The Spanish Tycoon's Temptress Page 0,2
he’d convinced this man to push her aside and his precious little girl had been slowly dying, living the life of a recluse. And she never laughed.
Oh, she might smile occasionally. She would go through the motions when in a social situation. But the smile was only on her lips and never reached her eyes. Those pretty brown eyes that used to always sparkle, that would tease him and show so much life, were dead now.
Gaston scoffed at the idea of Elana not being happy. His cynical nature came into play here and he refused to believe that Elana hadn’t moved on with her life. “That’s hard to believe, considering the picture you showed me of her with that other man.”
Rufus refused to let his shame interfere. This was his daughter’s happiness at stake. He had to succeed. “So find a way to make her forget any other man but you.” He paused and looked up at the tall, furious man. “Or are you not up to the challenge? Are all those stories about your female conquests just lies? Or publicity?”
Gaston refused to answer. It was none of this man’s business who he dated. And his daughter was definitely not going to be one of them. There had to be another way to get that book. Unfortunately, time was not on his side. His father was asking for the book, begging Gaston to find it and return it to him. The man was dying and they all knew it. What kind of son would he be if he couldn’t give his father his dying request.
What was in this book that was so important was a mystery to Gaston. He’d seen it when he was a child but he’d been too young to care about a moldy old book with ancient pictures in it. There had been too many other things to do at that age. His mother had passed away asking for the book and he hadn’t been able to get it. Now his father was dying, asking for the same book. He wouldn’t fail his father. He would get the damn book if he had to marry the faithless wench. It wasn’t as if he had to sleep with her.
Chapter 2
Elana peered through the microscope then made some notes on the report by her side. Moving on to the next slide, she did the same thing, over and over again. Each slide showed her the exact same thing and she sighed with frustration when the last slide revealed that nothing had changed. “Shoot,” she said and dropped her head into her palms as she rested her elbows on the black, epoxy-resin countertop. “Why didn’t it work?”
“Problems?” Richard Channing asked as he leaned against the other side of the countertop.
Elana looked up and grimaced at her fellow researcher. “It didn’t work.” She and Richard worked in the university laboratory on similar research projects, but he had funding from a different source. They had collaborated slightly on their results over the past year but Elana was embarrassed that her research wasn’t going as well as his.
Richard sighed and shook his head. “I would have thought that the last batch might have been a winner.” He moved around the table and examined the slides. “None of these worked?”
Elana covered her mouth, her mind sifting through the possibilities and potential next step. “Not a single one.” She took her notes and closed the notebook. Richard was a nice guy, but she hesitated to trust anyone in this laboratory. There was fierce competition among her peers to discover a new strain of bacteria resistant wheat and Richard wasn’t above stealing her ideas to help his own experiments. “How are your ideas coming along?” she asked, changing the subject.
Richard leaned his back against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. “I thought I had something with the cellulose last time, but the bacteria didn’t seem to care that I’d given the little buggers a toxin. They ate right through the cells.”
Elana nodded. “Same here.” She looked at the clock and sighed. “I guess we’d better be heading home, eh?” It was almost midnight and she’d been here since before six o’clock this morning, eager to start examining her results from the growths she’d been working on for the past month. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to have worked at all.
She was working on her doctoral thesis and this was supposed to be the major element in that paper. She wasn’t going to impress the panel much