Sizzling Nights with Dr. Off-Limits

She swiped at the tears running down her cheeks. “How do you just show up wherever I do?”

“This time it was intentional,” he admitted. “I had the driver pull over to pick you up.”

She turned away from him and pretended to stare out the window, but he suspected she really did so to hide her tearstained face.

“I’m taking you home, Emily,” he told her, keeping his voice gentle but firm. “Then you and I are going to talk. I’m going to tell you a few things I’ve discovered about me, you, and about us. You’re going to tell me what upset you so much at that funeral. When we’re through talking, I’ll leave and I’ll turn my notice in at Children’s, if that’s what you want. For that matter, I’ll leave Manhattan if you think the city isn’t big enough for the both of us. But prior to my stepping out of your life forever, we are going to talk.”

* * *

Lucas was so wrong if he thought Emily was going to tell him why she’d started bawling and hadn’t bee

n able to quit.

So very wrong.

What would be the point of telling him after all this time? There was nothing he could do to change the past. Nothing good could come out of telling him. Only more pain.

Pain she already lived with.

Pain she wasn’t even sure he’d feel.

Or that she hadn’t believed he would feel for so many years. Now she wasn’t so sure.

Having seen him with Cassie, Jenny, with his other patients, she had to question what she’d always believed. Over the years, she’d convinced herself that Lucas would have been glad their baby had died. It was how she’d dealt with the loss of him and their child.

Sitting next to him in that church, listening to that boy’s funeral, that conviction had been buried.

Lucas wouldn’t have wanted their baby to die.

That she’d ever believed so to begin with had been hormones and perhaps a coping mechanism to deal with her grief over losing her husband and her baby so closely together.

She’d needed him at the last funeral service she’d attended. He should have been there, but hadn’t.

Despite her grief, she recognized he couldn’t have been there even if he’d wanted, because he hadn’t known about the small service only three guests had attended. Emily and her parents.

She choked back more tears at the memories, at the overwhelming sense of loss. “I was pregnant.”

Dear God, had she really just said that out loud in the back of a taxi two blocks from her apartment? Talk about inappropriate. Talk about bad timing.

Lucas’s face went ashen. “I didn’t hear you, Emily.”

Now was her chance. Just tell him it was nothing. That she hadn’t even spoken. That what he thought he’d heard, then dismissed as having been wrong, had indeed been incorrect.

“I was pregnant,” she repeated a little louder than her first whispered admission. She turned away from him, unable to bear his confused expression, and stared blankly out the taxi window.

What was wrong with her? She couldn’t stop crying and now she couldn’t stop saying things she shouldn’t be saying.

She didn’t need to be looking at Lucas to feel his tension, to know that his entire body had stiffened.

“When?” If she hadn’t known who was sitting in the back of the taxi next to her, she wouldn’t have recognized his voice. He sounded distant, removed, like a stranger.

He was a stranger. Five years ago, he’d told her to leave, she had, and then he’d divorced her. Five years in which they’d had no contact whatsoever. Just because he’d jumped back into her life and into her bed didn’t mean a thing.

Not a thing.

Except that once again she was crying.

She turned, met his gaze and spoke low but clearly. “When you told me the very last thing you wanted was for me to have your baby.”