Brian spread his arms. “You know me, I never say never.” At her hardening glare, he grinned. “I’m in the same hijacked boat as you. I just decided to deal with my captivity and go on the journey with a different attitude.”
She huffed, deflating in her chair.
Brian was right. He was just another victim of the tsunami takeover. She should save her wrath for their new boss.
But Balducci wouldn’t be her boss for long. Not if he insisted on sweeping years’ worth of work and results under the rug and forcing them to dance to his profit-hungry tune.
Despite a medical degree, two master’s degrees and lucrative offers, she’d spent years at Biomedical Innovation Lab with a salary that barely paid the bills. All to do marginalized but necessary research.
Until Balducci Research and Development opened its bottomless maw and swallowed them whole. They now sloshed deep in its belly among other chomped-off acquisitions.
What most galled her was the humiliating speed with which everything had been initiated and finalized. The commercialized global whale, a major tentacle of the Black Castle Enterprises leviathan, had assimilated them in mere hours.
Antonio Balducci, the billionaire celebrity surgeon, had tossed a hundred million dollars their way—chump change for him—and once again proved that money was the most powerful incentive on earth.
“Uh-oh.” Brian took a step back as he spoke. “You’ve got that look on your face.”
She frowned. “What look?”
“The one you get when you’ve decided to go to war.”
She huffed a chuckle, half amused, half embarrassed. “I didn’t realize I was that easy to read. After all the years I spent battling my verbal incontinence, thanks for letting me know I’ve only developed the mental and emotional variety.”
An indulgent smile lit up Brian’s genial face. “You’re just straightforward and spontaneous.”
She rolled her eyes. “Which are the PC words for unrestrained and blunt.”
“And it’s something everyone is thankful for.”
She groaned. “You mean it’s not only you as my best friend who can see through me? Everyone else can read me like a ten-foot neon sign?”
Brian’s grin was appeasement itself. “And they love you for it. In a world full of pretense and games, you’re a rarity and an incredible relief. Not to mention extremely cute.”
“An outspoken five-year-old is cute. A transparent thirty-one-year-old is not.”
Brian wrapped an arm around her shoulder and gave her an affectionate squeeze. “You’ll be cute when you’re a hundred and thirty-one.” He pulled her up. “Now let’s go meet our new boss. I have a feeling this won’t be as bad as you think.”
Taking off her lab coat, she tossed him a challenging glance. “I bet you it’s worse.”
“You’re on.” He never could resist a challenge. “If I’m right, you go on a date with one of the restless bachelors that plague my serenely married existence.”
Unable to resist Brian’s infectious good cheer any longer, a smile spread Lili’s lips. All nine of Brian’s brothers and brothers-in-law were either single or divorced. He and his wife, Darla, were always trying to set them up.
“But if I’m right,” Lili said, “you strike me off your list of possible bachelordom cures. I’m the last woman on earth you should consider for such a task, anyway.”
“I know, because you’ll never get married. You’ve told me a hundred times.” He grinned knowingly. “All the women who turn out to be the best wives say that. Including Darla.”
Lili stifled a scoff. “You’re comparing me to Darla, the paragon of domesticity and motherhood, and a savvy businesswoman to boot, when I can barely manage a single life that consists of work, exercise, sleep, study, rinse and repeat?”
“Details, details.” Brian winked as he held the door open for her. “You could well be twins where it counts.”
She shook her head, but let him have the last word. She was nothing like Darla or any other woman born with the ability to conduct intimate relationships or nurture families. Like her mother. And she’d long been at peace with that.
So she was confident she’d win their bet, and at least one good thing would come out of their current mess. Brian would finally stop trying to shove her into his version of a fulfilling existence.
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