Reunited For The Billionaire's Legacy

“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.

Joanne came back a short while later, a studied blank look on her face. Diana’s heart seized in her chest. She knew that look. It was the one she used when she had tricky news to give to a patient.

“You are pregnant,” her doctor confirmed quietly. “I take it this was unexpected?”

Disastrous. Untenable was more like it. She wanted to be happy. She wanted to be a mother. Hell, she wanted to be a pediatric surgeon. Of course she wanted kids. But now? With Coburn? A haze of unreality spread over her that was so thick, so unnavigable, she couldn’t claw her way through it.

“There are options, you know.”

“No.” She barked the word out. That was not an option. Ever.

“Okay. I’d like to examine you, then. Just to make sure everything is okay. And since you have a rare blood condition in your family, I’d like to take some tests for that.”

Diana nodded. She somehow made her way through the next half hour without screaming, without losing her composure as Joanne examined her, because she was too numb to feel anything. This was supposed to be her time. Her chance at a new life. And she had messed it up royally over her lust for a man who had already wreaked havoc on her life for long enough.

Oh. My. God.

Joanne sent her off with a promise to deliver the test results in a few days. Diana found herself in the park across the street with a cup of peppermint tea in her hand, sitting on a bench while she watched the dark crimson and orange leaves fall off the trees as fall set in. It was just enough normalcy to convince her she hadn’t entered some alternate universe where condoms failed on the one night you had sex with your ex whom you were now tied to for at least the next two decades.