life together.
In the morning, Christina barely made it to the bathroom before she lost the contents of her stomach. She felt better after that, but still shaky, so she called her doctor and made an appointment to see her that afternoon.
“I might have the flu,” Christina said as she sat on the end of the exam table. “Or heatstroke.”
She should have asked for a break yesterday. It had been too hot, she wasn’t used to the heavy costumes, and the other extras had been flagging too. But they’d all stubbornly kept on, wanting to show how tough they were, Christina thought. Besides, getting frisked by Grant over and over again hadn’t been a bad thing.
Her doctor worked at the clinic at the crossroads, the same one Christina had brought Ray to when they’d been in a car accident last fall. Everyone in River County came to this clinic.
Dr. Sue, a fifty-something woman with short blond hair, three kids, and a husband who was a pediatrician, studied the file a nurse had walked in to give her, then put her hand on Christina’s bare knee.
“You don’t have the flu, Christina,” she said. “You’re pregnant, sweetie.”
Chapter Sixteen
Christina gaped, the dizziness she’d finally managed to shake swamping her again. “No, I can’t be.”
“Did you have sex with a man?” Dr. Sue asked, her look impish. “That’s how women get pregnant, Christina. I remember telling you that when you were sixteen.”
“Well yes, but I mean …” Christina struggled to think. “I went to a doctor in Dallas. She said I wasn’t pregnant. I’d thought I was …” She rapidly explained.
Dr. Sue listened without changing expression. “Let me see if I’ve got this right. You went to a clinic, where there were about forty women in the waiting room, and the lab there ran a quick test. No chance of getting the sample mixed up, or the wrong thing written down on the wrong record?”
Christina clutched the end of the table. “I couldn’t come here, because you know it would have been all over town, people speculating on why I went to my doctor this week when my yearly checkup is always in June.”
“I do understand, Christina, but if you’d come to me, you’d have gotten the correct results, and saved yourself a trip and a lot of money. I had the lab downstairs look for pregnancy as well as other things. When a healthy young woman who is obviously back with her boyfriend suddenly doesn’t feel well, I guess pregnancy, and I’m usually right.”
Christina still couldn’t breathe. “Do you mean you think I was really pregnant when I went to Dallas? This isn’t something that happened last week?”
Dr. Sue shook her head. “Based on when you missed your period and all my experience …” Dr. Sue rested her hand briefly on Christina’s abdomen. “I’d say you were about six or seven weeks gone.”
Another wave of dizziness hit her. When Dr. Sue moved her hand, Christina laid her own on her lower abdomen. Could she feel…?
Dr. Sue gave her a smile. “I’d talk to Grant. Congratulations¸ Christina. This is so wonderful.”
Christina gnawed her lower lip. “If I’ve been pregnant seven weeks, then there’s a problem.”
“Ah,” Dr. Sue said, though her bright look didn’t fade. “There’s a chance the baby is Ray Malory’s.”
Christina nodded, her face hot.
“Fortunately, there’s a way to find out who the father is without risking the baby,” Dr. Sue said. “Because we certainly don’t want any risks. I’m going to make sure you have this baby and it’s healthy and so are you. Don’t worry about that. We can do a test of your blood—they can isolate the baby’s DNA in your bloodstream, but we’ll have to wait until you’re at least nine weeks along. And we’d need a DNA sample from both men for comparison, of course.”
“Oh.” Christina had hoped that there would be a high tech test they could do today to rule out one man or the other.
Dr. Sue gave her a wise look. “It means you have to sit them down and tell them. They’re both good men, raised well. I’m sure they’ll consent to giving a sample.”
Christina was certain they would as well. That wasn’t the problem.
The problem was explaining the situation, finding out how Grant and Ray took the news, and deciding what was best for the kid.
I’m putting my baby’s welfare first. Always.
This was terrifying. And so effing wonderful. Christina’s doldrums of the last weeks evaporated in one second. Here was the relief the doctor