as intimidating.”

“And?”

“Florence called the police on her.”

There was a slight flinch that a less devoted observer of Rue might have missed. Once upon a time, Eli might have found some degree of happiness in telling her the truth, because it would have meant taking something away from Florence. All he could think about now was what he was taking away from Rue herself.

“For whatever it’s worth, and after ruminating over the matter for years, I don’t believe Florence planned to cut us out from the start,” he said. “Hark disagrees.”

“Why do you believe that?”

He shrugged. “Contextual clues. Wishful thinking? She was openly unhappy at UT. The biofuel tech could be brought to market and get her out, but Florence needed to own the patent. And the only way she could keep it was by proving that she hadn’t developed the tech with federal funds. Unfortunately, our stipends were on record, paid with federal grant money.”

“Ah.”

“She had to minimize our involvement. We were an . . . endurable sacrifice.”

“Why didn’t you report her?”

“We did. But even just a decade ago, things were different—and we hadn’t been seen around in years. There was little proof of our involvement. For all UT knew, we’d been playing pinball for twenty-four months. It was our word against hers, and a grad student’s word was worth very little. Then the case became highly publicized.” Rue couldn’t have missed the cable news pieces, the op-eds, the way public attention had been suddenly riveted by the very uninteresting topic of patent law. “Charming young female researcher tries to change the world with environmentally friendly fuels, does the work on her own time and dime, and UT wants to take ownership away from her. David taking on Goliath. A PR nightmare for UT, and they wanted it swept under the rug. It including the three of us, and the fuss we were kicking up, because them fucking over one person sounded bad, but them fucking over four? Even worse. Hark and I were asked to leave the program. Minami’s contract wasn’t renewed. We had no money. We saw two lawyers, and they both told us that we didn’t have a case. And then my father died, and that shit seemed like the least of our problems.”