Icing the Puck (New York Empires Book 2) Read Online Free

wouldn’t understand.”
    “Try me.”
    “My lab is studying the connection between telomere degradation and mutation rates in relation to age-specific disease progression.”
    “Are you working on the cancer tie-ins as well or just studying the mechanisms of telomere degradation and how to prevent it?”
    “Our lab is researching the relationship to cancer as well.” She frowned.
    “That’s good research. If scientists find a way to prevent telomeres from getting too short, we’d have some good information for helping fight against aging and cancer. What do you think of the whole CRISPR/Cas9 technology? Ethically? Will it lead to designer babies or is it just a great new technique for studying the genome and repairing faulty gene sequences?”
    She blinked a few times. “How on earth do you know about CRISPR?”
    “I read. A lot.”
    “On genetics?” That seemed hugely coincidental.
    “On everything. Of the sciences, my particular cake is genetics and cosmology.”
    “Why?”
    “Aliens,” he said in that matter-of-fact, isn’t-it-obvious way.
    “You believe in aliens?” That was worse than her parents.
    “Don’t you? I mean, it seems pretty arrogant to assume of all the planets in all the galaxies in a vast universe that we’ve only got the barest understanding of that there’s not some other life somewhere. Even if it doesn’t look anything like what we think of as life. In fact, I’d be more surprised if we didn’t at least find microbes on other planets and moons than if we did.”
    Her mouth dropped open a little and she had to snap it shut. Then she leaned back against the window to see him better. “This isn’t the conversation I was expecting from a hockey player.”
    “Snob.” But he said it with a grin.
    “Maybe,” she admitted. “You’re more enlightened than my family.”
    “Tell that to my brother. He thinks I’m a lunatic. Wait, I take that back. I don’t want you to meet him. Not yet. You might like him better than me, and then I’d have to kick his ass.”
    She huffed an unexpected half-laugh, then pressed her lips together, surprised by her amusement.
    His gaze dipped to her mouth, just long enough for her to feel the look like an actual touch.
    “One of these days,” he said, “I’m going to get a full blown laugh out of you. And that will be a glorious day.”
    “What if I snort when I laugh?”
    “Even better.”
    “You’re a very strange man, Mr. Evans.”
    “We’re on a date. Call me Brody or you’ll hurt my feelings.”
    “I find that hard to believe.”
    “Tough. Brody. Say it.”
    “Brody.” She frowned. “We’re on a date already?”
    “Of course. What do you think this is?”
    “Getting back into town. Then lunch.”
    “Which is what we here in New York call a date.”
    She scowled at the slight condescension. But since she probably deserved it, she let it pass. “Are you from New York originally?”
    “Nope. Northern California. Nevada City. We got out as soon as possible.”
    “We?”
    “Connor, my brother, and I. Nevada City is a great little town, but we’re both more big city boys.”
    “Why didn’t you move to San Francisco?”
    “We did for a few years—college. But Connor needed to be here for work.”
    “What does your brother do?”
    “He’s a financial genius. Billionaire.”
    He said the billionaire part so casually, as if it was something people managed to achieve all the time. “So young?”
    “You assume we’re young?”
    “Your comment about Alex earlier,” she reminded him.
    He grinned. “Caught. He’s pretty young to be a billionaire, I guess. No gray ties, though.”
    “What do gray ties have to do with anything?”
    “Don’t read a lot of fiction, do you?”
    “Not really. I prefer nonfiction.”
    “Probably best you don’t get that reference. We don’t know each other well enough for conversations about kinky sex.”
    “What kind of books do you read?” Her head spun, and she had to grip the