Meredith was left in a small apartment in a smaller town with no friends, no family, and very little money. She had lasted about two months before she left him. So much for her vows of for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer.
Zeke shook thoughts of his ex-wife from his head and concentrated on the specimen in the microscope instead. He was in over his head with his demand to be put to work. Not only was his stupid PhD from Harvard completely useless today, but he was going to have to work long hours every night to play catch-up.
“Hey, Zeke.”
He lifted his gaze at the familiar voice and found Kate leaning her hip against the desk next to him. She was smiling, and she crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. Kate had been revived at the same time as himself. “After ten years of hibernation, it wouldn’t kill you to smile,” she joked.
Everyone on his team knew he didn’t find life particularly amusing. He might have been slightly more carefree as a young child, but hard work on a virus he eventually succumbed to and a bum marriage had put him in a permanently bad mood. “My muscle memory hasn’t changed,” he teased back, letting the corners of his lips tip up in the only form of a smile he ever used.
Kate had been one of the few people who’d ever coaxed even that much out of him. Not because he was interested in her as more than a friend, but because she had his number and knew how to push his buttons to get him to lighten up like no one else. “Apparently not. Listen, Grayson, Colton, and I are meeting with the tech guys to bring us up to date on the latest technology. Join us.” She didn’t ask. She was telling him.
He sighed. He’d insisted he didn’t need any help when Michelle suggested it. He’d been a fool, however. Obviously computers had changed so much in the last decade he hardly recognized a thing on the screen. “Yeah. I should do that. When are you meeting?”
“Four this afternoon. In the conference room. We’ll meet a few hours every afternoon until we’ve got it.”
He nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll see you there.”
Kate bounced from the room in her usual energetic way that apparently hadn’t been affected by preservation. When she disappeared, Zeke shifted his attention to Michelle, who was staring at him over the top of a pair of reading glasses.
He immediately noticed two things. One, she had caught him halfway smiling at Kate. And two, she looked like a completely different person in the glasses, especially now that he was looking at her directly. The long braid hanging over one shoulder was also distinct from Meredith. His ex would never have been caught dead without her hair curled and styled and her makeup perfectly in place.
Michelle had on minimal makeup and had probably pulled her hair back haphazardly that morning without giving a shit what anyone thought. Tendrils hung loose around her face, teasing her cheeks. He visualized tucking the errant strands behind her ears.
Jesus, Zeke. He jerked his gaze away from her and picked up the data sheet in front of him to pretend to study it. His face was flushed from being caught staring. He felt like a ten-year-old boy. In fact, his social skills where women were concerned hadn’t changed much in the last twenty years since he was a ten-year-old boy.
While he attempted to control the shaking of his hands, it occurred to him that Michelle had other qualities Meredith couldn’t compete with. She was competent, educated, and intelligent. Why was he comparing the two women anyway? For fuck’s sake. Were his defense mechanisms so automatic that any woman who even had brown hair triggered his grumpiness?
Who was he kidding? His defense mechanisms were going bonkers because Michelle was hot and he hadn’t expected to react to anyone physically within the first few weeks of being brought back to life. Tall. Slender. Great legs. Mesmerizing chocolate eyes. And those glasses… They made her look downright studious. Which she was of course. But it was sexy on her. Meredith had never given off a vibe of intelligence.
Zeke shook his wandering thoughts from his mind. What was wrong with him?
He didn’t date anyone ever. Not just coworkers. He’d spent the next four years after Meredith left bitter and alone, sequestered in the bunker, trying to save people’s lives. In the end, his own life had been one of them.
Since waking up, Zeke had felt out of body. Something was…off. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but he felt a little like he was floating around watching himself, instead of participating. Apparently he was not alone. The others who had awakened before him expressed similar reactions. Emily had been the first person reanimated. Tushar and Trish—the married couple who headed up the original team—had been two and three. And then Dade.
Zeke took a breath as he thought about Dade. His best friend. A man who had been hiding in a remote cabin, fighting for his life. He’d had the genetic marker for another type of anemia that decided to kick into gear as soon as he received the cure for the first type of anemia they all had contracted a decade ago—AP12.
Life was fucking unfair. Even though Zeke had only been reanimated three weeks ago, he was aware of everything Ryan Anand had done to try to save Dade’s life. Luckily, Zeke had been able to see his friend for a few hours last week before Dade had received the cure for AP12 and an experimental stem cell therapy that stood less than a 50 percent chance of saving his life. What kind of fucked-up world allowed a man to be brought back from preservation only to kill him with some other disease?
Perhaps half of the reason Zeke was so bitter had to do with Dade. Everyone in the bunker was sullen over the possibility of losing Dade. Both the old team who knew him well and the new team who didn’t want to lose a single person.
Zeke found his gaze wandering to Michelle again. She wasn’t looking at him this time. She was talking to two coworkers who were members of the more recent Project DEEP team. They were handpicked from their respective military academies for this project just as Michelle had been, as well as every member of the original team beginning almost three decades ago.
As Zeke watched Michelle smile at them, nodding in agreement to something he couldn’t hear, he sat up straighter. A deep buried piece of him was coming to life. Unbidden. He shifted his weight in the chair, his breath caught in his lungs. Apparently, all parts of his body were well and truly in good working order.
He forced himself to look away, glancing around the room at the others, wondering if he might experience the same hitch in his breath as he did when looking at Michelle. Maybe being reanimated jump-started his libido in some unusual way.
Surely his physical reaction to her was an anomaly. After years of denying himself any woman at all, perhaps the current down time he was experiencing had made him more aware of their existence. He glanced around the room. Crap, not the case at all. Michelle was the only woman in the bunker who had caught his attention.
Dammit.
Michelle followed Zeke around the room out of her peripheral vision for the next several hours. She found herself pissed at him and unable to shake the feeling, even as the afternoon progressed. After giving her nothing but a scowl and a bad attitude, he had not only smiled at Kate but agreed to take computer lessons with her after flat-out denying the need for any extra help when Michelle suggested it.
There was no reason for her to be so affected. Who the hell cared if the man didn’t like her? She knew nothing about him. In fact, he and Kate had worked together for a few years before they’d been preserved. They had history. As friends? Or more?
Michelle shook the questions from her mind. She should not give a rat’s ass.
When Zeke left the room at four to go meet with the others, she breathed a sigh of relief. It was absurd to let the man get under her skin. She wasn’t sure if her frustration had to do with the fact that she didn’t like people to so summarily dismiss her, or if she hated the idea of Zeke in particular disliking her.
Either way, the feeling was foreign. Michelle was well-liked among her peers. She was friendly and outgoing in a profession where many people were cocky or self-absorbed. She hadn’t been raised to think she was
better than anyone around her, and she never had.
Did Zeke think he was better than her? He acted as if that were the case when he tossed out his credentials, as if spending a few years at Harvard excused him from being polite for life.
If his animosity extended to all humans, fine. She would deal with it. But if he didn’t like her in particular… A chill shook her body.
She was going to have to put on her charm and force him to like her. Though Lord knew she couldn’t imagine why she cared. No matter how much she’d tried to shake it, her first reaction was always wanting new people to like her. It was ingrained in her. Had been from a young age. A southern thing, always wanting to please people and make them happy. As a child she had learned to kill people with kindness until they had no choice but to like her.
Eventually, she’d realized she spent way too much time trying to fit into other people’s mold, keeping herself from being who she was meant to be. She had changed a lot since leaving her childhood home to seek advanced degrees. And now here she was, suddenly reverting back to her old self, thinking she needed to impress Zeke so he would like her. The idea pissed her off.
“Hey.” Emily Zorich startled her from behind, making Michelle jump in her seat.
She spun around to find the room empty except for Emily. She must have really been deep in thought. She was usually more observant than she’d been today. All her brain cells had taken a leave of absence from the moment Temple suggested she work with the disagreeable Zeke Holleran.
“You okay?” Emily asked, frowning.
“Yeah.” Michelle sighed, setting her glasses on the table and then swiping a hand down her face. “Exhausted, I guess. I didn’t hear you come in.”
Emily leaned her butt against the edge of the desk. “I heard Temple assigned you to work with Zeke.”
“Yep.” She pursed her lips, not wanting Emily to realize how much of her day had been squandered out of perseverating over Zeke from every imaginable angle.
Emily smirked. “How’s that going?”
“Fine.” Michelle returned her attention to the computer, moving her mouse around to shut it down for the night. “I didn’t see him much. He spent most of the day familiarizing himself with the research and then went with a few others to get some computer training.”
Emily was silent for long enough that Michelle finally glanced at her to find her still smirking. “In my experience, a person doesn’t have to spend much time with Zeke before they want to throttle him. I figured you could use some advice and moral support.”
Michelle let her shoulders fall as she blew out a breath. “Yeah. You’re right. It took about two minutes. What’s his deal? I should have thought to ask you. You’ve known him a long time.” Michelle and Emily had gotten close since Emily’s reanimation eight months ago. It was hard to remember that Emily had worked with Zeke prior to their vitrification.
“He’s always been a serious guy, but any sort of happiness he might have felt earlier in life fled with his bitchy ex-wife.”
Michelle flinched. “He was married?”
Emily nodded. “Not for very long. She was a gold digger who lasted about two months in Falling Rock before she divorced him.”
“Damn. That’s harsh.” It also explained a lot.
“I don’t think he trusts women.”
“Got it.” Michelle sat up straighter. “Well, he’s met his match because if he thinks I’m going to cower to him, he’s lost his mind. I spent way too much of my childhood deferring to the male species and killing myself to ensure I made them happy. Been there. Done that. Not going back. If he thinks I’ll put up with that shit, he’s wrong.”
Emily smiled. “Good. Don’t let him intimidate you. He’s a nice guy under the gruff exterior. I promise. I’ve met that guy. We all have. But he doesn’t come out often, and he doesn’t stay long.”
“I saw a glimpse of it with Kate earlier. I think he might have even smiled at her.”
“Smiled?” Emily laughed. “I hate that I missed such a phenomenon.” She shoved off the edge of the desk. “Come on. Let’s go eat. I haven’t had dinner yet. I’m sure you haven’t either. I think they made spaghetti tonight in the cafeteria.”
Michelle’s stomach growled. She was starving. As she stood, she touched Emily’s arm. “Thanks for the pep talk. Zeke challenge accepted.” She hoped she conveyed a twinkle in her eye as she met Emily’s gaze. She would not let Zeke get to her. She was determined to win him over. But she’d do it her way, not by cowering to him, but by proving her own competence. If he couldn’t see her value without her having to bend over backward to please him, that was his problem, not hers.
Day two working with Michelle started off on the same tone as day one. Zeke got up early and made his way quickly from the cafeteria to the lab. He beat everyone there, including Michelle, and already had the computer up and running when she arrived. In fact, she startled him when she leaned her hip against the desk next to him and crossed her arms.
He lifted his gaze to find her posture defensive, her expression wary. Good.
“You’re up early,” she pointed out.
“You get a medal for astuteness,” he bit out before he could stop himself. He had no good reason to be a dick. He just couldn’t stop himself. He’d been rather sour before vitrification, and it would seem nothing had changed in his attitude while he’d hibernated. Though inwardly he cringed at his unnecessary sarcasm.
Ignoring his snide comment, Michelle turned toward the screen. “One afternoon of tech support and you’re a pro?” she asked, though he couldn’t tell if she was trying to be snarky or complimenting him.
“I’m a quick study.” He continued to push the mouse around, returning his gaze to the screen, but her proximity was unnerving. Something about her made him sit up straighter. It was as if he could feel her heat even with several inches between them.
“No notepads today?” she tossed at him next.
“Nope.” He realized how ridiculous he had been yesterday, insisting he would not need her modern technological advances because pen and paper were the only notes he would ever fully trust.
He’d been wrong; a fact he’d fully embraced after a few hours of listening to the advances in both hard drives, backups, and the cloud where any and all documents could be stored and retrieved. It would seem that if nothing else, the last decade had made it possible to easily ensure not a damn piece of information was every truly lost.
Michelle turned more fully toward the screen, but when she did so, her arm brushed his and a shock startled both of them. She flinched, rubbing the spot on her arm. “Sorry.”
He sat stiff and frozen, trying to ignore the unwelcome effect of her presence. She needed to move away from him so he couldn’t smell her vanilla shampoo or so closely watch her full lips move as she licked them.
She was cute. She was confident. And for whatever reason, he couldn’t stop reacting to how attractive she was.
When she lifted her glasses from her free hand and settled them on her nose to see his screen better, he watched her profile. “You did all this since you got here this morning?”
“Just organizing the data so I can make sense of it,” he retorted, leaning a few inches away from her. She made him nervous. He didn’t want to accidentally brush against her again.
He needed her to move out of his space.
He needed to walk away and step closer to someone else on staff to prove to himself that his arousal had nothing to do with her specifically. Instead, something about reanimation must cause the pheromones to get out of control.
He should ask someone about it. Maybe Ryan. Or how about Tushar. Ryan’s dad had come out of preservation five months ago. If Ryan didn’t know, Tushar would.
What the hell was he thinking? No way on God’s green earth was he going to approach another man from his team or any other team to ask them if they felt some sort of irrational attraction toward a woman after returning to the living.
“Are you d
one scrutinizing my work?” He glared at her, willing her to walk away. “It’s my second day. Surely I don’t need a performance review yet.”
She jerked her gaze from his screen to his face. “For your information, I’m simply impressed with what you’ve accomplished, but evidently you’re either not a morning person, or you can’t take a compliment. Either way, you should consider an attitude adjustment.” She turned on her heels and walked away. Or stalked rather. Or maybe stomped.
Either way, he cringed. Great.
Michelle made her way to the other side of the lab without tripping over anything, even though her vision was blurred with fury. She also managed not to grab any breakable items on the way to launch against the wall.
Don’t let him get to you. She would be the bigger person in this scenario if it killed her. She had no idea what crawled up his ass or when it happened, but he’d met his match if he thought she would cower to him.
Her hands were shaking when she lowered into her chair and reached for her mouse. She took several deep breaths to control her emotions. When she’d first entered the room and found Zeke already hard at work, she’d watched him for several moments from the doorway.
He’d been so focused he hadn’t noticed her. Before approaching him, he’d also appeared to be human. More than human. Attractive. Tall. Lean. Confident. Someone had trimmed his dark hair in the last few weeks, making him look professional and clean cut.
Her heart rate had picked up a beat at first glance, just as it had yesterday, before she remembered he was sour most of the time.
She had no idea what had possessed her to approach him this morning, as if he might have experienced a personality shift in the night, but such had not been the case. If anything, he was more foul than yesterday.
Did he reserve that animosity for her?
According to Emily, Michelle would be overthinking things if she took his mood swings personally. He’d had a bad temperament for four years apparently. She didn’t think it was reasonable or fair for him to treat people with such disdain just because his ex-wife had left him, but then again, there was no way to be certain he hadn’t been rather ill-tempered even before he married the woman.
Reviving Zeke Page 2
