Under the Microscope Read Online Free Page A

topic if not the apology. “Female sexuality drug. Lots of publicity. Launches sometime this week.”
    “Actually, it was supposed to launch today. The FDA put a hold on it.” Still standing in the hallway, she unslung the leather bag from around her neck, opened it and pulled out a folder that was filled with a half inch of papers and had a data disk taped to the front inside a plastic sleeve. She offered it to him. “Four women are dead from cardiac arrest. According to the reports, the only thing they had in common was that all four took Thriller before they died.”
    He ignored the folder. “Call William in the morning and make an appointment. Our history back in Boston doesn’t give you the right to huntme up at home, and it doesn’t qualify you for preferential treatment. Hell, if anything, I should tell him to ask for hazard pay.”
    He told himself he’d meant the comment as a joke, but it landed flat.
    Three years earlier, he’d been more or less content with his lab work at Boston General Hospital. With a Ph.D in biochemistry, a postdoc in a fertility lab and a half-dozen major first-author papers to his name, he could’ve run his own group, but preferred having someone else manage the basics, leaving him free to pursue interesting side projects.
    It was one such side project that had put him in contact with a then-pregnant Raine. When danger had stalked the lab and its patients, Max had appointed himself the pretty divorcée’s guardian, and had thought his growing feelings were reciprocated.
    In the end, an empty hospital room had proven otherwise.
    “I already spoke to your partner about the case,” she said quickly. “He told me to talk to you.”
    Max bet she was leaving out a few steps. Like how she’d conned William into giving up his address. No doubt she’d implied—or outright said—that they’d been lovers, when they’d been nothing of the sort.
    Though they might have been lovers. If they’d met at another time, under different circumstances…
    It didn’t matter, Max told himself. They’d met the way they’d met, and parted the way they’d parted.
    And he’d gone on to make some really bad decisions in the aftermath. Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame her for them, but that didn’t change the upshot.
    Damsels in distress were nothing but trouble.
    He held up a hand before she could speak again. “Look, Raine. An apology doesn’t change anything.” He stepped back, into the apartment. “If you want Vasek and Caine to handle your case, you’ll have to deal with William, not me.”
    With that, he shut the door on her. He didn’t slam it, because a slam would indicate anger, suggesting he still cared.
    No, he shut it gently, with a firm, final-sounding thunk.
    Then he locked and double locked it. But as he turned away from the door and stared into the barren apartment, which had been stripped of most of its furnishings and absolutely everything of monetary value, he had to wonder.
    Was he locking her out, or locking himself in?
     
    RAINE STOOD IN THE HALLWAY for a long moment, trembling. Not with fear or anger, though that was part of it. And not with the accumulated stress of the past two days, though that was part of it, too. But the rest of it was Max.
    She’d thought she’d been prepared to see him.
    She’d been wrong.
    He was taller than she remembered, and broader, but his voice was the same, a deep, dark rumble that used an educated man’s vocabulary in a blue-collar Boston accent. His face remained a collection of heavy planes and angles that shouldn’t have been handsome but somehow was, even beneath a faint shadow of stubble. All that was the same.
    But his eyes were different. How he’d looked at her was different.
    When they’d known each other for those few short weeks at Boston General, under the strangest of circumstances, he’d treated her so kindly, so gently. He hadn’t said much, but he’d been there through the entire terrifying ordeal, and he’d