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 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.