that. Just seems like it might hike up quite a…bit.” The last word was barely made of anything but air.
He flushed and released her hand. “Up to you.” He took a couple of steps away from her and reached for another cookie dough ball.
“I’ll be so fast changing,” she said, already moving toward the mouth of the hallway.
Twenty minutes later, Hunter turned onto the road that led to his family farm. Molly had been here many times in the past, and it sure hadn’t changed much. “You have such a beautiful farm,” she said.
“It is great, isn’t it?” Hunter gazed out the windshield at the farm. “I do love it here.”
“And dinner is out here?”
He cut her a glance out of the corner of his eye. “Yep.”
Molly grinned and let him drive back to the stables. She let him help her onto a beautiful golden-colored horse, and she let him lead her through the evening sunshine to a stand of trees on the other side of the farm.
The conversation with him was easy and light, and when they swung down from their horses, Hunter took her hand and led her to a table in the shade of a huge live oak. Two chairs sat at the table, and a pale cream cloth covered it.
Two plates sat there, covered by two silver domes, and a vase of vibrant red roses dominated the center of the table. A waiter appeared from behind a tree of all things and filled their glasses with a light pink lemonade.
“It’s ready, sir,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Thank you,” Hunter said.
Molly gripped his hand and watched the man in the dark suit glide back behind the tree. “You billionaires really know how to pull out all the stops, don’t you?”
He laughed, lifted her knuckles to his lips, and said, “Let’s eat, sweetheart. I’m starving.”
Chapter 9
Hunter sat in front of the computer and typed in a couple of new parameters. “Is it ready?” he asked, looking past the monitor to a ginger-haired man named Joel Mittany.
At least twenty years older than Hunter, Joel kept his eyes on his handheld tablet for a moment before turning to him. “Yes. Did you get that last number?”
“Seven-point-seven-four-five.” Hunter read it from the screen. They’d been in the lab for an hour, trying to get the x-ray machine calibrated properly before they set in the crystals. Hunter had used x-ray crystallography extensively at MIT, and he’d been training the other scientists here at HMC for a couple of weeks now.
This maiden voyage had to go well, and everyone else would be here in fifteen minutes.
“Let’s fire it up,” Joel said with a smile. He came to Hunter’s side, and they both looked at the screen.
“Double-check me,” Hunter said, standing to give Joel room to see the screen.
The other man took the stool Hunter had been on, and he studied the computer screen, glancing at his tablet every few seconds. “You got it, Hunt.” He looked up and stood up, his eyes harboring as much anxiety as Hunter felt in his soul. “All we can do is try it.”
Hunter nodded, because truer words had never been spoken. No one was going to die if the calibration still wasn’t right. He wasn’t performing heart surgery. He simply wanted this demonstration to go well.
They only had a limited time to take everyone from their other tasks in Lab Six, and Hunter—as the very youngest and newest member of the team—wanted to make a good impression.
Everyone had been extremely nice to him upon his arrival. He suspected his last name had a whole lot to do with that, and he wanted—needed—to prove that he absolutely deserved to be there. He knew his stuff. He was extremely good at problem solving, thinking of new solutions, and using the complicated, scientific equipment to get results.
Then, he could use computers and programs to analyze those results. That was what Bioinformatics was, and Hunter loved it with his whole soul.
“Okay,” he said, thinking of his conversation with his aunt. He and Laura had met a couple more times since his first day at HMC, and they’d decided to take the company more toward developing new drugs with the knowledge and skills Hunter had acquired at HMC. The possibilities with Bioinformatics could take them in other directions too—waste cleanup, developing stronger strains of crops, improvements in agriculture, and even alternate energy sources.
But there was more money in medicine and pharmaceuticals. Uncle Wes had started HMC in