Reactive is a novella of 18,300 words that delivers the combustible collision of an intellectual rivals romance set against the pressure-cooker world of graduate research in Italy. Blending contemporary romance with enemies-to-lovers tension and new adult angst, this story throws two brilliant, stubborn chemistry students into forced proximity—where the line between competition and desire dissolves with every whispered correction, every charged silence, and every battle neither is willing to lose.

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Taddeo didn’t ask for a rival. He certainly didn’t ask for one who watches his hands during lab work like she’s already figured him out. When Sabrina arrives from Bologna and installs herself at the bench opposite his, their intellectual sparring ignites immediately—precision against instinct, protocol against intuition. She’s the first person whose critique he cannot dismiss. He’s the first peer whose intellect meets hers without deference.

But when a broken burette forces their bodies together in the narrow space behind the LC-MS machine, the air shifts. Her whisper against his ear lasts three seconds too long. Neither acknowledges it, but both replay it.

Taddeo does what any rational man would do: he runs toward something simpler. Alissa is warm, uncomplicated, and fits his world without friction. But Sabrina refuses to be ignored. She appears at his coffee spot, his climbing gym, every corner of his life—marking territory with lingering glances and calculated provocations. Soon Taddeo is caught between the woman who challenges everything he thought he knew and the woman who asks for nothing at all.

When a late-night encounter on a canal bridge dissolves a boundary neither can uncross, the choice becomes impossible. Sabrina knows about Alissa. Taddeo knows he’s lying to himself. And when a chemical burn lands Sabrina in the emergency room, Taddeo must decide—publicly, irrevocably—whose name he’ll say when the world goes quiet.

But Sabrina has spent months chasing him. Is she in love, or is winning the only language she knows?

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This is for readers who crave romance that burns fast and hits hard—where the tension isn’t just physical but intellectual, where the love story is earned through every argument, every glance, every choice made and unmade. Reactive delivers the obsessive pull of two brilliant people who finally meet their match, wrapped in the atmospheric intensity of Italy’s oldest university town. If you’ve ever wanted a love story that feels like a chemical reaction—volatile, inevitable, and impossible to reverse—this is your next read. Don’t let someone else find your equal first.

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