The Spanish Tycoon's Temptress Page 0,7
she could do. Eating crow, that was a whole other issue. “I wanted to thank you for the funding offer and to talk to you about the specifics. At your convenience, of course,” she added, just as s precaution in case he might think she was demanding his time. “Anyway,” she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “If you need more information on my experiments, let me know. I look forward to hearing from you,” she said and gave him her cell phone number.
With that done, she pressed the end button and fell onto her worn out sofa, relieved to have gotten the worst over with. That hadn’t been as painful as she’d anticipated, she thought with relief.
But just in case, she pulled up her laptop and started searching for additional funding sites. There had to be some agricultural company out there that might be interested in her work. The problem was her lack of results over the past six months. It was crushing her and if she could figure out who, why and how someone had viciously tampered with her work, she would at least be able to speak to that problem and provide a better argument for why she was so close to achieving the results she wanted. But she only had evidence that someone was sabotaging. She had no idea how or why. And the who was driving her just a little bit nuts.
Not five minutes had passed before her cell phone started ringing. She lifted her head off of the fuzzy sofa cushion and looked at the number on the small screen. Just seeing the man’s number made her stomach muscles clench with….fear? She wasn’t exactly sure what she was feeling but it was intense and uncomfortable.
Her finger pressed the button, but hesitated to release it which told her a great deal. “Hello?” she answered, pretending that she didn’t know exactly who was calling.
“Good afternoon, Elana. I suppose you called because you need laboratory space and funding. Am I correct?” Gaston’s deep, confident, sexy voice made her stomach muscles tighten even more.
She gritted her teeth, hearing the smug, self-satisfied tone in his voice. She wanted desperately to reach through the phone and smack him. But she needed the funding more than she needed to take him down a notch. “Yes. If the grant money is still available.” She just had a horrible thought. “It hasn’t been allocated to someone else already, has it?” she asked, a lump forming in her throat at the possibility that the grant was gone. She had no idea what else to do if it was. She was basically out of options.
“No. Rest assured, no other botanist has applied for the grant. I’ll pick you up at seven tonight to discuss the grant and to review your findings to date.” Without another word, he disconnected the line and Elana was left sitting on her raggedy couch, glaring at the phone as if it were some sort of serpent.
And then his words hit her. Dinner? Tonight?
She looked down at the jeans she’d pulled on earlier this morning. Since her actual legs were shorter than the legs of her jeans, the hems were frayed from walking on them. There was almost a hole in one of the knees as well as some sort of stain on the other knee. She couldn’t even remember what she’d spilled on the jeans, having been unconcerned with her appearance in favor of spending her time worrying about her work. Besides, her lab coat covered most of the problem so she’d never really thought about her jeans, much less her appearance. Or her shirt, she thought, glancing at that pathetic piece of her wardrobe. It had three stick figures at the top, one covering its eyes, one covering its ears and another covering its mouth with the words “Define Evil” underneath the figures. It had struck her as ironic when she’d found it in a small shop about six years ago, but the material had definitely seen better days.
She couldn’t let Gaston see her like this. He would immediately feel disgust, or worse, pity for her pathetic appearance and she wasn’t about to let him see her so bedraggled. It had nothing to do with wanting to impress him and everything to do with her pride. He’d left her seven years ago and she’d be damned if he thought she was still upset over his departure! She wasn’t. She’d gotten over him a long time ago. She