Fatal Reaction Read Free Page A

me right now.”
    She pushed past him and turned off the water. “I said talk , not fight .”
    “There’s no difference with you. One day you’re telling me that you want a divorce, and the next, I come home to find you half-naked in bed.” He held up his hands as if asking her what she expected. “At least this time you were alone.”
    Talking went quickly out the window.
    “Is that what this is about? It’s been four months, Jared, and you haven’t so much as looked at me. Do you know how much that hurts, or what it feels like to always be the least important thing to you? I quit my nursing job for you. I gave up my independence to sit here, alone in this house, indentured to you for taking care of me.”
    “You quit nursing for me ?” Jared scoffed. “You’re always the victim, aren’t you? Well, let me refresh your somewhat-jaded memory. You quit that job because you slept with Simon Walker, chief of medicine at the hospital we both worked at. Everyone knows about it, and if you hadn’t quit, he sure as hell would’ve found a way to fire you to stop the chatter. I have to walk on eggshells at that place to save my own ass. Sure, I could take a job somewhere else, but I worked my way up to department head. Those jobs just don’t exist out there, and I’m not starting over. Do you have any idea how hard it is to sit across a meeting room table and talk about Emergency Department funding with a guy who slept with my wife?”
    Colby slapped him hard enough across the cheek that her palm stung afterward.
    Jared’s head whipped to the side, and a red handprint surfaced on his cheek. He drew a deep breath in through his nose and clenched his teeth. “I think we’re done here,” he said, and closed the bathroom door.
    The lock clicked, and Colby stood for a moment in disbelief of what she’d done. No matter how much time passed or how many times she apologized, Jared would never forgive her. She wasn’t even sure she wanted him to.

CHAPTER 4
    Dr. Dorian Carmichael hung his lab coat over the back of his office chair and stared out the second-floor window of his Oakland Street office. He ruffled his wavy, dark blond hair, and rubbed a stray eyelash from the corner of his caramel-brown eyes.
    A mound of snow slid from the roof of the detached garage and piled on the construction trash next to it. Tearing down the old building was the last step in converting the 1900s home he had bought with his first bit of grant money into a welcoming obstetrical surgical practice. Nestled in a primarily residential neighborhood, the office was close to County Memorial Hospital where his pioneering of a uterine transplantation procedure had him quickly ascending the ranks.
    Before his research, women born without a uterus, or those who had lost theirs to disease, were limited to surrogacy and adoption if they wanted to have a family. Dorian’s procedure gave them the ability to experience childbirth firsthand. The response was overwhelming. Like anything new, the procedure wasn’t without complications, not the least of which was the unwillingness and general lack of donors, but he’d forged past that, and had operated on his first human, a woman named Stephanie Martin.
    Four blocks away, a grieving family held his second patient’s fate in its hands. Thirty-six-year-old Janice Harmon remained alive on life support after a car crash had left her clinically brain dead. A perfect donor match for Emily Warren, a twenty-eight-year-old who had lost her uterus to fibroids, Janice, who had never had children of her own, and whose family would never see a penny from agreeing to the donation, was the key to a high six-figure paycheck that helped keep things, especially with County’s CEO, Mitchell Altman, lubricated.
    A knock came at the door, and Dorian turned to see his nurse, Noreen Pafford, at the threshold, holding a sandwich.
    Noreen was a young thirty: slim and fit, with a beautiful softness about her. Her highlighted