Читать книгу Thirty Nights - JoAnn Ross - Страница 6

Cambridge, Massachusetts

TO A CASUAL VISITOR, the leafy campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located on the banks of the Charles River, would appear to be a peaceful glade. In this case, appearances were definitely deceiving. Inside a sixty-year-old ivy covered red brick building a battle royal was raging.

Hunter St. John was furious enough to kill the man he’d mistakenly considered a mentor. If this had been the Stone Age, he would have picked up the nearest club and bashed George Cassidy’s head in. Civilization being what it was, he was forced to fight with mere words.

“You stole my research and used it as your own.”

“There you go again, being overly dramatic.” The older man dismissed the complaint with a brief wave of his hand. “Sometimes I worry about you, St. John.”

“The gene-splicing project was mine,” Hunter insisted.

“You’re my research assistant, everything you do while a student here rightfully belongs to me. Including that little gene-splicing experiment.”

“That little gene-splicing experiment just won you a research grant from the National Institutes of Health, dammit.”

Cassidy’s features took on an expression of smug satisfaction. “It was well deserved.”

“It was my project.” Hunter’s growl was that of a wolf who’d just come across an interloper approaching his den. “I came up with it, I pushed it, I babied it along, going without sleep to work on it during hours I wasn’t working on your research. You had no right to it.”

To Hunter’s amazement, Cassidy actually had the nerve to smile. “You’re a bright young man, St. John. However, I fear that you lack the emotional restraint necessary to succeed in the research field. Along with a keen intellect and a deep-seated curiosity, a scientist must possess a clear and cool head. Which you lack. Which is why I regrettably had to notify the administration you were no longer suited to work here.”

Hunter had always known George Cassidy to be an egotistical, coldhearted son of a bitch. Since that seemed to be the norm in the world of scientific research, he hadn’t been particularly bothered by his behavior. But this treachery was beyond anything even he could have imagined.

“You had me taken off the project? I’m canned?”

“That’s not exactly the word I would have chosen, but yes.”

A fury like nothing he’d ever before experienced surged through Hunter. He curled his hands into fists at his sides to keep from pounding them into the supercilious bastard’s handsome face. “I could kill you.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to do that,” Cassidy countered. “Believe me, Hunter, my boy, the laboratory facilities in prison are definitely not up to your standards.”

When Hunter didn’t even bother to respond, the older man shook his head in mock remorse. “You’re making too much of this,” he repeated. “You’re a young man, only twenty years old—”

“I’m twenty-one.” Following in his brilliant late father’s footsteps, he’d already garnered a medical degree from Harvard and a master’s in biochemistry from MIT. The gene-splicing project Cassidy had so blithely pirated had been Hunter’s doctoral work.

“You’re still a wet-behind-the-ears pup. There will be more projects for you to work on.”

“I had a project, dammit. Until it was stolen from me.”

“Really, my boy, your choice of words is not only inaccurate, it’s redundant.” Appearing bored with this conversation, Cassidy opened a cage, pulled out a white research rabbit and prepared to draw a blood sample.

It was not in Hunter’s nature to surrender without a fight. “I could go to the administration and tell them what you’ve done.”

“And whom do you think they’d believe? A student who’s already been thrown out of two undergraduate schools due to his hot temper? Or a respected, world-renowned, award-winning scientist who’s on the shortlist to be nominated for the Nobel Prize?”

Both men knew the answer to that rhetorical question. Just as they both knew that Hunter’s time here had come to an abrupt, inglorious end.

“If you ever manage to control your unruly emotions,” Cassidy said into the silence that had settled over the laboratory, “you could well prove to be one of the greatest scientific minds of our time. But there’s one thing you need to learn.”

Hunter felt as if he were suffocating. “What’s that?”

The older man absently stroked the rabbit’s soft white fur. “It’s a bunny-eat-bunny world out there. Survival goes to the fittest.”

And the most treacherous, Hunter thought. And although he knew that it would only confirm Cassidy’s belief that he was too emotional to be a ground-breaking scientist, what was proving more irritating to Hunter than the theft of his research project was the realization that such betrayal had come from a man he trusted. A man he’d foolishly come to think of as a surrogate father.

“I’ll make you pay for this.”

“Perhaps.” Cassidy remained seemingly unperturbed by the gritty threat. “In the meantime, please shut the door on your way out. I wouldn’t want the rabbits to get ill from a draft.”

A crimson curtain, born of his boiling fury, drifted over Hunter’s eyes. Wanting to escape before he beat his former mentor to a bloody pulp with his bare fists, he stormed from the laboratory. Blinded by rage as he was, he didn’t even notice that he’d almost run into Cassidy’s young daughter.

Clad in the Catholic school uniform of a prim white blouse and green plaid skirt, Gillian Cassidy clutched her schoolbooks to her still-flat chest and watched Hunter St. John stride down the hall.

He was leaving. He and her father had fought before. Yet she knew, with every fiber of her young being, that this time Hunter would not be back.

Biting her bottom lip to block the involuntary whimper that rose in her throat, she closed her eyes, leaned back against the muddy-green wall and considered miserably that although her famed father supposedly knew everything there was to know about the human body, she suddenly possessed a unique medical knowledge of her own.

Although she was only twelve years old, Gillian now knew exactly how excruciatingly painful it was for a human heart to break.