Safe Love (Love Brothers #4) by Liz Crowe Page B

holiday with
    her sister’s family. It had been torture on some levels, but it was all she
    had.
    This year, of course, was a whole different ball of wax.
    After spending a ton of emotional energy ignoring Antony and his regular calls
    and text messages in the first couple of weeks after their encounter, she was
    exhausted. The fact that he’d finally gotten the hint and stopped pestering
    her—she had to use that word to convince herself that what they’d done was
    wrong on so many levels there were no words for some of them—it had taken a
    different sort of energy to not call or text him. To just get in her damn car
    that he’d fixed the first day they’d met and show up at his house, beg him to
    be with her where he belonged and leave behind his well-meaning, caretaking
    compulsion to marry Rosalee Norris.
    Whatever it was, she prayed to move past it. No matter what,
    she woke every day wishing she could crawl under the covers and sleep. By the
    time she hit four or five in the afternoon, she had to take a nap, just to get
    through the rest of the evening.
    “Come up early,” her sister Annette kept insisting. “Why
    wait a week? You know you’ll hate being alone on Thanksgiving, no matter how
    much you hate it here with all this damn chaos.”
    She’d already made up her mind. The movers were coming the
    Monday after Thanksgiving and it made zero sense to spend the money or time
    driving up to Michigan and back only to turn around again—for good. She had a
    few things to wrap up here, including the annual lady parts checkup she was
    currently late for, plus having a final good-bye coffee with Antony’s mother,
    which she anticipated and dreaded in equal measure.
    The traffic between her place and her gynecologist’s office
    was a mess, setting her back another twenty minutes. But she located a parking
    spot and dashed inside, smiling her apologies, and settling in for the usual
    extra forty minute wait she had to endure. Once she finally got settled in a
    room, had her vitals taken and was dressed in a hospital gown with a bonus
    paper lap blanket, the exhaustion stole over her again, making her sway on the
    ice-cold exam table.
    The doctor breezed in, looking down at her tablet computer.
    Margot flinched, drawing the edges of the flimsy gown together over her bare
    breasts. Sweat beaded up on her forehead even as she shivered.
    “You don’t look so hot,” the woman said, unnecessarily, as
    she tapped on her computer. Margot hated the new depersonalized approach
    doctors took with their stupid iPads or whatever. She took a deep breath as the
    nurse helped her down onto the back so the doc could commence with the usual
    boob poking and prodding which hurt more than usual. “Sore?” The doctor asked
    in a perfunctory fashion.
    Margot yelped. “No, I mean, I didn’t think so. Ow!” She
    resisted the urge to bat the woman’s fingers away. The doctor typed out something
    on her tablet, washed her hands, then palpated Margot’s abdomen. When she dug
    deep into her left side, low, near her hipbone it made Margo blow out a breath.
    “That hurt,” she said, wiping the sweat off her upper lip with a shaking hand.
    “Any chance you could be pregnant?” The doctor’s mild words
    pierced her brain. “Don’t we have you on…?”
    Margot gulped and tried to sit up, no longer hearing the
    doctor’s words as a strange ringing sound was filling her head. She was on birth control and she hadn’t forgotten to take it… had she? Of course
    not. She’d never neglect anything that important.
    The nurse patted her shoulder and glanced over at the doctor
    who was scrolling through her notes and frowning. “I’m not pregnant,” she
    insisted, even as her brain fuzzed over and her throat closed up recalling in
    an instant Antony’s tale about getting Crystal pregnant the second time even
    though his mother had ‘finagled a way to get her on birth control’.
    “Well,” the woman said as she helped Margot