Page 115 of The Vegas Lie

“I don’t hate it.Deliloand Stitch. You haveheard of that movie, right?”

“Get out.”

Laughing so hard she snorted, she shut the door, and he waited until he saw her enter the building before pulling off.

As he headed home, the itch to book a ticket to North Carolina burned in his palms and fingertips just as a message popped up on his console.

Mrs. Saraci

Thinking about you.

?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??

Dr. Lucas Saraci MD

??

ChapterTwenty

They needed more money.

While she could always inject more capital into their research funding from her own pockets, even her income was limited compared to the sheer size of their future plans. Essentially, she could drain every asset she had, and it still would only be seed money.

They needed more grants.

Donations.

Endowments.

Collaborations with private companies. One private company, in particular, could assuage nearly all their financial woes, and they’d reached a point where she could no longer afford to be stubborn.

“You’re going to have to ask, Raina,” the institute’s CFO, Lorelei Glenside, said. “I’m not asking you to ‘beg Daddy’ for money, but wasn’t this the point of him starting his foundation? To help fledglings like us?”

At the moment, the “institute” was two rooms at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill—a meeting space and the small office she and Lorelei shared that was currently piled high with boxes.

They only had three staff on-site: her, Lorelei, and an intern who would be graduating in December. The rest worked virtually, most of them based in the DMV area, and the plan was to move primary operations to the D.C. area, where they would have more opportunities to network with larger, more established institutions.

For that, they needed clout.

To get clout, they needed money.

“And what about Lucas Saraci? He could put his initials on this,” Lorelei drew an L and an S in the air, “and that by itself would help us out a bunch. Imagine having Anthony Fauci on your biomedical research team.”

“Saraci isn’t as well known as Fauci,” Raina said.

“He’s young. He could be one day.” Lorelei rolled her chair out from under her desk. “Rai, we have everything at our fingertips. We’ve been talking about this for too long; it’s time to take action. If we wait any longer, we might miss our chance to do important, meaningful work. I’m with you, but I also have bills to pay and a child to take care of.”

Raina scrubbed at her face with both hands. At the moment, the rest of the team believed Delilah introduced her to Lucas and that he’d taken an interest in their research because of an overlap with eating disorders that might arise after head and neck cancer treatment. No one knew it had gone further than that.

“Fine, I’ll talk to my father.”

Lorelei pumped a fist. “Yes! And what about Lucas?”

“Lorelei, what I’m about to tell you can’t get to the rest of the team. Not yet.”

“He backed out, didn’t he?”

“Not quite.” She sighed. “Lucas Saraci and I…sort of…hit it off.”