Free Earth Bound by Emma Barry & Genevieve Turner Page A

Everyone else had gone home. She was alone. She turned on her heel and did another circuit around the room.
    In some ways, Parsons was in the same situation. He wasn’t a woman—and of course that changed things. But he was eerily good at what he did and congenitally unimpressed, and thus he stepped on toes constantly.
    They called him a freak, too.
    That was probably why, as the clock ticked closer to six, she headed toward his office.
    She didn’t bother to knock. She simply opened the door.
    His jacket was off and so was his tie. His shirt was mostly unbuttoned. His shirtsleeves were rolled up. His feet were crossed on his desk, and his chair was pushed way back. Parsons himself was craned back, and he was playing toss with a wadded-up piece of scratch paper.
    She closed the door and leaned against it. He hadn’t acknowledged her, but that was probably good. She needed a moment to collect herself. She wasn’t quite sure what she was doing here—except she didn’t feel like quite so odd a bird around him.
    When at last she ventured all the way in, she chose the chair closer to him. She could have taken the small sofa, but instead she went with the hard, unvarnished wood. Unlike in the meeting, she tossed herself down. No performance, no gimmick. He wasn’t looking at her, and she didn’t care anyway.
    Seconds passed. She watched him surreptitiously, but then with steady awareness. His fingers were long. Callused at the tips. The way he moved was gentle, expert. He snagged the ball of paper out of the air and flipped it up again. Higher and higher it flew each toss.
    Her gaze swept lower, over his forearms dusted with dark hair, his flexing biceps in his sleeves, and down to the surprisingly trim plane of his stomach beneath his shirt.
    Parsons was a man. He wasn’t a disembodied brain. He was warm and real and only a few feet from her.
    The realization hit her with a tang. Her breathing went shallow.
    Before she’d gotten it under control, he spoke. “That meeting today, I—”
    “Don’t apologize.”
    He caught the paper and looked at her, straight on. “I wasn’t going to.”
    Of course not. But his tone frosted the words, blurred them. He thought he had nothing to apologize for. As she’d noted in the meeting, he was mad, but not at her.   He was mad at the men who’d been mean to her.
    That piquant detail made her cant forward and ask, “Why did you tell them I could do the calculation in twenty-two seconds?”
    He pursed his lips and exhaled. “You’re bright.”
    “Noted.”
    “No.” He waved her sarcasm off. “Beyond being smart, which you obviously are, you’re… competent. More so than any man working here. Their dismissal of you was outrageous.”
    There was no getting control of her breathing now. She could feel her cheeks heating and sweat blooming on her palms.
    She didn’t say anything, although she repeated his words over in her head several times. Bright, smart, competent .
    She knew that she was. She didn’t get through the things she had without knowing it, deep within her. The knowledge was like a secret idol she’d visited on her own. She alone kept the votive candles lit there.
    But maybe she had an acolyte.
    Parsons glared hard at the wall for a moment, as if it were Stan Jensen and he could correct the man with a mean look, but then he softened and turned back to her. “I probably… well, I was trying to help.”
    “There’s no help for the problem they have.”
    He glared at the wall again. “Maybe. But we have a goal here, a mission. I want the people I want for what I want them for. If we get the job done, the rest is immaterial.”
    Wasn’t that adorable? He believed so naively in meritocracy, she should probably cut him down to size.
    But something held her back. Or rather, she decided to prioritize something else.
    From the moment when he’d helped her out of the capsule, a potent draw had seemed to be between them. She’d worked to erase the memory—but