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“I’m not changing my mind.”
“I rather thought so.” Her father grimaced at her from across the solid, ornately carved mahogany table. “So I reached out to a contact of mine there and arranged for you to stay in the Lione Hotel instead of the usual accommodations. It’s minutes to the hospital and has the best security you can hope for right now. Someone will walk you back and forth each day.”
Diana stared at him in disbelief as the maid set the steaming main course down in front of her. “Dammit, Father, this is my life. You can’t just do things like that.”
“I wouldn’t have to if you weren’t being so foolhardy.”
“Part of this experience is bonding with the other doctors I’m working with. I want to stay with them.”
“There is another doctor staying at the Lione. Bond with him.”
She gave him an exasperated look. “You have to stop interfering in my life.”
Her father picked up his fork and pointed it at her. “Do you know how many foreign-aid workers have been kidnapped from that area in the past six months? It is staggering, Diana. If you won’t do this for yourself, do it for your mother and me so we don’t spend every day and night worrying about you.”
Worrying about your half-a-million-dollar investment in your only child, she corrected flippantly to herself. But the real hint of concern in her father’s voice made her soften. It wasn’t fair to make them worry.
“Fine.” She picked up her fork and matched his aggressive joust with one of her own. “But do not make one more phone call, one more inquiry on my behalf to anyone, or I will stay with the others.”
“Fine.” Her father dug into his beef with a satisfied nod. Diana looked down at hers, her stomach doing a slow roll at the smell of the spicy dish. She cut a piece of the meat. A wave of perspiration swept over her, blanketing her forehead in a thin layer of sweat.
Oh, no. Bile rose in her throat. She swallowed it back down, pushed her chair out and ran for the bathroom. She barely made it inside and to the toilet before she was brutally, gut-wrenchingly sick. Her insides heaving until there was nothing left inside her, she remained kneeling on the bathroom floor draped over the toilet until finally, her head stopped spinning and she could sit up.
What bloody bad timing. She grabbed some toilet paper and wiped it over her brow. She never got sick, never got the flu. Coburn used to call her stomach cast-iron, which made it all the more ironic her succumbing to it now with days to go before she had to get on a plane for a multiday trip.
Deciding she was in the safe zone, she got to her feet and washed her hands. The fact that this was the third day in a row she’d suffered a low-grade and now acute nausea penetrated her consciousness. Her uninhibited encounter with Coburn filled her head.
They’d used a condom. They’d always used condoms because she couldn’t tolerate the birth control pill and the last thing she and Coburn had needed was a baby at this point in their careers. To complicate their marriage.
It must be the flu.
She went back to the dining room, where her parents insisted she stay the night. But a sixth sense told her she couldn’t be here right now. She asked them to call her a cab instead and went home, where Beth fussed over her and made her a cup of tea, then put her to bed.
She tried to sleep but her head was spinning as if a circus was going on inside it. What if it wasn’t the flu? What if she was pregnant?
A giant knot formed in her stomach. She stared out the window at the big oak tree swaying back and forth in the darkness, high winds signaling the imminent arrival of a classic East Coast electrical storm. If she’d thought what had happened upon seeing her ex again had been a disaster, that was nothing compared with the possibilities raging through her head. Nothing.
She spent two days in denial. On the third, she had a scheduled appointment with her doctor to receive a final shot she needed for her trip. Joanne Gibson, her GP and a former colleague, gave her a frown as she entered the examining room.
“You look thin. Have you been ill?”
Diana sat down in a chair, the tiny room seeming to close in on her at the question. “Could you add a—” she could barely get the words out “—pregnancy test to the list?”
Joanne’s face lit up. “Really? Are you and Coburn back to—?” The look on Diana’s face stopped her cold. “What a stupid thing to say,” her doctor mumbled. “Of course we can do that.”
They did the pregnancy test first because Joanne wanted to make sure the shot she was giving her was fine if she was pregnant. Diana stared at the wall, examining the cracks in the plaster until she’d memorized every last one. She could not be pregnant. This could not be happening to her now, not when she was about to walk away from everything she knew. It could not.
