“I’m a what?” He’d never heard the expression.
Kyle snorted. “From some of the stories I’ve heard, it’s a pretty accurate description.” The doors opened and there was the entrance to McKay-Taggart. “Come with me, Noelle. I’m more than happy to show you around while Hutch sets up our briefing. And those muffins smell delicious. Would you like some coffee?”
“I would love some. Thank you.” Noelle completely ignored him as she walked off with Kyle. “It’s a lovely office.”
She had a lovely backside. And muffins. And she smelled like vanilla.
That was a good thing to remember. It hadn’t worked with a vanilla woman. He could have tons of vanilla sex, but it didn’t fill his soul the way it should. He needed more control than most women were interested in handing over.
He took a deep breath and followed. Sometimes mistakes were made for reasons. He had to hope that was the case here.
And he had to figure out what a horndog was. He sighed and moved toward the office. His day was already going bad.
* * * *
Did he have to be so cute? Noelle sat across from the man her father had warned her about and wished he wasn’t pretty much her exact type. If she was going to build a guy she found attractive, Hutch checked off all her superficial needs. He was gorgeous, had that strong jawline that made her heart go all girly. From the look of his forearms, he spent a lot of time in the gym. And he had beautiful eyes. He wasn’t so big that he overwhelmed her, but he also looked solid. His emotions seemed to play across his face. In the short time since she’d met him, she’d seen what he looked like when he was frustrated, embarrassed, and angry. She’d caught sight of him grinning with some of his coworkers, and that smile of his lit up the room.
Why couldn’t she like the Kyle Hawthorne, superhot and broody type? Any one of her friends would have taken one look at him and been a puddle at his feet, but she’d merely felt an artistic appreciation for the man’s perfection.
She didn’t like perfect. She liked laid back and fun. She liked a guy she could read, who didn’t constantly hide everything he felt.
“So you work for Genedyne?” Ian Taggart’s deep voice brought her back to the reason she was here, which was absolutely not to stare at Hutch while he stared down at the screen of his cell.
Her dad had told her Taggart had recently turned fifty, but he didn’t look it. He was hot, too, though in the Kyle Hawthorne way. He looked like a man who regularly dodged bullets.
He’d asked her a question. It was a tribute to how flustered Hutch had her that she couldn’t focus. She always had to focus. She had to be the smartest person in every room because not only was she a woman in a male-dominated field, sometimes her coworkers saw her in a wheelchair.
How to explain what Genedynamic did. “Yes, I hired on straight out of college. One of my professors had worked with Jessica Layne when she first started out. It’s pretty much my dream job because Ms. Layne is known for funding some big ideas and letting her researchers kind of go wild. She’s got several labs around the country, but Dallas is her base.”
Her boss was a controversial figure in the scientific world. She was known for offering young women the kinds of jobs that tended to be reserved for mature men, but she was also known for loving publicity and suing the hell out of anyone who offended her. Oh, she called it protecting her patents, but some of those suits had little ground to stand on in Noelle’s opinion.
“And what kind of projects do you work on?” Charlotte Taggart was a gorgeous woman, light to her husband’s dark. She wore a power suit and some killer heels, her strawberry blonde hair in an elegant bun.
“I’m actually working on helium.” She totally knew what came next. If she’d concentrated on a lesser-known element, she wouldn’t always have to explain. If she told someone she was studying ways to make a stronger magnet by using neodymium, most people’s eyes glazed over and they were back to talking sports or what movies they’d seen lately pretty damn quick. But everyone knew helium.
“Like balloons?” Kyle asked, his lips quirking up.
Hutch’s eyes were suddenly on her, studying her intently. “Seriously? Are you looking for alternatives?”
“Alternatives?” Kyle asked.
“Is this about the helium shortage?” Big Tag proved he’d actually read up on her. Or he knew more about science than most people.
“Shortage is in the eye of the beholder,” she said. “Some people think it’s merely a break in the supply chain and the fact that the new big deposits have been found in countries like Qatar and Russia, and sales can be influenced by political situations. Every couple of years something goes wrong and anyone who requires helium to run their machines gets nervous. We’re in one of those times when it’s a bit of a scarce resource. The price has gone up significantly in the last few years. But the truth of the matter is helium is a nonrenewable and vital resource. You think peak oil is a problem, meet peak helium.”