So he’d been told. By foes, friends and family alike. He pulled his gaze from that single, loose lock of hair that tickled the visible pulse he could see beneath her fair, fair skin. “I don’t think it’s egotism to recognize facts. And you might as well make it Rourke.”
“Why?” She didn’t seem to realize she’d reached for the other half of the roll he’d buttered and flicked a glance at it before dropping it back on the small bread plate. “Are we going to be doing business together after all?”
His inclination was to admit that they weren’t.
But he also had plenty of good reasons to want to ensure that Ted Bonner and Chance Demetrios were able to continue their work without any more hitches. Investing in anything that Ted was involved in would be a good bet.
But through the Armstrong Fertility Institute?
Not even Ted knew why that particular idea was anathema to him.
Maybe it was small of him, but he wasn’t ready yet to release Lisa Armstrong from this particular hook. He was enjoying, too much, having the ice princess right where he wanted her.
He hid a dark bolt of amusement directed squarely at himself.
Nearly where he wanted her.
“Our salads,” he said instead, glancing at Tonio, their waiter and Raoul’s youngest son, as he approached with his tray.
He could see the ire creep back into Lisa’s eyes.
She controlled it well, though. Merely smiling coolly at Rourke as Tonio served them. He wondered if beneath that facade she would have preferred giving him a swift kick or if she really was that cool, all the way through.
It would be interesting to find out.
Interesting but complicated as hell.
He picked up his fork, his appetite whetted on more levels than he presently cared to admit. “Eat,” he said when she looked as if she weren’t even going to taste Raoul’s concoction. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d observed that she’d lost weight.
At the Founder’s Ball in her floaty gown of slippery brown and white that had hugged her narrow hips and left the entirety of her ivory back and shoulders distractingly bare, she’d felt slender and delicate in his arms.
Now, even with the thick weave of her jacket and the wide-cut legs of her slacks, he could tell she was even thinner.
She took her work to heart.
He could have told that for himself, even if Ted hadn’t mentioned it.
Often in the office before anyone else arrived. Often there later than anyone stayed.
For Ted to even notice something like that, beyond his Bunsen burners and beakers, was something. He’d said she was a workaholic.
Ironically, that gave her and Rourke something in common.
She was poking at the tomato salad and he was glad to see that some of it actually reached her mouth. His sister Tricia would take one look at her and want to fatten her up with plenty of pasta.
“How long have you and Dr. Bonner been friends?”
He had to give her points for adaptability. He’d expected to receive a mostly chilly silence for his autocratic refusal to discuss what they both knew she’d traveled to New York City to discuss. “Since we were boys.”
Her gaze flicked over him. “I find it hard to envision you as a boy. Were you schoolmates?”
He almost laughed.
Ted Bonner had grown up with wealth and privilege. Rourke and his three sisters might have had the same, if their father hadn’t walked out on them when they were young. Instead, the Devlin clan had gone from being comfortable to being…not.
They’d been locked out of their fine Boston home with no ceremony, no explanations.
He’d been twelve years old.
For a while, his mother had struggled to keep them in Boston. He and his sisters had switched from private to public schools. They’d moved into a basement apartment a lifestyle away from what they’d been used to. But in the end, within a handful of years, Nina Devlin had simply been forced to move them all back to New York where they’d moved into the cramped apartment above the home-style Italian restaurant his grandparents owned and operated.
And Rourke’s father? He’d landed in California with a surgically enhanced trophy wife who’d been fewer than ten years older than Rourke.
He’d seen them only once. When he’d been twenty-three and had raked in a cool million over his first real deal.
That was when Trophy Wife had indicated a considerable interest in Rourke’s bed and Dad had claimed Rourke was a chip off the old block.
He’d never seen either one of them again.
“Ted and I were in the same Boy Scout troop,” he told Lisa, fully expecting the surprise she couldn’t hide. Before they’d left Boston, his mother had chugged him across town to keep him involved in the troop that he’d been drafted into by his father, before he’d skipped. Rourke had hated it until he and Ted had struck up an unlikely friendship.
“You were a Boy Scout.”
“Trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly—” He broke off the litany of Scout law when she snorted softly.
“Sorry,” she said, but aside from the bloom of pink over her sharp cheekbones, she didn’t particularly look it. “I just have a whole mental image of you wearing khaki shorts and merit badges.” The tip of her tongue appeared between her pearl-white teeth. Then she laughed softly, and shook her head. “A considerable change from your usual attire.”
He dragged his gaze away from the humorous stretch of her lips only to get caught in the sparkle of her eyes.
He tamped down on the heat shooting through him.
He hadn’t seen her smile, really smile, since that first glimpse of her at Shots when she’d been laughing over something with her friend Sara Beth.
Glancing at Tonio, who immediately cleared away their salads, Rourke picked up the prospectus. “The Armstrong Institute’s been plagued with bad press,” he said, breaking his own trumped-up rule of no business over lunch. “Questionable research protocols. Padded statistics.”
“Both allegations were proved false. By none other than your Scout buddy, Ted.”
“Yet the bad aftertaste of innuendo remains.”
The sparkle in her eyes died, leaving her expression looking hauntingly hollow. “That’s a little like blaming the victim, isn’t it? The Armstrong Institute has never operated with anything less than integrity. Nor has any of its staff. But we’re to be held accountable now for someone else’s shoddy reporting?”
“Integrity.” He mulled the word over, watching her while Tonio returned again with their main course of lobster risotto. “Interesting choice of words.”
Her gaze didn’t waver as she reached for her wineglass again. “I cannot imagine why.”
She would be a good poker player, he decided. Not everyone could baldly lie like that without so much as a blink. She was even better at it than his ex-wife had been.
But for the moment, he let the matter drop. “Eat the risotto. It’s nearly as good as my mother’s.”
She picked up her fork and took a small bite. Poked at the risotto as if moving the creamy rice around her plate would be an adequate substitute for actually eating. “Investment in the Armstrong Fertility Institute