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Anna took another gulp of her double-shot mocha as Anderson left the room. Her normal tea-and-flannel-pjs routine had failed her yet again last night, and she was running on about four hours of sleep. It was all Prince Eric’s fault. The royal family’s prodigal son had never taken anything seriously in his life as far as she could tell, but he’d suddenly done an abrupt about-face and was now chasing her down for meetings on a daily basis. The whole thing was making her anxious. She was half convinced he was doing it on purpose, too—dangling his funding in front of her like it was a cat toy that she was supposed to jump at without question, then punishing her with his incessantly cheerful emails and phone calls and in-person ambushes when she dared to turn him down.
She made a face, popping the lid off her coffee to lick the whipped cream off the top. The problem was, his funding would help her research. It would be so easy to let him set up a meeting, to accept the money, to not need to spend hours of her precious work time writing applications for more grants. If only her stepsister wasn’t the new Queen of Danovar, Anna would happily accept any funding the prince wanted to throw her way. But as things stood, she couldn’t accept the funds without all of her colleagues thinking she’d cheated by using her royal connections to further her research. And if there was anything Anna couldn’t stand, it was people thinking less of her work. She’d spent far too much effort to get approval to use this research facility and complete her study to let Prince Eric’s money taint it.
But at least she had the gorgeous specimen in the MRI to distract her. And testing a new patient would be the perfect excuse to continue avoiding Prince Eric, who the receptionist had mentioned was looking for her again. Anna was a little surprised this volunteer was a man, since her research was on the topic of breast cancer—but the disease affected men too, and it was exciting to have a more varied sample of patients from which to draw her results. If she could support her dissertation’s theory by showing initial proof of a drug capable of isolating and destroying a common type of breast cancer, she’d be able to take her pick of rich benefactors wanting to fund her research for the whole rest of her career.
She pressed the intercom button. “Okay, sir, I’m about to turn on the MRI. Let me know if you have any questions before we get started.” She let go of the button, but it stayed a glowing red. She frowned and pressed it a few more times. Weird. She’d have to get Anderson to check it later.
A furious banging interrupted her thoughts, making her jump and spill her precious coffee all over her lab coat. She yelped, then squinted at her monitors. The patient was banging his fist on the side of the lab’s very expensive, brand new MRI machine. Why the hell hadn’t Anderson strapped the patient down?
She set what was left of her coffee on the counter, allowing herself a half-second to mourn the whipped cream that she was now wearing, and hurried for the door—then paused. The banging had a strangely familiar rhythm to it. Was that…the Danovian national anthem?
She frowned, yanked open the door, and darted into the MRI room. “Stop it!” she shouted. “Do you even know how much that machine cost?” She smacked a button, and the gurney slid out. As it did, she caught a glimpse of a tattoo on the patient’s chest: a gorgeous griffin, its wings spread wide across the man’s even more gorgeous pecs.
Wait a second. She knew that griffin. From the front pages of every Danovian tabloid a few months back, when Prince Eric had showed off his new tattoo to the press.
“Hell’s bells,” she cursed, tempted to give the gurney a good kick and then run away before her arch-nemesis emerged from the machine. But she was too late. The man she’d been avoiding for weeks sat up and grinned at her, that ridiculously sexy grin
that crinkled the corners of his crystal blue eyes, and the best she could manage in the face of it was a mild glower. Good Lord, those abs really should be illegal. Though now that she was getting a close-up look, she had to say that his forearms might be even better.
Come on, Fernstone, get it together. Who gets turned on by forearms?
She shook herself and dug deep for her righteous anger, using it as a shield. She crossed her arms and sharpened her glower. “What are you doing? Do you know how much money you would’ve wasted if I’d turned that thing on? I barely have enough grants to get this study done as it is! How hard did you hit it? You could’ve damaged it, plus you made me dump my coffee all over myself.” She peeled her lab coat off, muttering.
Eric took a moment to respond, following her motions as she took off the coat, then his grin cranked back up to full wattage. “I’ll buy you a new one,” he said with a shrug.
“Oh no you won’t, there’s no way I’m going anywhere with you, not even to the nearest coffee shop.” He’d find some way to stretch the time, to use it to wheedle her into considering his offer. And she would not consider his offer.
“No, you misunderstand. I’ll buy you a new MRI machine. Although I’ll spring for some coffee too. I have a pounding headache, which your monstrosity of a machine did nothing to help.”
She blinked at him. “What?” was all she could manage as she attempted to parse that statement.
He leaned forward. His biceps tensed at the motion, which she steadfastly refused to notice. “I know you’ve been dodging me,” he said earnestly, “but there’s really no reason to. I want to help you.”
“No, you want to help yourself,” she declared hotly.
“I want to help us both. You need money. I need good publicity for my healthcare bill, which my country needs enacted. Everyone can win here. All you have to do is say yes. Have you even looked at the offer I mailed you?”
She hadn’t. She’d stuffed it deep into the very bottom of her least-used desk drawer, where it had been collecting dust bunnies for a week. “Thank you for the consideration,” she said stiffly, “but I want to keep my data clean of bias, and having my sister’s new in-laws fund my research wouldn’t look good.”
It was already bad enough that she had to do her dissertation work in her home country of Danovar rather than in America, where she’d been spending most of her time lately. Well, technically it wasn’t bad—the medical research laws here made for less red tape, after all—but to her mind, it had felt like taking the easy way out when she’d decided to return here to do her testing. Accepting money from a biased source would only make matters worse.
But Eric hopped off the gurney and shook his head, reaching out to grab her shoulders. “Dr. Fernstone, that’s not true,” he argued, and it took her a moment to process his words because she was too busy not focusing on the way his strong fingers curved gently around her arms, and the way his thumbs felt resting at the edges of her collarbone. It almost made her wish she’d worn a tank top instead of her normal turtleneck, so she could feel his skin against hers. And that he would grip her just a little tighter, move just a little closer, maybe let her put her hands on his bare shoulders—
She shook herself, slapping his hands away. She was a scientist, not some panting teenager. Stupid libido. It made her wish, not for the first time, that she wasn’t a virgin. Maybe if she’d gotten all this sex stuff out of her system back in college instead of studying night and day, she’d be able to concentrate on the argument she was supposed to be constructing against him right now…instead of fantasizing about him pushing her up against the wall, holding her down with those gorgeous, strong hands, and having his way with her. They were in a research facility, for crying out loud. She tugged at her tight braid, trying to refocus.
“…you would get publicity as well as the money,” he was saying when she managed to tune back in. “Wouldn’t that be good for getting the news out about what could potentially be a huge breakthrough toward a cancer cure? If your research wasn’t properly funded and taken seriously enough by those with the power to actually develop this drug one day, wouldn’t that be much worse than your source of funding potentially looking biased? And anyway, if you do a quality job, no one will have any grounds to question whether there even is a bias. Which there isn’t. I don’t care who your sister is. I just happen to think your research is the most promising thing out there right now that fits the needs of my planned publicity campaign.”
She licked her lips. He made a certain amount of sense. “Still…” she hedged.
He saw her wavering and went in for the kill, sweeping up her hands in his, which gave her tingles in all the right places. Damn, he played dirty. “Please, Dr. Fernstone,” he said. “Just say yes.”
Anything to get him out of her lab, so she could stop thinking about all the other, even better places he could be touching her. “Maybe,” she managed.
He grinned, triumphant, and the expression lit up his whole face. Her traitorous knees went a little weak. “Excellent!” he said. “I’ll be in touch.” He grabbed his shirt and pulled it back on, which was both a relief and a terrible, terrible pity, and headed for the door—probably trying to escape before she could change her mind.
By the time she remembered his offer to buy replace her coffee, he was gone. She groaned, grabbed some paper towels to mop up the mess on the floor of the control room, and tried not to wonder if she’d just sold her soul to the devil.
