the bowl up, but he didn’t beat the dogs to it, and then there were two heads in the stainless-steel container.
Gut clenching, he turned to snatch up Sweetheart—
“Wait,” Stef said, coming over.
Ben froze, blinking at the sight. Sweetheart took a handful of bites and then laid down next to the bowl, letting Fred finish the rest.
Letting Fred.
What the hell had the witch done to his dog?
Sweetheart was practically civilized now.
Stef put a few more kibbles in, since Sweetheart had apparently found her breakfast in Fred’s, and then Fred ate until the bowl was empty before flopping down next to Sweetheart, alternating between licking the container and his pup-friend’s ear.
“You’re amazing,” Ben told her as she came to his side.
“No,” she whispered. “That’s Fred. All Fred.”
He thought she was wrong. That it was her—all her.
And he looked forward to proving it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Stef
“Oh. My. God.” A beat. “You got laid.”
Despite herself, she felt her cheeks heat, knowing that Heidi was clearly able to see that Stef had, in fact, gotten laid.
Multiple times.
With multiple glorious orgasms.
So glorious that she was a little sore as she meandered her way into the lab. Meandered because Heidi was there, and Stef knew her friend would notice the difference. Hell, when she’d looked in the mirror that morning, she’d hardly recognized her own face.
Happy.
She’d looked utterly happy.
And had decided it was a good look on her.
That had been after her momentary panic with the food dish and the two pups, of course. She hadn’t thought Fred would get possessive, but he was so much bigger than Sweetheart, could easily hurt her, so she’d worried.
But then, like two peas in a pod, it hadn’t been an issue in the least.
Then Ben had made her a bagel, with loads of cream cheese, had downed a second cup of coffee, and disappeared into the bathroom to shower and change, coming out in a suit that had taken her breath away.
“I thought you tech guys didn’t wear suits.”
He’d merely grinned, kissed the top of her head. “I’m glad you like it.” Then he’d told her he had a meeting with the board that day, so he had dressed up for the occasion. Though from the glimpse she’d gotten of his closet Friday night, she knew that he was no stranger to a suit.
The entire back wall of his wardrobe had been filled with suits.
Now, Heidi squealed and clapped her hands together. “Yes! You got the best kind of laid.”
Stef bit her lip. She had.
“Who is he? What does he look like? Where did you meet him? What did you do? How many times did you—”
Stef held up her hand. Not only to thwart the pure onslaught of questions but also in order to cut off Heidi. They were at work, for God’s sake, and she wasn’t going to spill her guts when an intern could come in at any point. “We’re not talking about this right now.”
Heidi started to protest.
The lab door opened.
Stef lifted her brows, silently telling her friend, “See?”
Heidi just lifted her hands in surrender as their newest intern walked in then issued some instructions to Stef and Aarav, before strolling over to her computer.
Aarav, quiet, shy—and did she mention quiet?—merely said, “Good morning.”
Then they all got to work.
Stef on going over some data from the weekend, mostly seeing if their equipment was functioning properly, but also prepping some things for an experiment that Heidi wanted to conduct later in the week.
Her job probably wasn’t exciting from the outside—spending her time going over spreadsheets and spectrometer readings—but she enjoyed the challenge of working with atoms, with trying to discover their secrets, trying to study something that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye, with a normal microscope . . . hell, with any microscope.
It was all theory and testing and studying the blank spaces left behind. Atoms were too small to be able to see, so they studied the reactions between molecules more than the small, basic units of life themselves.
The ultimate puzzle.
And she was thrilled that she got to work on it, even her small part of it.
Her cell buzzed, and she glanced down at the screen quickly, knowing that she needed to turn it off and unable to believe she’d left it on. It could mess with the equipment, for one, and was a general distraction, for another.
But it wasn’t Ben texting, as she’d hoped.
It was from . . . Heidi.
On a scale of one to a million, how good was it?
Stef glared.
Deliberately held up her cell,