her a sharp glance, as if wondering what on earth had made him apologize to someone like her for the second time in the space of half an hour.
“It’s fine.” She kept the polite facade in place.
“But you probably didn’t expect to find yourself discussing my divorce,” he persisted.
“No. Your bio that I found on the Internet said you were happily married,” she blurted out, then mentally swore. Oh, shoot!
Ben Radford swore right out loud, and he didn’t say anything so mild as shoot. “We maintained the fiction for quite a while, but I’m afraid the Internet information is out of date. If I sound bitter about it, there are reasons.”
“So what went wrong?” she blurted again. Oh, this was getting worse and worse! Just because he’d let a couple of details that he clearly regretted already slip, that was no reason for her to keep this same conversational ball rolling. It was as if his forthright Irish housekeeper had slipped truth serum into their coffee. “Forget I said that,” she added quickly.
“I’ll answer, if you want.”
“No, no please.”
“Let me answer,” he insisted lightly. “I need the practice.”
She laughed before she could stop herself—oh Lord, what would he think now?—because it was the same thing she’d thought about him, some minutes ago, when they’d reached their first uneasy truce.
In dealing with men like Ben Radford, she definitely needed the practice.
“You have to laugh, don’t you?” he said. He wasn’t, though. He wasn’t even smiling. “Either that or punch walls. Which hurts, I’ve discovered.” He rubbed his knuckles to illustrate the point and made her laugh again.
Like Ben Radford himself, she wasn’t all that accustomed to laughter.
Her twin, Roxanna, laughed a lot.
Rox was bright and bubbly and confident, as well as creative, disorganized and quirky. She lived in Tuscany now, having fallen hard for a wealthy Italian businessman who loved her sizzling personality. She’d been the stronger, healthier twin at birth, while Rowena had been in and out of hospitals for years as a child, with respiratory problems and a heart defect that had required more than one operation to correct.
Formed by these childhood experiences, the differences between them had persisted into adulthood. Where Rox enjoyed parties and music and crowds of interesting people, Rowena liked the meditative silence of the research libraries where she tracked down her garden history and the fresh air and beauty of the gardens themselves. Where Rox turned men’s heads with her dazzling smile, Rowena became flustered and confused at male attention.
A serious clinical anxiety disorder had taken her out of the dating game completely for the past couple of years, and despite the huge progress she’d made under the guidance of her therapist, she knew she had some distance still to travel.
“I’ve never been divorced,” she blurted out. “Or married. Or engaged. Or even very serious.”
“You strike me as very serious.”
“About a man. Was what I meant.”
“I’m teasing you, Rowena.” She felt foolish, until he added unsmilingly, “Because if I don’t undercut your advantage a little, I am about to make myself very, very emotionally naked, telling a virtual stranger what went wrong with my marriage.”
“Oh, please don’t feel you have to do that!” She pressed a hand to her cheek, stricken at the fact that she seemed to have drawn out a vulnerable side to Ben Radford that she wouldn’t have thought could exist.
He wasn’t listening. “After I sold Radford Biotech, our divergent money styles became irreconcilable. I could phrase it that way.”
“Mmm,” she agreed politely.
“Do you think? How does it sound? I need more feedback than that.” He looked at her, and only now did she see that those dark eyes had softened, crinkling at the corners, inviting her to take this lightly.
She still didn’t fully understand the man’s motivation, but okay, sure. He was the client, after all…
“Too formal,” she said solemnly. She tapped the end of her pen against her bottom lip, while those eyes of his kept watching her.
“You’re right.” His mouth barely moved when he talked. Everything came out as a cynical, tight-lipped drawl. “How do I put it more simply?”
“You had different life goals?” she suggested. “Or, no, differing life goals.”
He gave a brief, crooked grin. “That’s not bad, Dr. Madison, not bad at all. You’re right. Ing. Differing. A subtle but significant improvement. It implies polite, ongoing disagreement. And says nothing whatsoever about what really happened.”
What did really happen? she wondered.
“Needs a little more, though,” he went on. “A kind of one-two-punch approach. Any thoughts on that?”
“But the two of you will always remain friends. That’s what you’d say if you were movie stars. And you’d still say it even if you couldn’t stand being in the same city as each other at the same time.”
“We would. We’d say exactly that. Heather will love it. Maybe I should write it down for her.”
He was still smiling at her, in his crooked, cynical, smoky-eyed and almost dangerous way, and all at once it was too much. It seemed more like flirting than anything else, and Dr. Rowena Madison just did not do flirting.
She didn’t know how.
And she didn’t want to learn.
He was standing too close. Rowie could sense his superior height and strength and bone-deep confidence like a gravitational pull. She could detect the finer nuances in the delicious way he smelled. The tantalizing scent of expensive male grooming products floated on the clear, dry Southern California air and seemed to belong there. It gave Rowena a dangerous, illusory sense that she belonged, too.
Belonged where, exactly?
The adrenaline rush generated by her earlier boldness was ebbing fast, leaving her with a million familiar doubts.
“You can stop teasing me now, Mr. Radford,” she said stiffly.
“I told you to make it Ben.”
“Yes, but I’m withdrawing to a more formal level to save us both from embarrassment later on.”
“You mean because of this uncomfortably personal conversation? Even though on the surface we’re treating it as a joke?”
“Yes.”
He heard a noise and glanced through the old gate to where he could just glimpse the driveway that curved in front of the house. A car sped around the curve and jerked to a halt.
“Unfortunately, it’s going to get even more personal any second,” he said. “And a lot less of a joke. This is Heather now.”
Chapter Two
Heather Radford caught sight of Rowena and Ben standing by the courtyard gate just as she stepped out of the low-slung yellow sports car, so she came along the side of the old adobe toward them, instead of going to the front door.
“My lawyer’s valuation of joint assets,” she announced by way of a greeting, and dumped an impressively thick binder of papers into Ben Radford’s hands.
Rowena felt almost comically inadequate when she considered the thin quantity of papers on her own clipboard. It was like a two-door compact car owner coming bumper to bumper with someone driving a brand-new Ferrari.
This woman had serious paperwork!
And if it wasn’t