Free Thunder (Alpha Love - a Paranormal Werewolf Shifter Romance Book 3) by Olivia Stephens Page B

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    “I didn’t say that I wasn’t going to do it.” Finn pauses for a moment, looking at her like he’s weighing her up. “I’m guessing it’s something to do with the reason you were so jumpy when you got here this morning?”
    Sofie nods once, not trusting herself to speak without letting the whole story come tumbling out.
    “You going to tell me what’s freaked you out?” The way he looks at her tells her that he already has his suspicions. After a few moments of silence, he gives in—hacking a bank is too tempting—even for Finn. “But if I do this, then you owe me.”
    “I owe you about a million anyway, so I guess add it to the list,” Sofie admits truthfully, as Finn sets up his laptop at his desk.
    She goes back to the rock that she had been about to study before Darwin had lost it. The knowledge that Finn was looking into her little technical malfunction was comforting, even though she still didn’t have a plan of what to do with the problem that was probably already on its way to Beaumont.
    She had wanted to use the rock as a distraction, something to stop her from focusing on what was headed towards her. It works better than she could ever have imagined. Work was the one thing that had always taken her out of herself, made her forget everything else around, the good the bad and the ugly. When I’m with Ashton I feels that way, too, she thinks.
    However, she can’t think about him too much now either. There’s too much else filling her brain, and the complications of their relationship or the fact that she misses him more than she thought possible for someone she’d only seen the night before is too much to take right now. So, instead, she focuses on the rock.
    Sofie tries to log the specimen as she would any other sample. She starts to follow the process of naming its constituents, identifying if it’s permeable or not. But questions that it should be easy to answer simply aren’t. The rock is neither one thing nor the other; it defies definition. The only thing she can say for sure is the black color of it, and even that now seems to be changing as she looks at it.
    She carries out the acid test, one of the basic analyses for samples. She watches as she drips acid onto the surface of it carefully, expecting it to fizz or for the acid to merely slide off the rock. What she doesn’t expect is for the rock to move. That would be impossible.
    “What the—?” Sofie breathes the words out as she watches the rock do the impossible. It starts to vibrate, slowly at first and then faster and faster. It’s pulsing so quickly that the edges blur, and the acid starts to sizzle on top of it. Without thinking, Sofie hovers her hand over the stone in the petri dish. She snatches her hand back as she feels the intense heat coming off of the rock. It’s burning up, boiling the acid until it has evaporated and disappears into the air. She blinks to make sure that what she’s seeing is real.
    It’s only when the rock is bone dry again that the vibrations slow and then stop completely. She sits in shock, staring at the rock, trying to fill in the blanks in her mind as to what she had just witnessed. The scientist in her is so excited she can barely contain herself. However, she needs to make sure that she hasn’t just imagined this whole scenario. She turns to call Finn over only to find that his chair is empty, and all the lights are on in the office. Night is falling, she’s been so engrossed in the sample that she hasn’t even noticed the hours tick by.
    She grabs her cell, pressing the recording button, a habit that she had inherited from Darwin—from a time when he still wanted to teach her things. She starts to document the rock, describing the sample and the test that she’s just performed and then a thought occurs to her. It is as if it is protecting itself from the acid, eliminating a threat.
    Her words give her another idea. She grabs up her miniature chisel and hammer, trying to