The Doctor's Pregnant Bride? by Susan Crosby Page B

great,” Ted said.
    “I’m looking forward to getting back to normalmyself,” Chance said. “Carrie’s doing an admirable job of filling in for you, Sara Beth, but she’s not you.”
    She smiled at the compliment. They did work well as a team. She respected him as a doctor. He was particularly good with the husbands, often counseling them separately through the in vitro process, knowing that most of the attention so often focused on the wives and their emotions. Sara Beth liked that he went the extra mile.
    “So,” she said, anticipation making her stomach do flip-flops. “I finished the latest box of files yesterday. Should I go to the vault and get more?”
    “I already did,” Ted said, pointing to the box next to her desk, which she hadn’t paid attention to, thinking it was the old box. “I hadn’t realized before, but I found out you’re not authorized.”
    Not authorized? She could never go into the vault? Never find her mother’s file? She grabbed her stomach, the pain so intense that nausea rose. She swallowed hard.
    “Hey.” Ted grabbed her as she swayed. “Sit down.”
    Chance rolled a chair behind her. She sank into it.
    “What’s wrong?” Ted asked, crouching in front of her, putting a hand on her forehead. “Are you sick?”
    She waded through the agony in her mind to find an answer for him. “I…had cereal this morning. Maybe the milk was bad,” she said, knowing it was lame, unable to think of anything else.
    Chance had his fingers on her wrist. Ted was lifting her eyelids, checking each eye.
    “Do you need to throw up?” he asked.
    The absurdity of the situation struck her. Here she was being tended to by two doctors, all because she’d been denied access to information she had no legal right to have, anyway. How guilty would she have felt if she had gone into the vault and gotten that information? What would she have done with it? She couldn’t contact the man after all these years, could she?
    No, it was better this way.
    And maybe at some point, she would actually believe that…
    “I’m okay. Really.” She gently pushed their hands away. “I don’t know what happened, but I’m all right now and ready to get to work.”
    “Just sit there for a while,” Ted said.
    She would rather go somewhere and cry, get it out of her system, but she was sure they wouldn’t let her out of their sight until they were satisfied she wasn’t going to pass out. “Okay,” she said.
    The timer on the centrifuge went off. As Ted reluctantly left her, Chance whispered, “Are you pregnant?”
    Shocked, she met his concerned gaze, her face heating up. “No!”
    “Sure?”
    “Yes. Positive.”
    He patted her shoulder, then joined Ted. Only a few words of their discussion reached her. Experiment. Risk. Won’t know until …
    Were they on the brink of success, then? Did they have something ready to try? Wouldn’t there be all sorts of hoops to jump through for the government first?
    She used her feet to push her chair to her desk and opened the box, pulling out a few folders, then turning on her computer, trying to accept defeat by reminding herself that when push came to shove, she may not even have followed through on her plan. She just wasn’t sure she could live with doing something so unethical.
    Sometime later Sara Beth felt herself in motion. Ted was pushing her chair to the lab door.
    “What? Hey! What’re you doing?” she asked, holding her feet up as they went.
    “You’re taking a break. You didn’t hear me call your name five times. I think I’ve rubbed off on you.”
    Not yet, you haven’t, but there’s hope . The thought made her smile, as did his taking care of her, worrying about her.
    “Go fuel yourself,” he said as she stood. “I don’t want to see you for at least a half hour.”
    “Breaks are fifteen minutes.”
    “Are you arguing with your boss?”
    “No, sir. I just don’t know how to take a half-hour break. I can do an hour for lunch, but a break?