Chapter 21 Phenotypic Evolution
PHENOTYPIC EVOLUTION
*Samantha*
Breakfast at Andreas’s was always an event, but this morning it felt like the prelude to something cataclysmic.
I sat cross-legged at the kitchen island on a stool, watching Andreas as he juggled two pans, a French press, and a phone call conducted entirely in French.
Even after so much time living here, I still couldn’t figure out which language he spoke at any given time.
Sometimes, I wondered if he switched languages mid-sentence just to mess with me.
Last night, I’d called my grandfather back, as promised.
I’d sat in the spare bedroom with the lights off, phone pressed to my ear, and explained, in exquisite detail, how and why the Genetix shares would soon be his.
I told him about the affidavits and the recording, the probable cause for the police to start digging, the likely outcome for Henrik (and hopefully Oskar), and how, with any luck, within a few months, my parents’ names would be cleared.
I also told him that I wanted the Genetix employees to inherit the shares eventually, because they were the ones who made the company what it was.
It took nearly an hour for him to process the idea.
There was a lot of silence on the other end, broken only by the sound of him pouring bourbon over ice and muttering “Goddamn” every few minutes.
Eventually, he said that it made him proud but also sad, because he didn’t want me to give up anything.
I reminded him I’d never earned any of it. That was the point.
After a long pause, he said, “Well, the shares will go where the law tells them to go. Unless you want me to adopt you again.” He was only half joking. I could hear it in his voice.
Before we hung up, he told me he would make me the proxy for his shares, so I could vote at the meetings until all the dust settled.
Honestly, he and Andreas would probably get along great. They shared a belief in the power of arbitrary declarations while ignoring inconvenient realities.
“Eggs on toast,” Andreas announced, setting a plate in front of me with a flourish. “And coffee, just how you like it.”
“Black as hell, hot as possible, and not a single molecule of actual nutrition.” I grinned, picking up the cup and smelling it.
“Thank you. This all looks delicious,” I said, because it really did.
He had a knack for arranging food in a way that made it look like it was plated by a culinary school graduate, even when it consisted of whatever he’d found in the fridge.
I picked up my fork and immediately started eating.
Andreas sat down across from me, seasoning his own bowl of quinoa, tofu, and avocado with sriracha. He didn’t look at me while he did it, but I felt his attention anyway.
We ate in companionable silence for a while, interrupted only by the occasional clink of fork on plate or the hum of city traffic beyond the window. I tried to focus on the food, but my mind kept drifting to last night, to the feel of his body curled around mine as we fell asleep in his bed.
I wondered if now would be a good time for us to have the Serious Conversation. He seemed to have accepted my decision about prosecuting Henrik and the shares. We’d slept together last night and cuddled, but did nothing else. I didn’t have the post-sexy-times fog muddling my mind.
Yes. The time is now!
But just as I opened my mouth to begin, Andreas set down his fork, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said in the most casual, morning-conversation voice, “Are you on birth control?”
I choked on air. Not figuratively—literally. I had to take a huge gulp of coffee.
“Yes,” I said, once my airway was clear. “I am on birth control.”
He nodded. “I do not have any STDs. Do you?”
“No.” I reared back even as I answered honestly.
He reached for his coffee, sipped, then asked, “Do I need to buy condoms?”
It finally clicked that he was running through a sex-prep checklist. Gaping at him, I wanted to laugh. But I also wanted to crawl under the table. Who discussed these things over breakfast?
Eventually, I managed to say, “That’s up to you.”
He gave me a flat stare. “Do you want me to use a condom when we have sex?”
“You’re assuming a lot,” I said, trying for indignation but landing somewhere closer to mortification.
“Am I?” he asked, raising an eyebrow.
I wilted. “Actually, no. You’re not.” And that was the truth.
He laughed, the sound so unexpected and bright it startled me. I threw my napkin at him, but he caught it without looking.
My entire body was flushed. I fidgeted with my fork, restless. Setting it down, I decided that if Andreas could bring up condoms and birth control and us eventually having intercourse over breakfast, then there existed no reason for me to keep dillydallying about the Serious Conversation.
I straightened my spine. “Because I am trying to learn from previous mistakes, I just want to say for the record that you and I are together, boyfriend/girlfriend, strings attached. Agree?”
He didn’t hesitate. “One hundred percent.”
I nodded, feeling a weird, giddy flutter in my chest, but also strangely deflated since I’d hyped the conversation up so much in my head and it had been incredibly anticlimactic.
But since we were bringing up unusual breakfast topics, I added, “And once all of this is over and the dust settles, I’m going to ask my grandfather to adopt me.”
He considered this, then said, “You should start moving forward with the adoption as soon as possible. And you should put some security on your grandfather. As soon as Tobias and Henrik realize your grandfather will be the one taking over those shares, he will become a target. And if it is really important to you that the employees are the ones to inherit the shares, you should move forward with the adoption as soon as possible to establish the line of inheritance.”
I gawked at him and how he’d taken everything in stride. “Uh. Thank you. It’s really helpful when you share your thoughts with me instead of keeping them to yourself. I just want to let you know, I appreciate you.”
He smiled, a little wicked. “Even if I’m sneaky?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I shot back, shrugging.
The corner of his mouth tugged upward.
I glanced at my phone and realized I was running later than I wanted. Shoveling food into my mouth, I stood up. “I have to go.”
“Are you running late for work? It is not yet seven,” he said.
“No, I just want to get there early so I can talk to security about getting clearance for Tara,” I said, grabbing my bag and heading for the door.
Before I could escape, Andreas caught my hand and pulled me down into his lap. The force of it made me laugh, but also set off a cascade of nerves from my scalp to my toes.
He moved his hand under my skirt, up my thigh, and cupped me over my underwear, fingers pressing gently but insistently. He leaned in, his lips at my ear, and whispered, “I love you.”
It sent a lightning bolt straight through my brain stem. “I love you,” I said, and the words felt truer than anything I’d ever spoken.
He grinned against my jaw, slow and smug, and I realized—impressed—that he’d just gotten me to admit it out loud by turning me on. He’d engineered the whole thing.
I tried to scowl at him, but my resolve melted when he started rubbing small, lazy circles with his finger.
“I thought you said you wouldn’t plot against me,” I said.
“But sometimes you like it,” he murmured, not even a little bit sorry. He hooked a finger in my underwear and tugged. “Take these off.”
I hesitated for a second, but then slid them down my legs, kicking them off.
He traced a line up my inner thigh, then said, “Unbutton your shirt and unhook your bra.”
I did as he asked, working the buttons open with trembling fingers. I unclasped the bra—front closure, thank you very much—and let it fall away, baring myself to him. He ran his hands over my ribs, my stomach, then cupped my breasts, squeezing gently.
“I like that this opens in the front,” he said, voice thick with approval.
He bent forward and kissed the swell of one breast, then the other, licking and biting lightly at my nipples until they ached. He kept one hand on the center of my back and the other between my legs, teasing my clit with soft, deliberate strokes.
“Open your legs wider for me.” Andreas breathed the words against my nipple between sucking kisses.
I obeyed, heat flushing through me. He slid two fingers inside, curling them perfectly, and rubbed my clit with his thumb, all while nipping and tonguing my nipples like he was starving.
Andreas’s hips rocked beneath me, and I could feel the hard line of his cock pressing into my bare bottom through his thin sweatpants.
“This is what you do to me. Can you feel how hard I am?” His voice was scraped raw, like he’d sanded the words against his own teeth just to get them out.
My only answer was an embarrassing, involuntary whimper. The second it escaped my throat I felt my face go hot, but it didn’t matter. The look in his eyes said he’d already filed the noise away in some secret compartment of his brain and planned to weaponize it at the earliest opportunity.
“When will you let me make love to you?” he asked, and the way he said it—low, reverent, so unlike his usual clinical detachment—nearly fried my higher reasoning.
He punctuated the question with a twist of his wrist, clever fingers curling in a way that made every muscle in my body seize and then liquefy.
For a moment, I couldn’t remember the English language, let alone the rationale I had ten seconds ago for not just climbing him like a tree right here, right now.
“Not yet,” I choked out.
He made a guttural sound, forehead collapsing onto my sternum. His hand never broke rhythm, but his mouth was insatiable—kissing, biting, licking, and suckling my skin like he’d die if he didn’t consume every square inch.
“Soon,” I amended, and it came out as a kind of sob.
“You have no idea what you do to me,” he said, and there was so much longing—and desperation—in his voice. “I want inside you. It is all I can think about. I cannot concentrate. You are all I think about.”
My mind became a blank page with only his name scrawled on it in block letters. I was barely even aware of the apartment, the city, the fact that I was half naked, sitting on his lap, legs spread for his fingers, my tits pressed against Andreas’s mouth.
He kept stroking me, relentless. His thigh was hard under my knees, his erection pressing insistently against my bottom. His grip on me was unyielding, anchoring me while my body pitched and rolled with every calculated move of his hand.
Abruptly, I seized the collar of his shirt, yanking him up to meet my mouth, kissing him with a kind of feral need that surprised even me.
He kissed me back, teeth and tongue, one hand fisted in my hair while the other still worked its magic between my legs.
I could taste the coffee on his lips, the faint ghost of toothpaste, and something else—something dark and hungry that hinted at the part of him he never showed anyone else.
He broke the kiss long enough to say, “Do you trust me?”
The question startled me, mostly because I realized I did. I trusted him more than I’d ever trusted anyone, and I was terrified by it. But I nodded, unable to do anything else with the way my body craved his touch. I tried wiggling my hips, rocking them, needing more friction.
“Sit still,” he ordered, voice muffled against my neck.
Somewhere in the distance I heard the click of a fork hitting the floor, the crash of a plate sliding against tile, but it didn’t matter.
The only thing in the universe was the pulse of his tongue against my breasts, the clever, playful pressure of his mouth, the way his hands held me to keep me from bucking off the chair.
I felt every breath he took, every shift of his jaw, and my vision went white at the edges as the sensations built and built, a slow, inexorable tide.
I was so close I could taste it. So close I actually clawed at his back, desperate.
He must have sensed it, because he doubled down, sucking hard at just the right spot, fingers matching the rhythm, and I came so hard I nearly blacked out.
My body arched off his lap, toes pointing, fingers tangling in his hair, and shirt, and whatever else I could grab on to.
When the world came back into focus, I was sprawled in his lap, legs shaking, chest heaving. My face was hot, my lips numb, and my whole body felt like it had been scooped out and filled with fire.
Andreas held me there, arms banded around my waist, face pressed against my chest like he’d run a marathon and needed to catch his breath.
He was hard as a rock under me, and I could feel him through his sweatpants.
But he didn’t move to do anything about it.
He simply held me, like he wanted to keep me safe, and with him.
Eventually, Andreas kissed my collarbone, then my jaw, then finally my lips—soft, almost shy. I kissed him back, just as soft, just as shy.
When we separated, he grumbled, “I want to keep you here forever.”
I laughed lightly and wiggled off his lap, legs wobbly, and started collecting my scattered clothing. He helped, surprisingly gentle, buttoning my shirt for me and smoothing down my hair like I was a doll he had to return to its shelf after playing with me however he liked.
When I was mostly put together, he tipped my chin up and kissed me once more, lingering this time. “I love you,” he said, and it didn’t sound like a trap or a power move. It sounded like a promise.
“I love you.”
“Can’t you call in sick?”
Grinning at his tempting offer and the longing in his gaze, I kissed him quickly on the cheek, and said, “No.” Then, darting away, I suggested over my shoulder, “Why don’t you go take a cold shower?”
He groaned.
I called back, “Accept your punishment!”
“For what?”
“You know what you did!”
I heard him curse in Italian behind me, loud and frustrated.