Prescription for Romance / Love and the Single Dad: Prescription for Romance / Love and the Single Dad

“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 private 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?”