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Amy nodded. “I’d have to look at this place to assess whether or not it’s any good,” she said.
“It’s good,” he assured her. “Every breakthrough in Italian medicine over the last thirty years has come out of Romano. Trust me—this is the right place for us. And anyway, I’ve already given them the investment.”
“I suppose it’s your money to spend as you’d like,” Amy said. She still wished he had consulted her before making a plan. She would have liked to review the facility. She knew she was the expert in this, and he wasn’t. But it was up to him whether he wanted her opinion or not.
“You’ll be able to visit this location as often as you’d like,” he said. “My driver will bring you here any time, day or night, if there’s work you feel you need to do, or if you want to monitor or consult on the research that’s taking place.”
Well, she couldn’t deny that that was convenient. “Thank you,” she said. “That’s going to make this a lot easier.”
“They’ve invited you tomorrow for a tour of the facility—will that be soon enough?”
“That will be fine.” She hadn’t planned to work today anyway. It occurred to her that she’d been frustrated, just a few hours earlier, at how long he was making her wait to get started, but now that she knew she would be able to devote herself to her work beginning tomorrow, three days no longer felt like such a long time.
She turned to face him. “Thank you,” she said, and was surprised by how genuinely she meant it. “Thank you for showing me this. It’s good to see where I’m going to be working.”
He nodded. “I think you’ll like it here,” he said. “And the team has been instructed to make your project their top priority.”
“Oh, don’t tell me you own this place too.”
He laughed. “I don’t own it,” he said. “But I am a very generous benefactor. The amount of money I gave will fund all kinds of research projects.”
Amy was surprised. “I didn’t realize you were going to fund more than just Barks-Howard’s research.”
He shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I’ve got the money,” he said. “No reason not to.”
She agreed with the logic—but it wasn’t something she would have expected from him. It was her first taste of the fact that Adriano could be unselfish if he really wanted to.
And it definitely wasn’t the kind of thing that would help her forget how attractive she found him.
CHAPTER11
AMY
Afew days later, after observing the way things were done at Romano Labs, Amy had to admit that she had prejudged the place.
And she’d been wrong. Very wrong.
It was a very good thing for them both that Adriano had known about this place because they were miles ahead of any of the labs she’d worked with back at home. They didn’t have a cure for Barks-Howard’s, of course—she knew she would have heard about it if they had—but what they did have was a medication she had never even heard of that had been effective in treating other autoimmune conditions.
“Why don’t we have this in the States?” she asked Dr. Esposito, a researcher who worked at the lab, as she perused the paperwork. “I’ve never even heard of it, and this could really help a lot of people.”
“It’s still in testing,” he explained. “Once it’s approved, we’ll release it on the foreign market, but we can’t do that just yet.”
“Well, do you think it would work against Barks-Howard’s?”
“I don’t have any reason to think otherwise,” Dr. Esposito said. “But I’m not an expert in that condition. I think you would know more about the possible effectiveness of our drug than I would.”
“It doesn’t have a name?”
“Just a serial number at the moment.” He rattled it off, and Amy knew immediately that she would never remember the long sequence of numbers. “Maybe we’ll name it after Mr. Canali, since he’s so generously funding our work.”
Amy nodded absently. What she really wanted to do was to get Adriano started on this wonder drug as soon as she possibly could. “Can you get me a list of the possible side effects?”
Dr. Esposito nodded. “There’s nothing serious associated with it so far,” he said. “No major health risks. But I’ll email you the full list so you can discuss it with Mr. Canali.” He hesitated. “Personally, I would recommend this course of treatment to anyone with a disease like his. I think it’s the best thing we have available right now. And seeing how he responds to it, even in the first few weeks, should advance our research significantly. This has never been tried on a Barks-Howard’s patient before, so we may find it’s highly effective. Regardless of the side effects, I would encourage him to go forward with it.”
Amy nodded. “I’m feeling the same way at the moment, though I’ll want to discuss the details with him and come to a decision together. Still, I’m very glad he chose this laboratory to work with. None of the ones I’m familiar with have developed anything this advanced. This might just be the lucky break we were hoping for.”
* * *
