Prescription for Romance / Love and the Single Dad: Prescription for Romance / Love and the Single Dad. Marie Ferrarella
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always be his building, even long after the man was gone.
“I see,” Ramona said thoughtfully as they both exited the room.
He didn’t like the way she said that. “What is it that you see?”
Keep it low-key, Ramona. You don’t want to push the man away or put him on his guard. “Just that your father must be a very forceful man.”
“At the moment, he’s a retired man.” Paul thought about his father, about how withdrawn and, on occasion, bitter the man had become. The senior Armstrong hardly ever left the house now.
She knew that Gerald Armstrong was retired, but she was curious if he still kept a finger on the pulse of “his” clinic. For some men, retirement was just a meaningless word. “Does he ever come in and see how things are going?”
Initially, his mother had tried to get his father involved in the institute again. It seemed rather an ironic turn, seeing as how Gerald’s obsession with the institute had taken such a heavy toll on their marriage in the beginning.
Paul thought Ramona would abort her line of questioning when he told her, “My father’s in a wheelchair.” He realized that he should have known better. The woman just kept going and going.
“That doesn’t stop some people,” Ramona said tactfully.
“It does others,” he countered. They were making their way back to the elevators. He couldn’t keep his curiosity in check any longer. “Why are you asking so many questions?”
She looked at him with an innocent expression that seemed to say that the answer was self-evident. “How else am I going to find things out? By the way,” she continued, stepping into the elevator car, “where are the archives housed?”
He stared at her for a moment, then pressed for the next floor down. “In the basement. Why?”
The answer was tendered in utter innocence. The doors closed. “I thought I’d take a look at them when I got the chance.”
In less than a minute, the elevator doors were opening again on the floor below. “Again, why?”
“To get a sense of the institute’s history,” she told him as they got off.
He had no desire to have her rummaging through the files that were stored down there. For the most part, they were charts and records that belonged to some of the institute’s first patients. “If you have any questions, you can come to me.”
He was walking faster, she noted, and lengthened her own stride. Was he just trying to get this over with, or was he subconsciously running from something?
“You just wanted to know why I’m asking so many questions,” she reminded him. “I don’t want to bother you any more than I have to.”
It might have seemed like a good idea to Derek at the time, but he was back to being sorry that his brother had talked him into letting Ramona stay. That was going to have to change and soon. He didn’t particularly want Ramona Tate digging around, disrupting the rhythm of things.
“As far as I’m concerned,” he told her as they went down the corridor, “this position is a one-shot deal. And you’ve fired the shot, or you will sometime today I imagine.”
It was her turn to be confused, Ramona thought. “Come again?”
“The press release about Bonner and Demetrios joining our staff,” he reminded her. “You wrote it. You’ll deliver it if you haven’t already. That’s why my brother initially hired you.”
“Initially.” She picked up on the word he used and emphasized it. “But that was just the beginning, Dr. Armstrong.”
Paul stopped walking and looked down at her, a man whose overnight guest had just announced she was settling in for the next six months. “Oh?”
Ramona continued walking as if she was oblivious to the fact that he had stopped. “The way I see it, the institute is in a precarious state, like a forest in the middle of a really hot summer. There are bound to be fires. It’s my job to put those fires out.”
He resumed walking. “And what if there are no fires?” he challenged.
“Then I’ll have a very stress-free job.” She slanted a look at him, more than a hint of a smile on her lips. “But do you really think that will be the case?”
He didn’t want to dwell on “fires” or public relations or baseless rumors that were running amok. He just wanted to do his job. “All I want to do is help couples have the families they’ve always wanted.”
She wanted to believe him, to believe that even in this modern, fast-paced world there were still people who wanted to do decent things out of the goodness of their heart. But until she disproved those rumors that she’d come to investigate, she couldn’t allow herself to be taken in by the innocent look in his eyes.
“I understand, Dr. Armstrong, but things are never as simple as we’d like them to be. It’s my job to make sure that you can do yours without being hampered by innuendo or, more important, lawsuits,” she told him, deliberately presenting him with a cheerful demeanor. “Public opinion can either be a wonderful tool, or a weapon.”
He stopped right in front of the lab. “How old are you?”
“Old enough to be good at what I do.” It sounded like an evasive answer, but she didn’t want to give him a direct answer. She knew that Armstrong was thirty-six and to him, she undoubtedly looked as if she was just out of elementary school.
“I was only thinking that you seemed awfully young to sound so cynical.”
She didn’t think of herself as cynical, but she let it go. Instead, she said, “These days, cynicism is built into the DNA.”
With a sigh, Paul shook his head and then pushed open the door to their state-of-the-art lab. He was proud of the equipment, proud of all the advances they’d made in the field because they were able to afford the kind of cutting-edge research to be done here.
Holding the door, he allowed her to walk in ahead of him.
Like the conference room, the lab was one large room. Unlike the conference room, it had two tables instead of one. The tables were waist high, equipped with sinks and a number of microscopes that were hooked up to projection screens and computers. There were several people in the lab at the moment, all dressed in white coats.
She’d heard as well as read a great deal about the newly transplanted research team of Bonner and Demetrios before she ever came to the institute. Consequently, she knew them on sight.
Only Ted Bonner was present at the moment. Chance Demetrios had an office in the building. Her guess was that he was probably there now.
Bonner did strictly research. He had the luxury of divorcing himself from the people who ultimately made use of the end product of his research via one of the doctors on the staff. This allowed him to throw himself wholeheartedly into his work. His failures had no faces on them, but then, neither did his successes.
She heard Paul take in a breath, as if he was bracing himself for some kind of ordeal. The next moment, she realized that she was the ordeal.
“Dr. Bonner,” he addressed the exceedingly tall, exceedingly good-looking dark-haired man who was about to bend over to look into one of the microscopes, “I would like to introduce you to Ramona Tate. She’s our new public-relations manager.”
Shaking her hand, Ted quipped, “I didn’t know you had an old public-relations manager.”
“We didn’t,” Paul answered before he realized that Ted was joking. “This is my brother’s idea. He thinks we need protecting.” He flashed a semiapologetic smile toward Ramona.
Thinking to spare him, she made no comment. She was getting a great many mixed signals from this man and decided it was better to pretend to be oblivious