Read Roll Against Discovery (3d20 Book 3) for Free Online Page B

Trevor.
    “Sure.” Trevor pressed his phone to his ear, and seconds later, stepped outside.
    I felt like I missed something significant. “What was that about?”
    “If he has to drive out to where the machines are, he’ll be a couple of hours. He’ll meet us when he’s done.” Evan offered me his hand. “That is, unless you want to call it a night.”
    “Not without you.” The words were bolder than I expected from myself, but they tasted right. I placed my palm in his and stood. What would it be like to have the kind of connection with someone, that an entire conversation could be conveyed in a couple of words and a tilt of the head? Evan didn’t let go of my hand right away, but when we stepped outside, his fingers drifted from mine. We meandered down the streets.
    “Where are you from?” he asked. “What lucky city claims you, when the weekend is over?”
    The way he phased the question filled me with a pleasant glow. Then again, most of what Evan said to me sounded both flattering and sincere. “I’ll be heading back to a town a whole ten or fifteen minutes away. I’m local.”
    “Really?” If it was possible for a single word to embody the term pleasantly surprised , he’d pulled it off perfectly. “Us too.”
    My pulse leaped in my veins. That meant seeing them after the weekend was a possibility. I shelved the thought quickly, but not before disappointment set in with the reminder this wasn’t what we had. “So getting a room makes it easier to pick up…” My question died in my throat. I didn’t want to hear his answer. Well, the morbid part of me did, but the rest of me already knew I was just a random girl in the right place.
    Evan glanced at me, expression unreadable. “No.” His refusal sounded as sincere as everything else he’d said. “It was so… uh…” He looked away. “Because it’s more convenient than heading home at night. You know?”
    “I do know. Me too.” So why did it feel like the one thing he’d said today that wasn’t one-hundred-percent honest?
    Silence descended over us. I turned my attention to my feet. Small talk had never been my forte.
    “Is Trevor in IT?” I blurted out the first question that popped into my mind. When I didn’t get a response, I glanced sideways, to see Evan studying me.
    He smiled and looked away, shoving his hands in his pockets. “He is. Director for a little start-up that makes web applications.”
    “That’s cool.” Way to be witty, me. This hadn’t exactly opened the floodgate of conversation I hoped for. Except, now that I’d broached the subject, I wanted to know more about both these men whose lives I’d dropped into for a day. “What do you do?”
    He relaxed his shoulders and seemed to walk straighter. “I’m a Materials’ Process and Physics Technical Analyst, at Boeing.”
    My mind ground to a stop, stuttering on the words. I got the basics of what Trevor did—I was telephone support for networking hardware. Whatever Evan just said had no bearing in my world. I’d expected him to say Sales, or something along those lines. That was what I got for making assumptions. “I… What?”
    His chuckle had the same lighthearted feeling as earlier. At least he was over the weird tension. “I’m a chemical engineer, and I work with the compounds they use for planes.”
    Oh. “That sounds infinitely more genius-level than… Well, anything, really.”
    “It’s not.” He settled a hand at the small of my back, to point me toward the intersection. His touch lingered, and warmth from his palm spread over my skin. “It’s just a different way of looking at the world.”
    “Standing on my head is a different way of looking at the world.” I realized he’d been the one leading the conversation about quantum physics, earlier. Something told me he was a lot smarter than he let on. It wasn’t that he acted stupid; it was that never once during the entire day had he talked down to anyone.
    “It’s true. It is.”