BISHOP SAT IN the hard, metal laboratory chair with his head in his hands. He didn’t usually allow himself moments like this. Moments when his control slipped and emotion crept in, scuttling over his skin like sharp-clawed crustaceans. Hurting him, sucking away his strength.
All because he was about to do something challenging. Pathetic. His upper lip curled in a silent snarl. Pressing his fingers against his skull as if he was trying to squeeze from his brain the ability to see better, he told himself to suck it the fuck up.
He lived for a challenge, didn’t he? He’d been driving himself relentlessly since he was seventeen years old. Challenges—academic ones—were the only things that kept him sane. Or at least too busy to spiral into darkness.
But lately, he’d been struggling.
He had pages worth of data to analyze, a task that always began with overcrowded spreadsheets full of rows after rows of numbers. Professor Sullivan usually took care of this part so Bishop wouldn’t have to, but now, Bishop had to tackle it alone. He raised his head out of his hands with effort and stared at the oversized computer monitor.
His body wound tight, he willed his eyes to focus and make sense of the long columns of numbers that bled into dark, blotchy streaks under his efforts. The accommodations Professor Sullivan had put into place for Bishop’s visual impairments were usually sufficient, but it was still the damned charts that messed him up every time.
“Fuck,” he murmured, and grabbed the mouse, scrolling left and right, back and forth. Nothing helped. He stood up and flung the device away and it hit the concrete floor, where it shattered with an unsatisfyingly anemic, plastic crack.
Leaning his weight onto his fists on the desktop, he let his head drop and silently went through his well-worn mental process of controlling his rage. Anger wasn’t logical. Anger wouldn’t help. His physical condition was what it was—what it had been for years—and emotion would only cloud his judgment as he worked to analyze the data he and Professor Sullivan had gathered for years.
When he felt more centered, he switched the monitor off in disgust. He may be over six-feet tall, and strong from daily training in the Sullivan Manor’s private gym, but there were still too many moments like these in his life that made him feel weak. He rolled his head on his shoulders and stretched. He could use some gym time. Straining his muscles and lungs helped him deal with the frustrations of analyzing data or grading student work.
But he was too busy to take a break now. There was always more he could be doing. More to learn. But most importantly, mysteries of the human mind and body to unravel, and Bishop’s drive to understand and to master every aspect of his field sometimes felt like obsession.
Now that his research had suffered a terrible setback, he was having a tough time dealing with the emotions associated with that. Bishop dealt in numbers, in statistics, in cause and effect, experimental results achieved in a controlled environment, and the publishing of his professional discoveries. He did not deal with emotions, not anymore. Emotions were unpredictable and hard to control, and the only way he’d learned to deal with his past was through strict control. Control of his thoughts, his body, his life.
Yet, no matter how meticulous he was in his discipline, there were still matters that bested his defenses, irritating and annoying him, like the charts he was trying to review. Or sometimes there were matters that smashed headlong into his orderly life and rollicked around like a drunken barbarian, destroying everything while Bishop watched in helpless horror.
The sudden, recent death of Professor Sullivan, Bishop’s mentor and only positive father-figure, that was one of those matters.
Those status-quo-destroying situations were the kinds of things Bishop worked to limit above all else. Those were the kinds of matters that, if he let them in too deep, could destroy him as they nearly had when he was seventeen. And he wasn’t going to let that happen again.
So he kept his world small. Kept his life simple and focused on facts. Just like in his experiments, Bishop controlled the variables.
Yet he couldn’t figure out what to do about the charts.
Normally Professor Sullivan would handle the spreadsheets, placing a warm hand on Bishop’s shoulder and telling him, “Clear out, son. Endless lines of numbers are my specialty.”
They’d made an excellent team.
Bishop turned his head toward Professor Sullivan’s empty chair, and the weight he’d been trying to ignore for the last three days seemed to shift and shudder, settling even heavier on his shoulders like a great oxen’s yoke, threatening to crush him. The professor had plucked an aimless and angry psychology student from the hundreds who’d applied for his assistantship position, and in doing so, had given Bishop’s life the direction and purpose he’d so badly needed.
He’d never made an issue of Bishop’s visual impairment, but had quietly, and at great cost, altered much of the precision equipment in his private lab to accommodate his new research associate. The famous Professor Sullivan was under no limitations. Most any university in the world would fly the renowned professor to the moon if they could, just to keep him happy and publishing for their school.
What the professor had asked the Ivy League Cooper College for was alterations to the equipment in his private lab in the basement of his estate to accommodate Bishop’s degenerative visual acuity.
And just like that, Bishop had found his hero, his calling, and the father he’d so badly needed. Under Professor Sullivan’s fastidious hand, Bishop had been able to tamp down the anger that had propelled him for so many years, and had taken back his agency, one scientific observation at a time, until he was the man he is now. An adjunct professor at the prestigious Cooper College, and a full research partner to Professor Sullivan.
Now Bishop was disciplined, authoritative and driven by facts, analysis and discoveries, not by his impaired eyesight, not by his anger and shame, and not by his past actions.
And no matter how disruptive this latest blow was, he would not allow it to change any of that.
A knock sounded at the laboratory door, jolting him from his thoughts. Ann, Sullivan Manor’s cook and house manager, called from behind the closed door. “Miss Penelope has arrived. I thought you might like to greet her and help her get settled.”
“No,” Bishop’s tone was harsh, and he scowled and made an effort to soften it. “I have too much work to do. Please just show her to her room and get her whatever she needs.”
The old door squealed on its hinges and he closed his eyes in exhaustion. He glanced at Ann and then swiftly away, but her purpose had already been accomplished. Even though he could only discern her familiar, grandmotherly shape at this distance, he didn’t need to see the frown on her face for her reproach to have effect.
He already knew two things: no matter what she was going to say, she was right; and he’d do whatever she asked. Ann had that sort of influence on people, even him.
He feigned concentration on the textbook he’d found in front of him, but his hearing, as always, was sharp, and he knew she was next to him before she laid a gentle hand on his bicep.
“Bishop.” Ann’s soft voice was pleading. “I know how much Professor Sullivan meant to you, but Penelope has lost her father. You are her guardian now, and while I’m sure the professor didn’t intend for you to take his place, you ought not just ignore the poor girl. She’s only seventeen, and you’re all she has now.”
Bishop let the added weight of this reminder drag his eyelids closed again. Guardian. What the hell was he supposed to do with a seventeen-year-old, orphaned girl? The professor had become like a father to him, but Bishop could never have imagined this spontaneous kinship would turn into something so legally serious and potentially life-changing. Nevertheless, when the professor had died suddenly, with no living relatives other than his daughter, that drunken barbarian Bishop feared above all else—unforeseeable change—had started rollicking through the halls of Sullivan Manor.
Bishop hadn’t even known the girl existed, which, in and of itself, raised serious questions, given how close he was to the professor. So, when he’d been contacted by the professor’s lawyer regarding Dr. Sullivan’s last will and testament, shocked wasn’t nearly an strong enough word for his state of mind when he discovered he’d been willed not just Sullivan Manor, but also a ward—a living, breathing ward! The professor’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Penelope.
He sighed, scrubbing at his eyes. Ann was right, of course. The girl must be devastated and confused. After all Professor Sullivan had done for him, Bishop owed it to him to guide Penelope through to her last year before adulthood. One year and then he could shuttle her out of his life when she was safely an adult, and he could go back to the small, tidy world that was the only life he knew how to survive. The only way he knew how to keep the darkness within him bottled up.
“You’re right, Ann. Have her wait in the library. I’ll be right up.”
*****
Ann, the woman who’d let her in the door of her own father’s house, came bustling back down the hallway toward her, the look on her face subtly different than what she’d shown Penelope when she’d first opened the door to her—the look Pen had seen way too much of in the last three days.
Pity.
God, the pity was the worst, and it made Penelope want to rage, tear things off the wall, or hit someone. Now was not the time to pity her. When she’d been thirteen years old and the only kid without a parent at her boarding school’s Parent’s Day—that was the girl who needed pity. When her mom had died before Pen was even old enough to remember her, and she’d been sent to a father who didn’t want her. That girl could’ve used some fucking empathy. Where was the pity then?
But people don’t pity you when your father is paying tens of thousands of dollars per year to put you up at the most prestigious boarding schools in the country.
She didn’t need pity now. Now, at least, she was in a situation that came with an end. There was closure. Finality. Her father was dead. It was over. She would never gain his attention or approval. The option was void. Now the only thing left to do was to fucking get over it.
So, thank god Ann’s face was no longer dripping with pity. Instead, the woman looked worried as she showed Pen into what appeared to be a library.
Interesting. Maybe the Boy Wonder was dragging his feet about coming to see his poor orphaned ward.
As he should be.
She was the only child of the famous inventor Charles Sullivan, a millionaire many, many times over through patents, licensing and private investments. Yet, there she found herself, just over the threshold of her father’s death, somehow sharing her inheritance with the “son he’d never had”, as her father had written in his will.
Well fuck you too, Dad. Sorry I don’t have a penis.
Apparently, he’d been so desperate to have a child who wasn’t her, that he was willing to grab some stranger off the street as long had he had balls and testosterone. Everyone knew girls couldn’t do science with him, right?
Yeah, right.
She’d shown interest. Begged him to let her spend the summers in the lab with him, but he wouldn’t allow it. The science teachers at her schools practically jizzed themselves whenever she turned in a test or research project. The word prodigy had been thrown around. And yet she was sent to golf camp for the summers. Intensive language school. Hell, one summer she’d spent harvesting and spinning alpaca wool to learn about “micro-industries”. Anything except spending time helping her father in the lab. He didn’t need her help anyway. Not when he had the Boy Wonder living right there, all cozy-like, in his own home. A place where Penelope, his actual child, had never been allowed to live.
So, her last middle finger to Dad had been to try a new method—failing out of nearly every class this past semester. She was disappointed in herself, actually. She’d meant to fail out of all of them. But instead of dragging her home from boarding school and making her stay in his house under his watchful eye as she’d hoped, her dad had died of a pulmonary embolism, and she’d experienced his ultimate brush-off from beyond the grave.
He’d left his home and everything in it, including the lab equipment and research materials, to Bishop Cole. Sure, most of his fortune had gone to her, but it was to be held in trust by this fucking Bishop, a complete stranger to her and the guy who took the place that belonged to her in her father’s life, until her nineteenth birthday. That was a year and a half this man would have his thumb on her.
Well, she hoped Bishop Cole was up for the ride, because she didn’t intend to make it easy.