The Spanish Tycoon's Temptress Page 0,18

very nice. Thank you.”

He showed her around the rest of the lab, introducing her to the others who all seemed genuinely pleased to meet her and hear about her work. It was a nice, friendly atmosphere but still filled with the bustle of activity and intelligence that seemed to make the work area hum with excitement and anticipation.

An hour after pulling into the parking lot, she was set up and ready to work. She pushed herself harder than ever, wanting to prove to Gaston that she wasn’t a failure despite her lack of recent success that had her begging for his grant funding last week. Her need to prove herself to him had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to impress the man and everything to do with helping people who were hungry and farmers who could lose their entire crop to the various bacteria that she was fighting. She loved her work and the new environment helped her thrive. The people were kind and dedicated with a brilliance that she’d never encountered before.

Two weeks later, Elana peered through the microscope, her breath caught in her throat as she saw the results. They were positive! This was what she lived for now. The experiment, with unadulterated testing, was doing exactly as she’d hypothesized during all those years. She’d actually done it!

Thankfully, her tests from the previous lab weren’t as messed up as she’d previously assumed. She looked up and recorded the information, making notes in the margins. It didn’t matter that this batch worked. She’d still have to do the entire experiment over again, showing her data without any sort of errors. The results might be wonderful now, but she’d have to prove, and then reprove, her work. She’d have to have secondary tests, blind tests….she needed to….

“Elana!”

She snapped around, her eyebrows furrowed in irritation as she looked behind her, trying to find the source who had interrupted her thought process. “Hi! What’s going on?” she asked when she finally focused her eyes on Tom but she quickly looked back down at her microscope, eager to move on to the next slide.

Tom chuckled nervously as he looked up at the man next to him. “She didn’t mean to snap at me. We all get into our work pretty heavily at times.”

She looked behind her once again, wondering who Tom was apologizing to. Elana gasped when she realized that Tom was addressing Gaston in an elegant, dark suit that did nothing to hide the raw power of the man. Just looking at him caused her heart to jump several beats. “What are you doing down here?” she asked, rising from her black stool and walking over to her new batch of slides that were growing the bacteria she was trying to fight. She didn’t want to look at him, irritated that he could stand more than five feet away from her and her body still reacted to the man.

“I came down to take you out to lunch,” he replied, watching her with interest. She was wearing a pair of black slacks and a red, turtleneck sweater that hugged her slender waist and full breasts lovingly, although the white lab coat hid most of her figure, only giving him slight glimpses of what lay underneath. Gone were the worn out jeans and tee-shirts. She’d assimilated into the work environment here quickly, he noted. She’d been working here for only two weeks and already she had improved her wardrobe. And made friends, if the man standing next to him was any indication. Tom, his laboratory manager, seemed to be infatuated with the woman Gaston himself was targeting.

Too bad Tom wasn’t going to win this battle, he thought with resentment, stifling the urge to fire the man on the spot for looking at Elana with those adoring, puppy dog eyes. What happened to professionalism, he asked himself. What about his corporate policy on not fraternizing with co-workers?

Well, he couldn’t really enforce that one since he was about to seduce one of his employees. Okay, so perhaps she wasn’t technically one of his employees. But the rules should still apply. At least to Tom.

Gaston excused himself from those rules in this situation since he had an ulterior motive. His motives were more genuine. He wanted to marry the woman, he assured himself, trying to salve his conscience.

The fascinating woman in question was already shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Gaston, but I don’t have time for lunch today.” Elana hid her burning face by bending down