An Act of Persuasion - By Stephanie Doyle Page 0,26

up on her like a wave. Instantly, she stood and darted around the other tables. She covered her mouth just in case and managed, with scant seconds to spare, to find the ladies’ room in the rear of the restaurant and kick open a stall.

Leaning over the toilet bowl, every traitorous bit of food she’d consumed came spewing out of her mouth. She fell to her knees and braced herself, trying not to think how disgusting it was to do this in a public bathroom.

Her only salvation was that it appeared to be spotlessly clean.

She heard the door behind her squeak open and thought about trying to gather herself up to explain. Surely another woman would understand her plight. Especially if the woman was a mother.

Only it wasn’t a woman who’d entered. She knew it when the stall opened and a cold, wet towel was placed on the back of her neck, while he handed her another one so she could wipe her mouth.

That’s right. A cold towel on the back of the neck did make her feel better.

“It’s okay. I’m here, Anna.”

She closed her eyes. He was here.

* * *

BEN INSISTED on seeing her home. He’d paid the check and escorted her out of the restaurant, but instead of taking her to her car he drove her directly home.

“I need to get to work tomorrow,” she protested. But he could see the objection was only mildly stated. After heaving up the contents of her stomach she looked decidedly weak. She leaned her head on the seat and he watched her eyes close for a prolonged count before she struggled to open them again.

“I’ll pick you up in the morning.”

“Or I can take the bus. I’m not an invalid, you know. It’s just morning sickness. All day morning sickness.”

“I want to be helpful. Besides, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

She tilted her head in his direction. “You’re still not working.”

“In spurts. But certainly not full time. The replacement you found—well done, by the way—has kept everything moving. Everyone is booked with a consulting assignment of some sort. It seems the business can run without me.”

Ben had struggled to digest that fact once he’d started to feel better again. He’d told himself he wasn’t going to the office because of his concerns about being around people. The truth was he was afraid that once he got to the office there wouldn’t be much for him to do.

To her he could admit that. Only to her. “It’s a hard lesson to learn that you’re completely and totally dispensable.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. They’ll need you. When something goes wrong, they always need you.”

He found a parking spot on the street in front of her building then got out of the car to walk with her to her apartment. He had this absurd urge to lift her off her feet and carry her, but considering his strength was only nicely returning he could see himself dropping her halfway up the stairs.

That wouldn’t be very Rhett Butler of him.

Once inside her apartment, she immediately went into her bedroom—no doubt to change out of the sundress, which had suffered from her time spent kneeling on the bathroom floor. He could hear the water running and imagined she was standing under the shower, cleaning herself off.

He imagined her naked.

Her breasts covered with hot running water that would trickle over her skin and down her belly to...

Ben groaned and cut off that line of thinking. Not twenty minutes earlier she’d been head down in a toilet bowl. It wasn’t fair to be thinking of her and sex when she obviously felt so poorly.

But when she came out of the bedroom, dressed in a pair of yoga pants and a tank top—an outfit he remembered fondly—with her hair pulled back and her face washed clean she looked better.

She looked beautiful. The freckles that dotted her face and arms and body stood out against her white creamy skin and he found himself wanting to connect the dots. With his tongue.

“I am flipping hungry.”

“Seriously?” He recalled never being hungry after vomiting. In fact, the sensation of hunger altogether had been stripped away by the drugs until very recently. Now he was hungry for food and...other things.

“I know. But it’s not like chemo. It hits me like a truck but then it’s gone and I want a gallon of ice cream.”

Ben wandered into the kitchen, which was merely an extension of the living room but with ceramic tiles on the