LITMIR.BIZ

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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 fairytale 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 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

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