by Emma Shortt
“I can be cautious enough for both of us,” he said. “But I’m going to need you to respect that caution.”
“I’m going to need you to respect my need for honesty,” Meg said.
“Absolutely.” He squeezed her to him “I will never lie to you again, Blue. I promise. Will you do it? Come and work with me?”
“Will it be with you, Jack?”
“Yeah. It will.”
“And will it be with Chance, too?”
“Always.”
Meg lifted herself on to her tip-toes and placed a soft kiss against his lips. “Then, it would be my pleasure.”
“And my other question?”
“Which is more important?”
“This one,” he said.
She gave him another kiss. “Say it again.”
“Will you date me?”
“I’ll date Jack Chance,” Meg said. “And I’ll date Jack Richards, too.”
“They’re one and the same.”
“I’m starting to realize that.”
“I did say you were brilliant.”
Meg rolled her eyes. “I have a nasty suspicion we’re going to end up as one of those horrendous whirlwind couples.”
Chance lowered his head and placed his lips against hers. “I’m good with that,” he whispered.
He turned her around so that her ass was pushed against the counter. Even as a shiver of desire ran down Meg’s spine, she couldn’t help but look over her shoulder.
“Chance, there’s something you don’t know about me, either,” she whispered as she nudged the colony away.
“You can tell me anything,” he said.
“I don’t like ants.”
Epilogue
Meg wasn’t even sure why she was so nervous. She had no good reason to be. And yet, nervous she was. She raced around the kitchen, putting things away, dragging other things out, and all the while keeping an eye on the clock above the counter. It was a Star Wars clock, Star Wars. Meg was not a fan and fully intended to replace it with her Star Trek clock the moment the opportunity arose.
Chance wouldn’t like it. He’d give her “the look.” It was the same look she’d spotted on his face when she’d tacked her Sailor Moon poster up in his bedroom, covering up a Lord of the Rings mural that Meg could only describe as creepy. What girl wanted Sauron looking down at her as she slept?
Besides, it was their bedroom now, and despite Chance’s “look” that said Yes, I am so glad you’re here, but please don’t move all of my shit around, Meg fully intended to make this her home, which meant half of her stuff, and that meant the Star Wars clock, was soon to be banished to the bathroom. The light sabers could totally stay, though. A compromise. Never let it be said that Meg couldn’t do that!
Meg nodded to herself at that and pulled a pot off the stove. The liquid inside of it, meant to be an accompaniment to the black cod in the oven, bubbled viscously. Meg wrinkled her nose at the smell. She may have gone slightly too heavy on the ginger. She picked up the pot of Chinese five spice and added a liberal amount. The liquid continued to bubble, but the smell didn’t change.
“Sort your shit out,” Meg growled at it.
She placed the pan back on the stove. Perhaps it just needed a little time. How was the black cod doing? Meg bent down, intending to take a look, but at that same moment her Android beeped with a message coming through from Kate. Meg straightened up and wandered over to the counter. Kate and Will were just leaving, ETA twenty minutes. Did Meg need anything?
Meg shook her head, smiling slightly as she considered the fact that she was messaging her best friend on the app that her boyfriend had built. An app that almost half of the world used.
The Android pinged once more. Kate had sent a link to a message someone had posted about Gabe. Both Meg and Kate had gotten to know the other man pretty well over the past few months, and they both found it hilarious to forward him messages from the tech forums. Most of those messages were posted by women.
Meg settled onto the barstool to read it. She couldn’t help but snort as she read through the thread. She liked Gabe a lot, but she was continually surprised that people bought into the image that he portrayed. Gabe was not sweet and thoughtful. He was brilliant, he was charming, and he was funny, but he was also a total player. If only those women knew… Perhaps she should forward it to him before he arrived? Better yet, she’d read out the juiciest parts during dinner.
“Blue?”
Meg looked up to see Chance wandering into the kitchen. Her heart clenched at the sight of him. At her insistence, his hair had long since grown out into a shock of curls. Meg adored them. The beard remained. Meg adored that, too. There was little about Jack Chance that she didn’t adore.
“Hey, babes.”
“Something smells…good.”
Meg’s eyes widened. She gasped. “Oh my God, the cod!”
She raced over to the oven and pulled the door open. A cloud of smoke hit. The smell of ginger was no more. Instead, the kitchen smelled like…
“It’s burned!”
“Yeah.”
“It makes no sense!” she said, throwing her hands up and kicking the oven door closed. “I followed the recipe with mathematical precision.”
“You stuck to the cooking times?”
She had not…that damn, distracting thread. “Yes.”
“You got the temperature right?”
She had gone a little higher than recommended, but then she’d been late putting the cod in. “Yes, Jack.”
He grinned as he dropped the bags he was carrying on the counter. “I’m just asking.”
“Well, don’t,” Meg snapped. “I did everything exactly right.”
“Okay.”
“It shouldn’t be burned.”
“No.”
“And they’ll be here in a minute.”
Chance made his way across to her. He reached out, turning the oven and the stove off. The pan of questionable liquid he placed on the side.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter,” Meg said. “We have three people coming over. Three people to feed. And I wanted to feed them myself, with an actual recipe, made from scratch and everything.”
“Blue…”
“Is that the cake?”
Chance swiveled around, following Meg’s gaze to the bags on the counter. “Yeah.”
“How much did you buy?”
“I picked up some other stuff, too.”
Meg narrowed her eyes. She recognized the logo on two of the three bags. An image of a rice Luna-the-cat flashed through her mind. “You bought dinner?”
“I bought a back-up dinner.”
“You knew I was going to ruin it?”
“I calculated a strong probability.”
“Chance!”
Chance pulled Meg into his arms. Despite the back-up dinner on the counter, she let him, sighing slightly as his warmth surrounded her. They spent quite a bit of time in each other’s arms. But then, living together, working together, that was hardly a surprise.
“Blue, you are the most talented woman I have ever met,” Chance said as he dropped a kiss on her open lips.
“Not at cooking.”
“You can’t be good at everything.”
“You’re good at it.”
“I’ve practiced.”
She narrowed her eyes again. “You still beat me when we run as well.”
“I’ve practiced that, too.”
“And you solved the Millennium Prize problem before I did.”
Chance dropped another kiss on her lips. “Are you ever going to let that go?”
“Once you tell me the answer,” Meg said.
“You almost have it.”
“Chance…”
“You’re so close,” he added. “Think how satisfied you’ll be when you finally figure it out.”
“I want to figure it out now,” Meg said. She felt like stamping her feet.
Eight months working
at X-Tech, eight months with an entire team at her disposal, and more resources than she could ever have hoped for, and still Meg couldn’t quite get there. It maddened her that Chance knew the answer, that he only smiled as she talked through her latest thoughts, never giving her any inkling of whether she was right or wrong. He did that with all the problems in the Golden Group, and Meg wasn’t the only one it infuriated. It didn’t help, either, that he and Gabe had deleted every bit of ERQ’s stolen research. Of course, Meg knew it would be wrong to use it, but still…
“Practice, Blue,” he whispered.
“Dammit, Chance, you never had to practice at it,” she said. “You got it the moment you decided to do it. It’s like that for everything with you.”
“You know that’s not true,” he said. “If it was, I wouldn’t have needed you to come into my life and show me how to do the really important stuff.”
“Which is?”
“This, Blue, just this.”
He leaned in and took her lips into his. His curly beard tickled her skin as he moved. It made Meg tingle, it always made her tingle, and she had little choice but to give into it. Chance knew it as well, he had long since learned how to deal with her tantrums.
“Now, why are you in a bad mood?” he whispered when they eventually pulled apart.
“I’m not.”
“Meg…”
She sighed. “I’m nervous.”
“Because our friends are coming to dinner?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve had dinner together plenty of times.”
“But this will be the first time Kate and Will and Gabe are here in our apartment,” Meg said.
“I’m lost.”
“It has meaning to it, Chance,” she said. “I want it all to go well. I want everyone to have a good time. I want everyone to be happy.”
“Everyone is happy.”
“Not if they eat that they won’t be.”
Chance laughed that that. “Then we’ll eat the food I bought.”
Meg eyed the liquid. It was still bubbling. Where had she gone wrong? Why wasn’t cooking as easy as math? “I guess we’ll have to.”
“Blue, I didn’t fall for your cooking skills,” Chance said. “I fell for you. For your smile. For your laugh. For your brilliance. You’re completely perfect in my eyes, you know that. Completely beautiful.”
“I thought beauty was for mathematics,” Meg said.
“And for you,” Chance replied. “And only you.”
A buzzer sounded. Meg started even as her heart melted. “They’re here.”
“You go greet them,” Chance said. “I’ll sort out the food.” He dropped another kiss on her lips. “And remember, it’s not about what we serve; it’s about the people we’re serving it to.”
Many hours later, as Meg looked around the table in their home, at Kate and Will sharing a piece of chocolate cake, at Gabe laughing at something that Chance said, she knew that Chance was right. In the end, this was what life was all about. The puzzles, the codes, even the beautiful mathematics, came second to this.
“Thanks, Chance,” she whispered later that night, when the apartment was theirs once more.
“For what?” he asked.
She gestured between them. “For this.”
He smiled down at her. It was the same kind of smile that Will wore whenever he looked at Kate. The same smile that Meg’s parents shared whenever they looked at each other. It was the smile that almost everyone in the world searched for and cherished when they finally found it.
“It is my pleasure,” he said. “Always will be.”
He led her into the kitchen. The last of the chocolate cake was on the counter. Next to it sat a lemon cake. It had yet to be touched. Meg still hadn’t told him that she really did prefer chocolate.
“When did you get this?” Meg asked.
“Earlier,” Chance said. He leaned against the counter, arms crossed, an intense kind of look suddenly on his face.
Ordinarily, that look would have caught Meg’s attention, but the cake…there was a pattern in the middle of it, a weird, winding pattern…why had the baker put it on there? Meg leaned forward, eyeing the pattern, trying to understand why it was even there. More importantly, why it made her feel…odd.
“Chance,” she began.
He came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her stomach, a stomach that was now flipping weirdly. “Blue?”
“Did you…” The words trailed off as something clicked deep inside Meg’s brain…something she had been waiting a very long time for. It was an understanding…a leap…an answer. “Jack,” she gasped, because it was not Chance who held her now, it was Jack, Jack Richards.
“The tech is waiting,” Jack said.
“Waiting…”
“For you,” he said.
“But…” Meg shook her head even as the understanding continued to fill her. “You said you wouldn’t help. That I had to figure it out myself.”
“A complex pattern is not help,” he said. “It’s just a nudge. A nudge that only one other person in the entire world could possibly understand. Only one other person could possibly figure out.”
“Me…”
“Yes, you, my brilliant partner,” he said. “Now, go, get this done.”
A quick smile, a quick kiss, and Meg was off. Her laptop awaited her, the solution did too, finally, and once it was done, once the prize was claimed, Chance would be there all over again. As Meg sat down to start writing the equations that fit the pattern on the cake, her heart was fuller than she could ever remember it being.
A game of chance.
And it was one that both she, and Jack, had won.
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Acknowledgments
I like to think that an author puts a little bit of themselves into every character that they create. For instance, Meg and I share a very creative interpretation of time. My lovely editor, Erin, knows this only too well. This book is dedicated to her not just because, as always, she made it better than it was when I sent it to her, but because she waited forever and a day to get the chance to do that. Thank you, Erin. Promise not to keep you waiting so long next time!
Thanks also to my equally as patient family. Yes, I pretty much ignored you all over the months that it took to write this, but we all knew it was going to happen, and we know it will happen again and again. Such is our lot. But…it’s a lot we share, and that makes the whole thing awesome.
Lastly, thank you to every reader who has ever picked up one of my books. In the beginning I write them for me. But, by the end, they’re always for you. I hope you enjoy reading this one as much as I enjoyed writing it.
About the Author
As a kid Emma wanted to be an astronaut, or maybe Captain Janeway. Because she didn’t really think her career choices through very well, she ended up in an everyday geek job, crunching numbers and sighing over syntax. It seemed a long way from the stars, and in an effort to remain sane, Emma decided to get serious about her other passion. Writing.
Several years later, and Emma has yet to walk on the moon or sit in the captain’s chair, but she is still writing. She scribbles stories in all sorts of genres: contemporary, paranormal, post-apocalyptic, historical, sci-fi…if she hasn’t tried it yet, she will before long. The only common theme is the romance. A hopeless romantic, everything Emma writes has a love story in there somewhere.
She lives on the west coast of England with her very Greek husband, delightful offspring, and multitude of cats. Apart from all things geek, reading is her main hobby and she likes nothing better than getting home from a hard day at work and curling up with a book, though sometimes she gets home and writes one instead.
Also by Emma Shortt…
The Seduction Game
Waking Up Dead
Waking Up Alive
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