AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As she passed him on her way out of the lab, she swept it in one last regretful look.
If things went according to her projections, as she was certain they would, this would be the last time she saw it.
* * *
Their new boss was late.
As she sat in her usual seat halfway down the conference table, Lili fumed.
Either Balducci had met his demise—and they couldn’t possibly be that lucky—or he didn’t consider them worthy of his legendary punctuality. And that boded even worse for them than she’d expected.
Her bleary gaze scanned the room. All thirty of the BIL employees were there and unlike her, they’d all clearly run back home to dress for the occasion, leaving only her in an appropriately drab-as-her-mood outfit. Also unlike her, they seemed relieved, even excited at the takeover. Even hating this as much as she did, Lili realized why. She had been feeling the toll of the obstacles they’d had to tackle continuously to do what other better-funded labs did in a fraction of the time. But to her, setbacks, false starts and near misses were an expected part of scientific endeavor. It seemed her attitude hadn’t been shared by the others as she’d thought, and she was the only one with a purely negative stance on the takeover. And a hostile one toward the man behind it.
Everyone else was awed by the very mention of the legendary Dr. Antonio Balducci. The buzz she was sensing wasn’t only over any favorable expectations with him at the helm, but also over the opportunity of meeting him in the flesh. The ladies especially looked aflutter at the prospect. From her online research of him, she grudgingly conceded their reaction was the normal one, not hers.
Since she reserved her curiosity for scientific matters, she’d barely known a thing about him before she’d heard the news. After she had, she’d gone through the stages of shock, denial and fury, and through everything she could find on him on the net.
To her surprise, she found three parallels with him from the first thing she read. Like her, he was a doctor, and he’d been born to an Italian father and was an only child. But that was where their similarities ended.
He was an American now, naturalized three years ago, while she was an American through her mother. Both his parents were long dead, while her own mother had died only a year ago, and her father who had never existed in her life, had recently—and to her continuing surprise, very enthusiastically—reentered it.
Pulling her thoughts away from that development, she turned them to the man at hand.
Not much was known about Antonio Balducci’s early life. He was raised in Austria, his mother’s homeland, where he became fluent in six languages and where he lived until he graduated from medical school. It was only about eight years ago that information about him, staggering in quantity and quality, had started pouring in.
That was when he’d shot onto the world scene, an awe-inspiring figure whose success in every field he entered was phenomenal. Being a founding member of the global juggernaut Black Castle Enterprises was meticulously documented, as well as his founding of the conglomerate’s medical R & D business—the arm of his empire that had taken over her beloved lab.
Adding to his lure for the media was his effect on the females of the species. Women went nuts over him like they did over music and soccer legends like Presley and Beckham. If she’d thought his effect a media exaggeration, she was seeing empirical evidence of his irresistibility to women right before her eyes. And that was before he actually arrived.
But all that wasn’t what he was best known for. Most of his fame stemmed from being sought after by the world’s elite to perform or even consult on their rejuvenations. But his biggest achievement was being hailed as a trauma and reconstructive surgical god whose work bordered on magic.
She ground her teeth together. The only magic she thought Balducci practiced was the black kind. To her, he was the capricious force who was pulverizing everything she’d worked for, just because he could.
And the damned man dared be late for her destruction!
Suddenly conversation was cut off as if someone had hit Stop. She looked up and saw all eyes glued to the doorway behind her. That meant...
She swung around to catch the moment when the man who’d quashed her ambitions bulldozed into her territory. And it was her turn to feel she’d been caught in a stasis field.
As everything decelerated to a standstill, a mental protest went off inside her mind.
No one should be all that, and look like that, too. Is there no fairness in this world?
Gaping and unable to do anything about it, she stared at the figure in the doorway. In a slate-gray suit that molded to a body that belonged to a world-class athlete, not a surgeon and entrepreneur, Antonio Balducci dwarfed the room with his physical and personal presence.
While viewing his photos online, she’d dismissed the possibility that he looked that good in real life, believing he’d had his photos touched up or he’d achieved his perfection surgically.r />
But even across a packed room, she knew neither of that was true. If anything, the photos had downplayed his looks. And she could discern surgical interventions from a mile away and she had no doubt whatsoever that every one of Antonio Balducci’s jaw-dropping assets was authentic.
At forty, the man had skin that looked like an alloy of polished copper and bronze. The tensile medium was pulled tight over a masterpiece of bone structure. Her fingers itched to indulge in a much-neglected pastime and sketch its every detail: the leonine forehead, the patrician nose, the slashing cheekbones, the powerful jaw and cleft chin.
After transferring the framework of his unique face to paper, she’d linger over every hair framing his majestic head, the most robust mass of raven silk she’d ever seen. But among all those wonders, two things transfixed her. The wide, sculpted lips bowed in a mysterious quirk. And his eyes.
Apart from their amazing shape and startling blueness, it was what they conveyed that sent her heartbeat into disarray. Contrary to the opacity of his smile, his gaze radiated an amalgam of expressions. Amusement and austerity. Curiosity and superiority. Astuteness and calculation. And a dozen other things she couldn’t decide on.
Those were the eyes of a scientist. But equally they were the eyes of a conqueror.
Which probably summed him up just right.
