Page 80 of On The Beach

"Is she?" Anna narrowed her eyes. "But she told us that she isn't sleeping with?—"

"I have to go home." I tried to stand up, but Mick wouldn't let me.

"Nuh-huh. I like having you in my corner. I'm going to have to keep you around." He held me to him. "So, you've been telling people we're not sleeping together?"

I sighed and said morosely, "Busted."

Anna and Dan laughed, and Jess and Leela exchanged glances, barely holding back their laughter. I felt my face flush.

CHAPTER 27

rock bottom realizations

MICK

Belle was losing it. I was also getting pretty tired of the Boston winter and wanted nothing more than to go back to Reef Harbor. But I wasn't going without Belle, who was working around the clock, burning the candle at both ends, running on fumes, and grinding herself down to the last molecule. It was like she was trying to squeeze blood from a stone—or worse, trying to outlast the half-life of a radioactive isotope.

I'd told her that if she didn't slow down, she'd hit burnout faster than a rocket losing fuel mid-flight.

Her family agreed, which is why we were gathered in Anna's living room with Anna, Charles, and Molly discussing an intervention. Dan was on a call and had told us that he would join our little cabal as soon as he could.

I glanced around the small gathering of conspirators. We were behaving as if we were staging a heist, which, given the plan, wasn't far off.

"I need to get her on the plane. Now is the right time. The trials are moving along smoothly, and I want us to be farfucking away from Mass Gen before we get the preliminary results."

Belle was exhausted. I hated seeing her like this. No matter what I did, I couldn't get her to relax, to breathe. She was driven, yes. She was passionate, absolutely. She was also scared shitless. She was also absolutely knackered, as they said in my country of birth.

"She won't go willingly," Anna muttered.

"Drug her," Molly suggested.

"Excuse me?" I looked at Belle's mother, certain I misheard her.

"Yeah, drug her. She'll go to sleep, and you can whisk her away." Molly looked at Charles. "Is that allowed, or would it be a problem with, say, the airport people?"

"He'll charter a plane, right?" Charles looked at me expectantly. "I think it'll be fine then. I can write you a prescription for?—"

"Belle will cut my balls off if I drug her. I think we're better off trying to convince her." I ran a hand through my hair. What the fuck was wrong with this family?

Apparently, they knew Belle, and she was mulish when it came to workingall the time. It took them a while, but they finally convinced me.

"So, let me get this straight." I couldn't believe we were going to do this. "We're going to drug Belle, pack her onto a plane, and fly her out to Reef Harbor?"

"Iwill drug her;youwill take her to Reef Harbor," Molly clarified.

Anna grinned, already delighted by the thought. "Yep. She'll hate us for it, but it's for her own good. She hasn't slept a full night in weeks, and everyone, from her boss down to her research assistant, is saying she's running on coffee fumes."

Molly chimed in with a wave of her hand. "Oh, she'llthank us…but much, much later. Just last Sunday dinner, she fell asleep on the couch before the soup was even served. She hasn't looked this exhausted since she was preparing for her doctorate orals."

"Belle has a habit of pushing her heart to its maximum output. She's running on adrenaline, but even the strongest muscle can only pump so hard before it wears down." Charles adjusted his reading glasses and looked pointedly at me. "If you're serious about this, Mick, then we're on board. But she's not easy to wrangle, our Belle."

I raised an eyebrow, amused. "You say that like I haven't spent the past five months trying to keep her from bolting away from me every five seconds."

Belle was in and then out. In and out. She said she loved me when we had sex, the rest of the time she talked about trial protocols and data. I love the woman, but she was driving me insane.

Anna looked at me seriously. "Your job is to get her to my parents' place for dinner, force her, blackmail her emotionally, whatever."

In most families, they'd be able to do the blackmail, but the Volnays were a strange breed. Charles and Molly were liberal parents who wanted their children to live their lives on their terms and wouldn't know how to emotionally blackmail them if it came with an IKEA-style guide.

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