Eating Summer Peaches in the Rain

By Adrienne Marie Wood

Anthea just wants to get out of the biological station's staff meeting so she can get back to her job managing a research lab.

 

When Brad, the new stone-fruit professor, shows up, everyone there, even Anthea, starts drooling over him.

 

He's phenomenally handsome in a Greek-god kind of way.

 

She knows that the culture of the station—lab managers and other "civilians" never mix with the profs and students—means there's no way he'd ever even see Anthea.

 

But Brad walks into a completely trashed lab, with contaminated samples, moldy pizza, and empty beer bottles among glassware and microscopes.

 

It'll take weeks for him to clean up on his own. An absolute disaster.

 

Anthea just happens to notice his panic and overwhelm. Maybe her particular brand of organization and problem-solving can save the day.

 

And, even better, give them the excuse to spend some time together. 

 

A fun, quick-reading meet-cute story.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adrienne Wood
• Release date: Aug 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201382544

Adrienne Marie Wood

Adrienne Marie Wood discovered that her very random academic studies in biology, sustainable development, and feminist spirituality were actually the exactly right training for writing fiction. That, and reading every novel she could get her hands on. Connect with her through her website, adriennemariewood.com.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The staff meeting started in ten minutes, but Anthea figured she could finish cleaning up the lab’s big metal storage cabinet with plenty of time to spare. She didn’t feel comfortable leaving glassware, sample kits, wash bottles, and all the rest strewn across the black soapstone-covered bench while she sat listening to her colleagues chatter for an hour.

For one thing, an undergrad was liable to wander through and steal something, or break it, or otherwise cause their usual destruction. And for another, that wasn’t how she operated. She ran a tidy, organized lab and leaving the project incomplete hurt her sense of order. Much better to just finish it, even if she ran the risk of walking into the meeting—useless waste of time that it was—a couple minutes late.

As it turned out, she closed and locked the cabinet doors at two minutes to nine, grabbed her notebook, and walked into the lounge at nine precisely. Anthea took her usual seat, a velour wing-back chair in a particularly unpleasant shade of green near the door. The usual variety pack of doughnuts, already picked through, sat temptingly on the table. She pretended they didn’t exist and prepared her notebook for taking meeting notes.

The others talked loudly. The professors occupied the best chairs in the center of the room. They ran the meeting, and the research station itself. Their grad students clustered around them, with the undergrads strewn farther out.

Scattered among them all were the professionals who were neither fish nor fowl. Facilities management, the bookkeeper, lab managers like her, and others, they were neither professors nor students, but nonetheless did the bulk of the day-to-day work that kept the research station running for the benefit of the university. Take away their support staff, and the professors