Prologue
MADELINE
“Oh,fuck. Just like that. Your tongue is fucking magic.” The words bounce off the sterile walls of the clean room like a goddamn echo chamber.
I stop mid-step, sandaled feet sticking to the lab floor like I’ve just walked into a crime scene. Which, to be fair, I think I have.
It’s Saturday afternoon. I’m in a bikini under my sundress because I was on my way to the beach after checking on my oyster larval viability study—which, by the way, is the most important thing in my entire marine biology career right now. I was supposed to be in and out. Ten minutes max.
But now?
Now, some lucky girl is getting her brains fucked out in the middle of the lab.
I snicker to myself, already turning to leave. Honestly, good for them. If someone’s gonna break protocol and risk an infection in a clean room, they might as well get it.
Then I hear it.
A deep, guttural groan. One I know too fucking well.
I freeze.
Then it gets worse.
“Yes, yes, yes, Ethan?—”
I stop breathing.
Because there’s only one Ethan at the Boston Marine Biology Institute.
And that Ethan?
Is my fucking boyfriend.
Three years.
Seven hundred and twenty-eight nights in his bed.
Three years of bullshit monogamy, making sure his suit was ironed for symposiums, listening to him drone on about invasive species in the Gulf of Maine.
Three fucking years.
And now he’s eating someone else’s pussy in the goddamn lab?
My stomach does a slow roll, a sick mix of rage and humiliation crawling up my throat as I step forward. I push the door open just enough to see through the glass.
And there he is.
Dr. Ethan Wright.
My graduate supervisor and marine biology’s golden boy, crouched in his lab coat and nothing else, face buried between the legs of Katie Monroe, his twenty-two-year-old research assistant, moaning like a dog who learned how to scratch his ass along the floor.
Katie—the perky, blonde, fresh-out-of-undergrad suck-up who always giggled way too hard at his bad jokes. Who always smelled like vanilla and bubblegum and desperation.
Who, apparently, has been getting what I never fucking got.
Because this piece of shit always said he hated giving head.
“Son of abitch,” I say, loud enough to shake the goddamn microscope tables.