could feel the wine wending its heady way through her veins. Breakfast had been hours ago. Wait. She’d skipped breakfast, in favor of a conference call.
Which meant drinking even the tiniest amount of wine was more foolish than usual.
Arguing seemed too much work, though, so she took the roll from him. Their fingers brushed.
She shoved the bread in her mouth, chomping down on it as viciously as she chomped down on the warmth that zipped through her hand.
“Good?”
Chewing, she nodded. The roll was good. Deliciously so.
It only annoyed her more.
She chased the yeasty heaven down with more wine and leaned closer to the table. “Obviously excellent bread and wine isn’t always enough to ensure success, or this place would be busting at the seams.”
“Raoul closed Fare until dinner for me.”
She blinked slowly and sat back. “Why?”
“Because I asked him to.”
“Again…why?”
“Because I wanted to be alone with you.”
A puff of air escaped her lips. “But you don’t even like me.”
Rourke picked up his wineglass and studied the disbelieving expression of the woman across from him. “Maybe not,” he allowed.
Lisa Armstrong had looked like an ice princess the first time he’d seen her more than six months ago in a crowded Cambridge pub called Shots where he’d been meeting with Ted Bonner and Chance Demetrios.
He’d had no reason to change his opinion in the few times he’d seen her since.
“But I want you,” he continued smoothly, watching the sudden flare of her milk-chocolate eyes. “And you want me.” He’d known that since he’d maneuvered her into sharing a single, brief dance with him months earlier.
Her lips had parted. They were slightly thin, slightly wide for her narrow, angular face, and a shade of pale, delicate pink that he figured owed nothing to cosmetics.
And he hadn’t been able to get them out of his mind.
Obviously recovering, those lips pursed slightly. Her eyebrows—darker than the gold that covered her head—returned to their usual, level places. Her brown gaze was only fractionally less sharp than it had been when she’d first sat down across from him. But a strand of hair had worked loose of that perfect, smooth knot at the nape of her neck and had curled around her slender neck to tease the hollow at the base of her throat. “You have an incredible ego, Mr. Devlin.”
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
