AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Prologue
Most people couldn’t predict the end of their lives. They didn’t know the day, the hour, or the second they would cease to exist. Most weren’t aware that, one day, it would all fall apart based on a single, seemingly innocent decision.
That wasn’t the case for Raina Daniels.
Unlike most people, Raina was well aware that the minute she’d laid eyes on this man, he would lead to the end of her life as she knew it. And the beginning of her end, like many ends, started with a question.
“What qualifications do you think you have to ‘school’ an MD in genetics or biological sciences?”
She’d accepted an invitation to present at an epigenetics conference in Athens attended by a room brimming with MDs and PhDs. She’d accepted the invitation, assuming that they would be able to respect her opinion regardless of the lack of letters trailing after her name. After all, she had the background, the knowledge, the experience, and her science was sound. It was difficult to argue with science.
And most had accepted her.
In fact, all of them did.
Except one.
She cocked her head to the side, her half-filled wine glass barely balancing on her fingers, and studied this man who’d taken it upon himself to sit beside her at a near-empty hotel dinner table, for the sole purpose of pissing her off.
He wore apompouslinen-colored blazer, a white collared shirt, black slacks, and an expensive timepiece glistened on his wrist. His thick, dark hair curledpretentiouslyover his forehead, highlighting anarrogantlyattractive face and low facial hair neatly trimmed from his temples to his chin.
Then there were his eyes.
His eyes reminded her of looking down at a forest canopy from a helicopter in slowly intensifying sunlight, the evergreen tops merging toward the endless black holes he called pupils.
“I’m sorry, but did you need something?” she asked.
He raised a dark eyebrow. “Technically, I want something.”
“And that is?”
He remained silent.
Raina looked around, searching for the inverted pentagram haphazardly scrawled on the hotel’s wooden floor that had conjured him into her presence.
“You can’t argue theories with no scientific basis,” he said.
She wasn’t arguing anything. She’d been drinking wine and minding her business when the tall, green-eyed incubus appeared before her in a cloud of invisible smoke.
“I’m sorry, but who are you?”
That wicked brow shot up again. “Another mistake. If you’re here, you should know who I am.”
“Clearly, I don’t.”
“My name’s Dr. Lucas Saraci.”
She gave him a more thorough once-over. “You’re the one who kept rolling his eyes during my presentation. If I bored you that much, why didn’t you leave?”
“Don’t change the subject, Miss Daniels.”
The man had even remembered her name. He had to have been planning their fight for hours. The minute she introduced herself at her breakout session, he must have latched on, anticipating the moment he would corner her with sharp, descended canines.
“Your point of view was reductionist at best, ridiculous at worst,” he soldiered on. “Eating disorders are widely known to be primarily psychosocial. Your suggestion that there is a biological, genetic, or epigenetic basis for them is founded on old, outdated science.”
Like hell, it was.
Her nonprofit research institution released a paper on the epigenetics of eating disordersearlier that year.
