Chapter 12: What the Scan Showed

Rhett's POV

Her mouth was still warm on mine when the door bell rang, and I turned toward it with my pulse still racing.

Tawny Yarbrough stood on my shop floor in a white dress with a long envelope in her hand.

I had seen her at the clubhouse twice, years ago, as a girl pouring beer for her uncle.

She didn't recognize me.

She looked at Ruby, and then at the space between Ruby and me, and her face tightened.

"Well," she said. "That was fast."

"Get out," Ruby said.

"I came for the club, not for you." Tawny held up the envelope. "Floyd said the first baby counts. So here's mine."

She slapped it on the counter.

I picked it up before Ruby could.

A slip of thermal paper slid out, with a grey fan shape on it and a tiny white blob in the middle, and my hands went still.

I had been in a cell for eight years, and I had learned a great deal about paper.

I read the top line twice.

"Where did you get this?" I said.

"A clinic in Tulsa. It's real."

"It says eleven weeks."

"It's a different machine."

"Eleven weeks," I said, "means this baby was conceived in March."

Ruby had gone still beside me.

"The photo came in on June fourth, Tawny," she said slowly. "You've been sleeping with him for six weeks. You told the whole club six."

"I counted wrong."

"You counted wrong by five weeks."

"I counted wrong." Her voice shook. "Doctors change the dates."

"Whose name is under the sticker?"

There was a small white label across the top of the slip, over the line where a patient's name would print.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Chose Her. I Left Carrying His Heir. from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.