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He caught her hand, halting her before she reached the door. She glanced over her shoulder, a quizzical expression on her face.

“I just wanted to say thanks—for offering to cook for me tonight.”

“You’re welcome,” she said cautiously.

“I know that you don’t really approve of me—”

“And I know you aren’t really concerned about my approval.”

He lifted a shoulder. “But you should know that only about half of the rumors that circulate around the hospital are true.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said.

“And while I can’t control what other people say, I don’t kiss and tell. Ever.”

“I know,” she admitted.

The timer in the kitchen buzzed again.

“I really need to get that pasta off the stove.”

But he still didn’t release her hand and there was a mischievous glint in his eyes that made her uneasy.

“The noodles are going to be overcooked,” she said again, and that was when she realized what he was doing. “You’re stalling me on purpose.”

“Why would I do that?” he asked innocently.

“To wind up my torsion spring.”

“People don’t actually have torsion springs—I only said you were
like
a torsion spring.”

“If you don’t let me get back to the kitchen right now, I’m going to let loose all of my tension in your direction.”

He grinned. “Promises, promises.”

But this time when she turned away, he let her go.

She had a colander in the sink and a distinctly unhappy look on her face when he returned to the kitchen. She dumped the noodles into the bowl and carried them to the table she must have set when she got out of the shower.

“If dinner is ruined, it’s your fault,” she told him.

“Dinner is not ruined,” he promised, retrieving the salad from the fridge.

But she still looked skeptical as she scooped penne out of the serving bowl and into her pasta bowl. She ladled sauce on the top and waited until he had done the same before she picked up her fork.

“Did your mother teach you how to cook?” he asked, after he’d sampled his first mouthful.

She shook her head. “My mother is a senior research supervisor at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta—she can isolate a pathogen but I doubt she knows how to pound or purée.”

“So who taught you how to cook?”

“I took a few recreational cooking classes at a small culinary institute in Boston while I was doing my residency.”

“Did you graduate with top honors from there, too?”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t for grades, it was for fun.”

“For fun?” he asked skeptically.

Her lips curved, just a little. “It was more fun than starving.”

“Well, your pasta gets top marks from me,” he told her.

“The sauce was good,” she allowed. “The noodles were overcooked.”

“Maybe by about thirty seconds,” he acknowledged, smiling at her.

She smiled back, a wordless acceptance of the truce he’d offered. “Okay, maybe I could learn to relax a little bit.”

“I’d be happy to teach you.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to be
that
relaxed.”

He chuckled, unoffended.

“I didn’t make anything for dessert, but I do have ice cream,” she told him.

“I don’t think I have room for dessert—even ice cream,” he told her.

“It’s cookies ’n’ cream,” she said, in a tone that suggested no one could refuse her favorite flavor.

But he shook his head. “No, thanks.”

When she started to stack the dishes, he pulled the lab report out of his pocket and slid it across the table to her.

Avery’s heart pounded as she unfolded the page.

Her eyes skimmed the document quickly the first time, then again, more slowly. She’d been right. Just as she’d suspected, his results were all clear.

She exhaled a grateful sigh. There was nothing to worry about. But she’d needed to be sure—just in case there were other repercussions from that night.

“That’s it, then,” she said, almost giddy with relief as she pushed away from the table to help clear it. “There’s no need for either of us to ever again mention what happened on New Year’s Eve.”

He leaned back against the counter, holding her gaze for a long moment before he finally asked, “Are you sure about that?”

She hugged the salad dressing bottles she carried closer to her chest and eyed him warily.

“There are other potential consequences of unprotected sex,” he reminded her.

She nibbled on her lower lip, as if she didn’t know where he was going with the conversation. Because she hadn’t expected him to go there, she hadn’t expected the possibility to cross his mind. And maybe it hadn’t. “What do you mean?”

He continued to hold her gaze, his own unwavering. “I mean a baby,” he told her. “Is it possible you could be pregnant?”

She shook her head as she turned away from him to put the dressings back in the fridge. “I don’t think so.”

“That’s not very reassuring.”

She couldn’t see him, but she could hear the scowl in his voice. “Well, that’s the best I can do right now,” she admitted, shifting around some items in the door of the refrigerator to avoid facing him.

“You’re not on the pill or the patch?” he pressed.

“No.”

“You didn’t take the morning-after pill?”

She shook her head.

He nudged her away from the fridge and firmly closed the door. “Why not?”

“I—I didn’t think about it.”

His hands settled on the counter behind him, his fingers curled over the edge. “You’re a doctor, Avery. You know how babies are made—and you know there are steps that can be taken to prevent a baby from being made, even after the fact.”

She felt her cheeks burn, but she nodded. “You’re right. And I did get a package of morning-after pills from the clinic—the morning after.”

“So why didn’t you take them?”

“Because when I stopped at the hospital after I left the clinic, to check on Callie’s sister and her baby, something inside of me...yearned.”

She’d hoped for some kind of understanding, but the darkness of his scowl warned her otherwise.

“I know it sounds stupid,” she continued to explain, “but that’s how I felt. Then I got home and I sat at the table with the package in front of me, and I stared at it for a really long time. Because the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy completely freaked me out, but the possibility of a baby...somehow the possibility of a baby didn’t freak me out at all.”

She looked at him, silently begging for his forgiveness—or at least acceptance. “I mean, I’m not a teenager, and I do want to have a baby someday, so I decided that if I did get pregnant, having a baby might not be the worst thing that could happen to me at this point in my life.”

“Not the worst thing that could happen to
you
,” he echoed, pinning her with his hard and unyielding gaze. “Did you give any consideration to what it might mean to
me
? Did you think,
for even one minute
, about how a baby would affect
my
life?”

“No.” She whispered the admission, ashamed that it was true. She hadn’t thought about him at all. She hadn’t thought about anything but how the possibility—minuscule as it might be—of having a baby filled her heart and soul with joy. “All I could think about, all that mattered, was that I might finally have the baby I’ve always wanted.”

“You were
trying
to get pregnant?”

“No! I didn’t plan any of what happened between us that night,” she promised him. “But when I realized it was possible that we might have conceived a child, I just didn’t do anything to stop it.”

“A decision I’m still struggling to understand,” he told her.

She nodded, acknowledging that she owed him a more thorough explanation of her actions. “When I graduated from medical school, I had a fiancé and a five-year plan.”

His brows lifted at that, but he remained silent, allowing her to continue.

“The plan included a wedding and, a few years after that, a baby. Then my fiancé decided to go ahead with that plan with someone else, and I moved on with my life without him.”

“And moved to Charisma,” he guessed.

She nodded again. “I’ve helped a lot of women deliver a lot of babies, and I always believed that someday it would be my turn. But I’m thirty-two years old and maybe my biological clock isn’t actually ticking just yet, but that someday doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.”

“You still had no right to make a decision that could affect both of our futures without talking to me,” he told her.

“I know,” she admitted. “But I promise you, if it turns out that I am pregnant, I will take full and complete responsibility for the baby.”

“You don’t want anything from me?” he challenged. “Not child support? Not even my name on the birth certificate?”

She shook her head, eager to give him the reassurance he seemed to be seeking. “Nothing,” she confirmed. “No one will even need to know that you’re the baby’s father.”

“Which only proves you don’t know me nearly as well as you think you do.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that if all you wanted was a sperm donor, you should have gone to a clinic.”

“Hey, I didn’t plan for this, either,” she reminded him hotly. “I didn’t seduce you or sabotage birth control. We both acted impulsively and
if
it turns out that I am pregnant—and that’s still a pretty big
if
at this point—it will be the culmination of various factors that neither of us could have predicted.”

“When will you know?”

Her cheeks burned. Somehow, talking about her monthly cycle with him seemed even more intimate than what they’d done in the supply closet. “Sometime in the next seven to ten days.”

“Okay,” he said. “So between now and then, we’re going to spend as much time together as possible.”

She frowned. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“It’s absolutely necessary,” he told her. “Partly so that the people around us—friends, family, coworkers—start to see us as a couple. But mostly, and much more importantly, if you are pregnant, we need to know one another a lot better in order to coparent our child.”

She stared at him, horrified. “Coparent?”

“I might not have had any say in the choices you’ve made up to this point, honey, but I promise you, I’ll be involved in any decision making that takes place going forward.”

He kept his eyes on hers, implacable and unyielding. “If you are pregnant—you don’t just get a baby. You get me, too.”

* * *

His words had sounded more like a threat than a promise, but Avery decided not to worry too much about what Justin had said in the heat of the moment. She understood that he was angry—and that he had reason to be. They’d both forgotten about birth control on New Year’s Eve, but she’d unilaterally decided to accept the possible risk of pregnancy.

And maybe it was foolish to want a child under the current circumstances, but she couldn’t deny that she did. Even if this wasn’t the way she’d envisioned it might someday happen, she refused to have any regrets. She had no illusions that being a single mother would be easy, but she was fortunate to have a job she enjoyed along with a steady income that would pay her bills. She had a lot of patients who lived under much more difficult circumstances on a daily basis.

She’d seen Justin frequently in the week that had passed since the night they’d had dinner at her apartment—and he’d made a point of being seen with her as often as possible—but she’d managed to keep their conversations mostly short and impersonal.

The prospect of coparenting with him made her more than a little uneasy, but there was no point in worrying about that unless and until her pregnancy was confirmed. And even then, nine months was a lot of time. She was confident his determination to be involved would wane long before their baby was born. Maybe that was an unfair assumption to make considering how attentive and solicitous he’d been, but he had a notoriously short attention span when it came to his relationships with women.

She could have taken a test already. The presence of hCG, the hormone that indicated pregnancy, could be found in very low levels within seven days after conception. But she wasn’t ready to confirm her pregnancy just yet. Because as soon as she knew for certain that she was going to have a baby, she’d feel obligated to tell Justin, and she wanted to hold the excited anticipation close to her own heart for a while before he trampled all over it.

Three more days
.

The words echoed in her head as she waited for sleep to come.

She awoke a few hours later with a crampy feeling low in her belly. Uneasy, she got up to go to the bathroom. That was when she realized her instincts and intuition were wrong.

She wasn’t pregnant, after all.

She crawled back under the covers of her empty bed, in her quiet apartment, and cried softly.

* * *

When Justin finally got a break and went in search of a much-needed caffeine fix, he found Avery sitting alone in the cafeteria with a single-serving tub of cookies ’n’ cream ice cream in front of her. He took his extralarge cup of coffee over to her table, wondering if the ice cream was evidence of some kind of pregnancy craving or just strange eating habits.

“Do you mind if I join you?”

She glanced up when he stopped by the chair across the table from her. “Of course not.”

He lowered himself into the empty seat. “Breakfast?” he asked, nodding toward the ice cream container.

She dropped her spoon into the melting dessert and shook her head. “I was hoping to see you today.”

He was surprised and pleased to think that she wanted to see him rather than avoid him, which was her usual modus operandi. “You were?”

“I figured you’d want to know as soon as possible that you’re off the hook.”

“Off the hook?” he echoed, the implication of her words taking a moment to sink into his brain. “Oh.”

She nodded. “I got my period last night.”

“Oh,” he said again.

“We successfully dodged that bullet.”

But her clichéd phrases and the forced cheerfulness warned him that her feelings weren’t as simple or straightforward as she wanted him to believe. “How are you doing?” he asked.