He laughed, shaking his head. “If I gave all the people who I think deserve it a piece of my mind, I wouldn’t have any mind left to use for myself.”
Lisa’s frown was back. “So then you’re not going to tell Derek that he’s got to stop making unilateral decisions?”
“I didn’t say that, did I?” His eyes held hers until Lisa shook her head. “I’ll talk to Derek,” he told her, then added, “not that I think it’ll do any good.”
“You’re probably right,” she was forced to agree. “But you never know, maybe we’ll get lucky. But first,” she emphasized, “you have to give that woman her walking papers.”
There were times when Lisa was like a hungry dog with a bone. She just wouldn’t let go. Which meant he’d get no peace until he gave in. Paul rose again. “Connie Winston’s old office, you said?”
Lisa nodded. “The three of us are supposed to be running this clinic. It’s the Armstrong Fertility Institute, not Derek Armstrong’s Fertility Institute. If anything, it should be Dad’s name, not Derek’s.”
Paul put his hands on his sister’s arms, trying to settle her before she got riled up again.
“Take a deep breath, Lisa—and calm down. There are a hell of a lot worse things going on in the world. Derek playing king is really just small potatoes in comparison.”
“Emperor,” Lisa corrected doggedly.
He closed his eyes for a moment. He was not going to get sidelined with semantics. “Whatever.”
Paul was fully aware that if he even attempted to put off this woman’s termination, Lisa would continue bedeviling him until such time as he would make good on his promise. His sister meant well, he thought, but she tended to get far too worked up. Still, she was right. Derek shouldn’t have just gone off and hired someone without even running the idea past them. This was a completely new post his brother had created.
Did they really need someone to try to restore the institute’s good name? Or rather, their father’s good name even though it wasn’t imprinted on the front of the building?
Dr. Gerald Armstrong had always been a little larger than life when it came to the public eye. Paul was not ashamed to say that he revered his father and the groundbreaking work he had done. He’d gotten away from the boy he had once been. The boy who, when he was growing up, felt his father was accessible to everyone but his own family. He knew his mother felt that. Gerald Armstrong was always far too busy making a name for himself to enjoy the name he had already gotten, almost by accident: Dad.
Still, that was all water under the bridge now. A man was what he was and Gerald Armstrong was an excellent physician, a visionary and the last hope for a great many women who had been told that they would never be able to hold a child of their own in their arms.
The rest of it—the feet of clay, the women, the preoccupation—well, that could all be forgiven, Paul thought, walking down the corridor to the office where, according to his sister, he would find his brother’s latest mistake—and it really was a mistake, in Paul’s opinion. Right now, they needed every last penny to be spent on research, not “spin.” The research team he’d lured away from San Francisco did not come cheaply.
Approaching the until recently evacuated office, Paul knocked on the door, then knocked again when he received no answer. He was about to try again when a melodious voice told him to, “Come in.” Apparently the focus of his sister’s ire was indeed in.
He wasn’t good at firing people. Actually, to his recollection, he never had. He’d always been satisfied with the people he’d selected. There was no need to fire any of them.
Twisting the knob, he opened the door and walked in, not knowing what to expect.
He wasn’t prepared for what he saw.
She was sitting at her desk, a slender blonde whose every movement promised curves that would melt a man’s knees. She looked up at him with the clearest, bluest eyes he’d ever seen. The word beautiful pushed its way through the sudden cobwebs that had taken his brain hostage. It took him a moment to realize that he wasn’t breathing.
She did not look like someone who was hired to do battle with mudslingers. She looked more like a fairy-tale princess who had sprung up from someone’s smitten fantasy.
The woman seemed to light up as she saw who was walking into her office. Her face became a wreath of smiles.
“Mr. Armstrong, hello.” The young woman half rose in her seat, as if she was eagerly ready to hop to do his bidding at the slightest suggestion. “What can I do for you, sir?”
Bracing himself, Paul said in his kindest voice—because it wasn’t in him to be cruel—“I’m afraid you’re going to have to pack up your things and leave.”
The smile on her perfect face faded, replaced by bewilderment. “Excuse me?”
He hated this, he thought. He tried again, sounding even more gentle than before. “I think there’s been a mistake.” Each word felt more awkward on his tongue than the last. This was definitely not his forte. “I mean, we really don’t need a public relations person.”
The woman was obviously not going to go quietly. “But you just hired me,” she protested with feeling.
She didn’t look angry, he thought, which surprised him. What she looked like was someone who was set to dig in. She still thought she was dealing with his brother, Paul realized. He needed to set her straight before he continued.
“No, I didn’t,” he began, but got no further in his explanation.
“Yes, you did,” she insisted. “Yesterday. We were in your office and you distinctly said you were hiring me.” Her blue eyes seemed intense as she peered at his face. “Is something wrong?” she wanted to know. “I haven’t done anything yet, much less something that would make you want to fire me.”
“I don’t want to fire you,” Paul said and it was true. “I wouldn’t have hired you in the first place—”
“But you did,” she reminded him with feeling.
“No, I didn’t,” Paul told her again. “That was my brother.”
Her eyes narrowed and the frown on her face told him she wasn’t buying it.
“Your evil twin?” she asked with more than a tiny trace of sarcasm in her voice.
Finally, Paul thought. “Actually, I don’t generally think of him in that light, but now that you mention it, yes.”
The young woman stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “Excuse me?”
Any breakthrough he’d thought had been made faded like dancing dandelion seeds in the warm spring breeze. “Maybe I should explain—”
He could see that she was struggling to remain civil. Looking at it from her point of view, he couldn’t blame her.
“Maybe you should,” she agreed.
Chapter Two
Bravado was second nature to Ramona Tate. It always had been. Her chosen field of investigative reporting had only honed that ability. She could bluff her way through practically everything.
Because she had never gone through an ugly-duckling stage and had been a swan from the moment she came into the world, Ramona had to constantly keep proving herself. People naturally assumed that a) because she was beautiful, that meant she didn’t have a brain in her head, and b) she’d gotten to her present stage in life because she’d slept her way there.
In both cases, nothing could have been further from the truth.
Blessed with a near-genius IQ, Ramona still had to work twice as hard as the next person to be taken seriously and to keep from being dismissed as “just another empty-headed pretty face.” This while politely, but deftly and succinctly, putting men in their place if they decided to become too familiar with her. In the latter case, whenever “hands-on” experience was mentioned, her antennae instantly went up because most of the men she’d encountered took that to mean their “hands on” her body.
Ramona always made it perfectly clear that working and playing well with others did not refer to the kind of playing that could be done beneath the sheets. She fought her own battles and protected her pr
ivate life—what there was of it—zealously.
Since wrongdoing on any level was something she abhorred, Ramona found that she took to investigative reporting like the proverbial duck to water. Even at her seemingly tender age of twenty-five, she had already broken a number of stories, revealing fraudulent practices at one of the country’s larger life insurance companies, and exposing a doctor who had made a career out of bilking Medicare, submitting charges for the treatment of nonexistent conditions for nonexistent patients in order to collect Medicare’s payments. Both stories had necessitated her going undercover to get the information she needed to substantiate her allegations.
Ramona had followed the same path here, at the Armstrong Fertility Institute. Once revered as a bastion of hope for the terminally infertile, the institute’s outstanding success rate had bred a certain amount of envy, which begged for closer scrutiny. This scrutiny in turn gave birth to ugly rumors, some that were quite possibly well founded, others that almost certainly were not.
That was going to be her job—to separate fact from fiction, no matter how deeply the former appeared to be buried.
But Ramona had a far more personal reason to have gone undercover at the institute. She needed to gain access to the institution’s older records in hopes of saving her mother’s life. Her mother, who had raised Ramona by herself, had been diagnosed with leukemia less than six months ago. The prognosis was not good. If something wasn’t done soon to stem its course, her mother had only a very short time to live.
Katherine Tate desperately needed a bone-marrow transplant. Ramona would have gladly given up hers. She would have given her mother any organ she could to save the woman’s life, but, as happened all too frequently, her marrow wasn’t a match. So the search was on for some miscellaneous stranger whose marrow might provide the cure.
There was, however, a glimmer of hope when Ramona remembered accidentally stumbling over a piece of vital information packed away in a long-forgotten box hidden in the back of her closet.
Katherine Tate was one of those people who never threw anything away, she just moved it around every so often from one pile to another, from one room to another. In one of her many, many boxes throughout the house was a bundle of receipts and bills dating back more than a couple of decades. Including a receipt from the Armstrong Fertility Institute for the purchase of donor eggs.
In between jobs and desperate for money, Katherine had sold a part of herself in order that “some poor childless couple know the kind of joy I do.” At least, those had been her mother’s words when Ramona had finally confronted Katherine with her find.
Now Ramona could only hope that the eggs had been used and that somewhere out there she had a sibling walking around. A sibling whose bone marrow would turn out to be a perfect match for her mother.
Finding this sibling was far more important to Ramona than breaking the story of any ethical wrongdoing on the institute’s part.
But she wouldn’t be able to do either if this bipolar man made good on his threat to terminate her before she even got started in her search. For that to happen, she needed to get entrenched here. She already knew that calling the institute’s administration office with her plight was an exercise in futility. When she had, the woman on the other end of the line had briskly told her that accessing the old records would be a violation of those patients’ right to privacy.
Yeah, right. As if the Armstrongs and their minions actually cared a fig about doing the right thing.
“You were hired,” Paul began slowly, trying to carefully hit all the salient points, “by someone who didn’t have the proper authority to hire anyone by himself.”
Ramona felt her temper shortening.
“I don’t understand,” she said, hoping that the smile on her lips didn’t look as fake as it felt to her.
Paul backtracked in his head, realizing that he’d failed to state the most obvious part, the part that would instantly untangle the rest. Or so he hoped.
“You see, I’m twins.”
She stared at him, her blue eyes widening. “You are?”
That sounded stupid, he upbraided himself. “I mean, I’m one of twins. I have a brother,” he told her. “He looks just like me. His name’s Derek and he’s the one who hired you.”
Her expression never changed, but her tone was slightly incredulous as she asked, “You’re not Derek Armstrong?”
Finally. The light at the end of the tunnel was beginning to materialize, he thought, relieved. “No, I’m Paul.”
Twins. Damn, how had she missed that? She’d been so consumed with getting ammunition against the institute and being angry because they wouldn’t just help her get at the information she needed to, hopefully, find a sibling, she’d completely skimmed over the Armstrongs’ family dynamics.
She needed to be more thorough, Ramona told herself sternly.
Cocking her head, she scrutinized the man in front of her, doing her best to give off an aura of sweetness. She knew that she could be all but irresistible if she wanted to be. She eased her conscience by reminding herself that this was definitely not for personal gain. This was for her mother.
“Now that you mention it, you do look a little more robust and athletic than you—I mean, your brother—did yesterday.” She was five-seven, not exactly a petite flower. But the man before her was taller, way taller. He looked even more so since she was sitting and he was not.
Ramona raised her eyes to his in a studied look of innocent supplication. A look she’d practiced more than once. “So he—your brother—can’t hire me?”
Now she was getting it, Paul thought. “Not by himself, no.”
Again she cocked her head, employing a certain come-hither look as she asked him, “Can he hire me if you hire me?”
Why did he feel as if the ground beneath his feet was turning from shale to sand, leaving him nothing solid to stand on? “Not without Lisa’s okay,” he heard himself say hoarsely.
Another country heard from, Ramona thought impatiently, trying to remember exactly how many Armstrongs worked at the institute. Her smile never wavered as she repeated, “Lisa?”
Paul nodded, trying not to stare. Was it his imagination, or did she somehow suddenly look more beautiful? “My younger sister. She’s the head administrator here at the institute.”
That had to have been the cold voice on the phone, Ramona thought. “Does anyone else have a vote?”
He smiled and she thought he had a rather nice smile. It softened his features and made him appear less distant and forbidding.
“No, that’s it,” he assured her. “Just the three of us.”
She nodded slowly, as if taking it all in and digesting the information. What she was really doing was casting about for a way to appeal to him and make him let her remain.
“Well,” she said slowly with a drop of seduction woven in, “we know that I have your brother’s vote. Do I have yours?”
For one unguarded moment, he could have sworn that he felt some sort of a sharp pull, an attraction to this young woman. But then he told himself it was just that he had always appreciated beauty no matter where he came across it. He certainly couldn’t allow it to cloud his judgment, especially when it came to the institute.
Still, a public relations manager might prove useful, he supposed. Paul was honest in his answer. “I’d have to think about it.”
She appeared undaunted. “Well, that’s better than ‘no,’” Ramona allowed.
Faced with her optimism, Paul wavered a little more in his stand, shifting in a direction he knew that Lisa would easily disapprove. “I tell you what. Let me talk to the others and we’ll get back to you.”
Ramona smiled. It made him think of a sunrise. Warm and full of promise. And then she looked just a tad shy as she asked, “In the meantime, would it be all right if I drafted a press release?”
“A press release?” Paul echoed, confused. “About what?”
“About doctors Demetrios and Bonner joining your st
aff. Mr. Armstrong—Mr. Derek Armstrong,” she amended, “said that so far, no mention had been made of the transition. I think it would be a big plus for the institute, not to mention that it would be a huge draw, as well.” Not that the institute actually needed it, she thought. The rich and famous flocked here, and the masses followed. “These two researchers are very famous in their field.”
“I know,” he said, amused that she believed she was telling him something he wasn’t aware of.
“Of course you do.” Holding her breath just so allowed the right amount of pink to creep into her cheeks. She instinctively knew that Paul was the kind of man who reacted to blushes, even though it was as out of date as a silver disco ball. “I just meant that it should be brought to people’s attention. It’s positive reinforcement.” And then she flashed him another guileless smile. “I promise I won’t do anything with the draft until I get your—all of your,” she amended, “okays.”
She sounded so eager and upbeat, Paul found that he hadn’t the heart to tell her to wait until after he’d won Lisa over. Lisa could be difficult at times, especially if she felt that her territory was being encroached upon and threatened. Her earlier tirade was likely only the tip of the iceberg on this matter.
“That’ll be fine,” he told her and then he quickly walked out of the room before he wound up agreeing to something else.
He needed to find Derek and have a few choice words with his brother for putting him in this situation. A few very choice words.
He found Derek just outside his brother’s office, engaged in what appeared to be a very private conversation with one of the newer and younger administrative assistants. From the looks of it, it appeared that groundwork for far more than further conversation was being laid.
Suppressing a sigh, Paul inserted himself between the exceedingly perky young redhead in the platform heels and his brother. “Excuse us, please, um—” He had no idea what the young woman’s name was.
“Danielle.” Both the young woman and Derek said the name at the same time, which caused them to exchange more covert looks. Paul heard the assistant smother a giggle.
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