bed and adjusted the lights higher. The man turned and scowled in the doctor’s direction.
Instantly, his image was overlain by another in her mind’s eye. It was the same face but a different setting—a bar, crowded, noisy and dark. He’d turned and scowled at her, but his brown eyes had warmed with reluctant interest when she’d said something clever—she didn’t remember what it had been, but no matter. She remembered him stretching out a hand, remembered the warmth and the faint electric buzz when they shook and he’d said, “I’m—”
“Ethan!” she said aloud in the hospital room, making him jump.
A flash of relief glinted in his eyes, tainted with something more complicated. “You remember.”
“I remember meeting you in a bar, and…” She trailed off as other memories reconnected. The bar hookup. The hotel room. Hot sex. A plus sign on the home pregnancy test when she’d been praying for a minus. “Oh,” she said, then more forcefully, “Oh! Oh, no. I have to talk to you. In private.”
He turned away, as though he didn’t want her to read his eyes when he said, “You already told me about the baby.”
“Oh.” She swallowed hard and tried to fight through the headache and a growing swell of nausea. “I don’t remember that.” What did I say? she wanted to ask. What did you say?
“What is the last thing you do remember?” he demanded, and she had a feeling there was more to the question than him judging the extent of her partial amnesia.
“I remember getting up this morning.” She glanced at him. “Is it Tuesday?” When he nodded, she felt a small measure of relief. “Then I remember getting up this morning. I read the paper and made a few calls for a project I’m working on.” Pitifully unsuccessful calls, she remembered. “Then I drove into the city to see you. I can picture myself parking somewhere and walking into a big building, but I’m not sure if that’s a memory or a logical guess.”
“You don’t remember being in a glass-walled elevator?” he persisted.
She shook her head, then winced and pressed her fingers to her temples when the headache spiked.
“You’re hurting.” He stepped away from the bed. “I’ll come back later.”
“No.” The terror had subsided somewhat with the piecemeal return of her memory. In its place was a sense of urgency. Despite what had happened at the office building, she’d set out that morning with a purpose. Now, she looked at Dr. Eballa and saw compassion in the other woman’s eyes. “Can we have a few minutes alone?”
The doctor hesitated a beat, then nodded. “You’re lucid, and it’s not unexpected for you to have blocked out the actual trauma. You may never remember that chunk of time, but everything else seems okay. I’ll take a walk. When you and Mr. Moore are finished, I’ll come back and run a few more tests, just to be on the safe side.”
When she was gone, Nic stared at her legs beneath the pale blue hospital blanket. “In case you were wondering, there’s no chance the baby could be anyone else’s.”
He nodded, though she didn’t know if that meant he believed her, or if that was what he’d expected her to say. Which just underscored how much she didn’t know about the father of her unborn child. She’d picked him up in a bar, for heaven’s sake, and though she’d like to think she wouldn’t have been attracted to a jerk, her track record said otherwise.
“Do you…” She faltered, but pushed through the awkwardness with a faint thread of optimism. “What do you think about being a father?”
“Being a sperm donor doesn’t make a man a father,” he said, voice nearly inflectionless, but he paced the length of the room, body language giving voice to the upset within.
When he stopped at the window and worked the mechanism to open the blinds and look out at the night, she thought she saw something sad in the reflection of his eyes, something that defused her quick anger and left the hurt behind.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “It’s not about you, or about what we did. It’s…” He turned toward her and spread his hands away from his long, lean body. “Let’s just say the world is better off if I’m in it by myself.”
A flare of disappointment warned Nic that no matter how many times she’d told herself not to think foolish thoughts, some piece of her had been hoping for the happy nuclear family she’d always dreamed of. But she forced her voice level when she said, “I didn’t come looking for a marriage proposal. Lucky for us, society has evolved past shotgun weddings.”
Though she had a feeling her professor father’s reaction wouldn’t be particularly evolved when he found out his first—and possibly only—grandchild would be born outside of wedlock.
Ethan repeated, “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too,” she said. “I wish…” She trailed off, not sure what exactly she wished. If she hadn’t gone into Hitchin’s that night, damned caution and hiked up onto a bar stool beside the hottest guy in the joint, she would’ve missed out on some pretty fabulous sex. And yes, she would’ve missed out on the life growing inside her. An unplanned life, perhaps, but one she already cherished.
“I’m okay with it, really,” she said, not sure whether she was saying it for his benefit or her own. “I’ve always planned on having kids. Even thought I’d found the right guy once.”
“Jonah,” he said, surprising her.
She nodded, remembering that she’d mentioned her ex in passing during their brief bar flirtation. “Good memory. But that—obviously—didn’t work out.”
Ethan looked over his shoulder at her. “Was that why you were at Hitchin’s that night? Because of him?”
“No,” she said quickly, then stopped herself and went with the truth. “Or, not really. It was my thirty-fourth birthday that day. I had all these plans with my friends from the school.” She glanced at him. “Did I tell you I’m a teacher?” When he shook his head, she said, “Science. Donner High School. Anyway, we were supposed to have a girls’ day out—a few hours at the spa, a movie, that sort of thing. Simple fun. But I got up that morning, looked in the mirror, and all I saw was someone I never expected to be. Thirty-four, unmarried, no kids.”
She shook her head. “That much I could’ve dealt with. I’d been dealing just fine. But then I checked my messages and found out that Toulouse Inc. was backing out of funding this biofuel project I’ve been working on with some of my students. We’ve built this great greenhouse.” She sketched the building with her hands. “Corn. Wheat. Soybeans. Easily renewable resources. And we’ve got a converter we designed…” She trailed off, aware that he was staring. “And I’m babbling. You don’t care about any of this. Sorry.”
Jonah had always hated when she’d interjected her “little project” into dinner-party conversation, even though it had been his idea that she leave grad school for the more family-friendly schedule of teaching high school. The way she figured it, if Jonah hadn’t cared about the biofuel project, then Ethan certainly wouldn’t.
“Sorry,” she said again when he just stared at her. She felt a hot flush climb her cheeks. “That’s not what you’re here to talk about, is it? You want to settle things, make sure I’m okay. Well, I
