She could hear her mother’s sigh from across the room. “Long enough for you to have an aperitif.”
As if to not have a pre-dinner drink was the height of crassness.
Paul appeared beside her and pulled a wineglass from beneath the bar. “White?”
She stifled her own sigh and nodded.
He poured her a glass. “I’m sorry I was tied up with patients this afternoon and missed you when you got back.” His voice was low. “How’d it go?”
Her fingers tightened nervously around the delicate crystal stemware. Her mother had switched her attention to fussing over Gerald, though Ramona was watching them. Lisa pulled her lips into a smile for her brother and his fiancée, lifting her glass a little as if in a toast. “We…um…we’re not going to have to worry about that…small problem anymore. It’s completely taken care of.” Or it would be soon enough.
She took a hasty gulp, drowning her anxiety in wine.
“He went for it, then?”
He, of course, meant Rourke. “Mmm-hmm.”
Her brother smiled. “I knew you could pull it off, Lis.”
“There is one thing I need to tell you—” She broke off when they heard the chimes ringing from the front doorbell. Her first thought was that Derek was showing up, after all, but she quickly dismissed it. This was his childhood home, too. He wouldn’t have stood on ceremony any more than she had. He’d have walked right on in.
“Go see who it is, Lisa,” her mother ordered. “Anna is off today.” Anna was her parents’ housekeeper.
She didn’t mind. It gave her an escape for at least a few minutes. She left her wineglass sitting on the bar and walked through the house back to the front door, pulling it open without so much as a glance through the heavily leaded sidelights.
Rourke stood on the porch. He was wearing a dark overcoat that made his shoulders look even wider than usual, and the golden light from the sconces positioned beside the massive door made his black hair glint.
She resolutely ignored the way her heart practically stood still and pulled the door shut a little behind her, lest anyone else’s curiosity led them to the foyer. “What are you doing here?”
“Is that any way to greet your fiancé?”
The term jarred her. “What would you like me to do? Throw myself into your arms?”
“That’d be more natural, wouldn’t it?”
“There’s nothing natural about any of this.” The magnitude of what she’d agreed to overwhelmed her all over again. As did the needlessness of it all. She stepped farther outside, nearly pulling the door closed entirely. “Why me?” she asked. “If you want a child—within the bounds of wedlock,” she added quickly before he could interrupt, “why not just marry one of your other women?”
He smiled a little. “And what women would those be?”
The evening air was decidedly cool, but her limbs felt decidedly not. “The women you date. Obviously.” He was a seriously eligible bachelor. There was no question that the man had women in his life.
“Dating gets…messy.”
Wasn’t that what she believed, herself?
“This feels pretty messy to me,” she countered.
“This is business. The terms are already outlined.”
“A child is not a business.”
“So says the woman whose entire life revolves around an institute that creates them.”
“We’re not cloning people, for heaven’s sake! We’re helping infertile couples achieve fertility.” She went stock-still when his hand suddenly lifted toward her.
“This strand of hair keeps working loose of that knot you keep it in.” His knuckles brushed the underside of her jaw as he ran his thumb and forefinger down the long, wavy lock.
It didn’t seem to matter that he was wreaking havoc on her life. Just that faint touch made her bones feel like gel. “Wh-what are you doing here? For that matter, how’d you even know where I was?”
He wound the strands of hair around his finger. “Your assistant told me.”
She jerked back, and he let her hair loose though he still left her feeling crowded on what was supposed to be a very spacious porticoed entrance. “What were you doing calling Ella?”
“Finding out your schedule, obviously.”
“You should have contacted me.”
He smiled faintly. “Somehow, I think Ella was more forthcoming than you would have been.”
The truth of that stuck in her throat. “You said we…we would work out the details of our—” She couldn’t even manage an appropriate word and just waved her hand instead. “Later.”
“And now it’s later. You’re meeting with your family this evening. I figured it’d be logical for me to be here when you tell them we’re getting married.”
“Maybe I didn’t plan to tell them this evening,” she bluffed. Badly.
“I’d think you’d rather they hear it from you than from somewhere else.”
“What’d you do? Issue a press release?” She hadn’t really taken him seriously on that score.
“I’ve arranged for the ceremony to be held in New York at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”
“What?” The cathedral was famous. It was Catholic. “I’m not Catholic.” She hadn’t even been to church in years. And he was a divorced man.
“I am.”
She folded her arms tightly. “Aren’t there…requirements to be met there? Marriage classes or something?”
“Ordinarily.”
How simply he glossed over what she knew had to be an encyclopedia of protocols, and it was just another example that he wasn’t any ordinary man. Not even an ordinary, wealthy man.
So she squashed the multitude of questions that her detail-oriented mind wanted answers for, and settled for just one. “Why do you want a church ceremony when you’ve already promised that our…union…has an expiration date?”
“That’s a promise known only between you and me, remember? As far as anyone else is concerned, this is the real deal. Unless you’re already chickening out.”
She made a face. “I’m not chickening out.” Not because she didn’t want to back out. She did. But she wanted to ensure the institute’s security even more.
“Good.” He slid his hand inside the
