Betrayed by My Husband, Taken by His Billionaire Uncle novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Transfer of Care

August hands Juliet's care to a colleague and shows her the forged lab report, admits he can't stop thinking about her, and tells her Truman knows nothing with Sunday dinner three days away.

I tore the notice off the glass.

The tape took a strip of my mother's gold lettering with it, the B from BEXLEY.

"Annabeth."

She came out from the back with the bat, hair flattened on one side.

She read it over my shoulder.

"He signed it himself," she said. "He didn't even make an intern do it. That's almost romantic."

"Thirty days."

"Thirty days is a long time. I've had whole relationships in thirty days." She took the paper and folded it into a neat square. "What do you need first?"

I needed a lot of things.

I picked the one I could get before noon.

"My records," I said. "Everything they have on me at that clinic. On paper."

Queen City Fertility looked different on a Friday.

I gave my name at the front desk and watched the receptionist's face go careful.

"Mrs. Radford, Dr. Radford asked us to bring you straight back."

"I'm not here to see him."

"He asked," she said again, like that settled it.

He was waiting outside exam room two, in a charcoal suit today instead of scrubs, no mask, silver at his temples catching the overhead light.

Beside him stood a woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a white coat.

"Mrs. Radford," he said. "This is the physician who'll take over your care, starting now. She's the best we have."

The woman held out her hand, warm and dry.

"I'll be your doctor from here on, if you want me. Anything you need, you call my nurse, not him."

I looked at August.

"Why?"

"Because I can't be your doctor," he said, "and say the next thing."

The woman's eyebrows went up over the glasses.

She didn't say a word.

She just handed me a card with her direct line, nodded at him once, and walked away down the hall.

He waited until she turned the corner.

"Juliet."

It was the first time he'd used my name.

"Come to my office. There's something you need to see before you see anything else."

His office was at the end of the hall, with a window over the parking garage and nothing on the desk but a computer and a closed laptop.

He shut the door.

He turned the big monitor toward me, the way he had in the exam room.

Two lab reports, side by side.

On the left, a report with a Ballantyne letterhead and my name. May fourteenth. AMH: 0.2.

On the right, Queen City's blue logo. My name. Yesterday's date.

AMH: 3.4.

"The blood we drew before your exam," he said. "That number is normal for a healthy twenty-six-year-old. Better than normal."

"And the other one?"

"Nobody your age drops from that to this in five months. Nobody." He touched the left report with one finger. "Either this is forged, or he's the worst doctor in North Carolina."

I sat down in the chair across from his desk because my knees decided for me.

"I cried for a week," I said. "In May. I cried in the van in the parking lot of a Harris Teeter because I thought I'd broken something. I apologized to him."

"To Chandler."

"I apologized to Chandler for my eggs."

He made a sound I didn't expect, short and rough, almost a laugh with no humor in it.

Then he sat on the edge of the desk, close enough that his knee was an inch from mine.

"I'll print you both. You'll have everything that belongs to you."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me."

His jaw worked.

"Dr. Radford."

"August," he said. "You can't call me that anymore. I'm not anybody's doctor in this room."

"August, then. What's the next thing?"

He looked up.

His gray eyes weren't cold at all this close.

They were tired, and angry, and fixed on my mouth.

"I haven't stopped thinking about that room," he said. "Not for one hour. Not driving home, not at three in the morning. The sound you made."

Heat came up my neck so fast it hurt.

"You were working."

"I was. That's why I hate myself for it." He didn't look away. "I've been doing this for ten years, Juliet. Thousands of women. I've never once had to leave an exam room and stand in the stairwell."

"Did you?"

"For ten minutes. Before I pulled the donor file."

I should have stood up.

Instead I said, "I'm still married to your nephew."

"I know."

"I'm still married, and I have thirty days before he takes my mother's shop, and you're telling me about a stairwell."

"I know," he said again. "That's why I'm sitting on the desk and not anywhere else."

Neither of us moved.

The printer under the desk whirred and clicked and started spitting out pages, loud in the quiet room.

I breathed out.

He reached down without looking, took the warm pages and put them in my hands.

His fingers didn't touch mine.

He made sure of it.

"Does Truman know?" I asked. "Any of it?"

"No. My father knows a baby is coming, and he knows it's yours." He stood and went to the window. "He's been telling his barber."

"Chandler told him?"

"Chandler told him in August. Champagne at the club, the week the embryos were made."

My stomach turned over.

He was quiet for a second, looking down at the garage.

"You still take him gardenias on Sundays?"

"Every Sunday."

"Sunday dinner is in two days," he said. "Chandler will be at that table. And my father thinks you're the mother of his great-grandchild."

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