The Doctor's Damsel in Distress

Levi didn’t want a relationship. He didn’t want to get to know her better. He didn’t want to spend more time with her.

He probably never had. He’d just fed her lines, fed her what she’d wanted to hear even though she’d denied that even to herself, feeding herself just as many lines as he had.

Player. Playgirl. Modern woman. Ha! At heart she was as old-fashioned as they came. She’d wanted the dream, the fairy-tale, and for one romantic moonlit evening she’d believed that fairy-tale might be within her grasp.

She was no different from any of the other women Levi had been with in the past.

She hadn’t thought she’d been that bad, but obviously she didn’t have a clue about pleasing a man, about holding a man’s interest.

Definitely, she knew nothing about being a player herself.

Their picnic had been beautiful. Wonderfully romantic. Yes, she’d known better than to act on her feelings for him, but she was only human and he was a Greek god fallen to earth to tempt mere human females.

She’d been tempted, all right.

Tempted as surely as Eve had bitten into that apple.

And just like Eve, she’d been tossed out of paradise.

“You okay?”

She glanced up at Karen, nodded and gave as bright a smile as she could manage. “I’m fine.”

Just because she’d quit eating over the past four weeks and had dropped eight pounds it didn’t mean she wasn’t fine.

Four weeks.

Four weeks with Levi barely acknowledging her existence.

Four weeks without a monthly visitor despite the fact she should have been visited.

Four weeks in which she kept telling herself that she couldn’t really be, that real life wasn’t like that, not for grown, sensible women like her. No way would her one and only bout of unprotected sex leave her pregnant.

Yes, Levi was a virile man but, still, just once?

Yet she knew it only took once for an unwanted pregnancy to occur.

Unwanted pregnancy.

Was that what was happening in her body? Or was stress the culprit in preventing her menstrual cycle?

Definitely she was stressed. Majorly stressed. As in sick inside and out. Worse than she’d been with Simon.

With Simon, she’d felt foolish, felt u

sed, felt blind.

She felt all those things with Levi, but with Levi she ached in ways she’d not imagined possible.

She felt like a hole had been ripped in her chest.

Which was insane. She couldn’t have loved him.

“Madison? You’re worrying me,” Karen interjected, stepping closer and waving her hand in front of Madison’s face. “Do you need to go home? I can get someone to cover your patients if you aren’t feeling well. Patient count is down at the moment, anyway, with all the discharges earlier, so it wouldn’t be a problem. I may have to send someone home anyway.”

Shaking her head in the negative, Madison smiled weakly at her friend. “I’d rather stay if it’s all the same to you.”

Because if she went home she’d have nothing to distract her from the fact that tomorrow evening Levi and his father would cut the grand opening ribbon on the Margaret House.