"Internal as in..." As she got the meaning, Xhex shook her head. "Nope. Not going to happen."
"Were you sexually assaulted?"
"No."
Doc Jane nodded once. "Is there anything I need to know that you haven't told me? Pain in any particular place?"
"I'm fine."
"You're bleeding. I'm not sure you're aware of it. But you're bleeding."
Xhex frowned and looked at her trembling arms.
"There's fresh blood on the insides of your thighs. Which is why I asked if I could do the internal exam."
Xhex felt a wash of dread come over her.
"I'll ask you one more time. Were you sexually assaulted." There was no emotion behind the clinical words, and the doctor had guessed right. Xhex wouldn't have been interested in any hysteria or drippy, over-the-top pity.
When she didn't reply, Doc Jane read into the silence correctly and said, "Any chance you could be pregnant."
Oh... God.
Symphath cycles were weird and unpredictable, and she'd been so caught up in the drama of the capture and captivity, she hadn't even thought about the repercussions.
At that moment, she despised being a female. She truly did.
"I don't know."
Doc Jane nodded once. "How can you tell if you are?"
Xhex just shook her head. "There's no way I am. My body's been through too much."
"Let me do the internal, okay? Just to be certain there's nothing going on that I can feel inside. And then I'd like to take you to the Brotherhood compound and do an ultrasound on you. You were really uncomfortable when I went over your belly. I had V come with a car--he should almost be here by now."
Xhex was barely hearing a word that was being spoken to her. She was too busy tracing back over the last couple weeks. She'd been with John the day before the abduction. That last time. Maybe...
If she was pregnant, she flat-out refused to believe it had anything to do with Lash. That would just be too cruel. Too f**king cruel.
Besides, maybe there was another reason for the bleeding.
Like a miscarriage, part of her brain insisted on pointing out.
"Do it," Xhex said. "But make it quick. I don't deal well with this shit and I'm going to flip out on you if it takes longer than a few minutes."
"I'll be fast."
As she closed her eyes and braced herself, a quick slide show set up shop in her head. Flash: her body on a stainless-steel table in a tiled room. Flash: her ankles and wrists locked in place. Flash: human doctors with spastic, lookie-here eyes coming at her. Flash: a video camera in her face and panning down. Flash: a scalpel catching the light from above.
Snap. Snap.
Her lids flipped open at the sounds because she was unsure whether what she'd heard was in her head or in the room. It was the latter. Doc Jane had her latex gloves on.
"I'll be gentle," Jane said.
Which would be a relative term, of course.
Xhex fisted the sheets and felt the muscles that ran up her inner thighs spasm as she went rigid from head to toe. The good news with the frozen- stiff act was that it cured her of that stutter. "I'd rather you be fast."
"Xhex... I want you to look right at me. Right now."
Xhex's scattered stare swung around. "What."
"Hold my eyes. Right here." The doctor pointed to her peepers. "Hold 'em. You lock on my face and know that I've had this done to me, okay? I know exactly what I'm doing, and not just because I've been trained."
Xhex forced herself to focus and... Jesus, it did help. Meeting that evergreen stare did help. "You'll feel it."
"Excuse me?"
Xhex cleared her throat. "If I'm... pregnant, you'll feel it."
"How."
"When you... there'll be a pattern. Inside. It won't..." She took a shallow breath, drawing on the tales she'd heard from her father's people. "The walls won't be smooth."
Doc Jane didn't even blink. "Got it. You ready?"
No. "Yes."
Xhex was in a cold sweat by the time it was over and that rib she'd broken was screaming from her sawing gulps of air.
"Tell me," she said hoarsely.
Chapter Twenty-three
"I'm telling you... Eliahu is alive. Eliahu Rathboone... he's alive."
Standing in his room at the Rathboone mansion, Gregg Winn stared out the window at some of South Carolina's signature Spanish moss. In the moonlight, the shit was creepy as a shadow thrown by no discernible object... or body.
"Gregg, did you hear me?"
After rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he looked over his shoulder at his nubile young narrator. Holly Fleet was just inside the door, her long blond hair pulled straight back from her makeup-less face, her eyes not nearly as wide or captivating without the false lashes or the sparkly-sparkly stuff she wore on camera. But the pink silk robe did nothing, absolutely nothing to hide her banging body.
And she was practically vibrating, her inner tuning fork struck by one hell of a ringer.
"You are aware," Gregg drawled, "that the SOB died over one hundred and fifty years ago."
"Then his ghost is really here."
"Ghosts don't exist." Gregg turned back to the view. "You of all people should know that."
"This one does."
"And you woke me up at one a.m. to tell me this?"
Not a good move on her part. They'd all gotten next to no sleep the night before, and he'd spent the day pushing and shoving on the phone to L.A. He'd hit the pillow an hour ago, not expecting to crash--but fortunately his body had had different plans.
Either that or his brain was telling him to give it up because shit was not going well. That butler was refusing to budge on the permission thing; both of Gregg's reapproaches had been shut down, the one at breakfast politely declined, the one at dinner flat-out ignored.
Meanwhile they had some great footage that he'd already sent in. Thanks to the evocative shots captured on the sly, the brass had given him the go-ahead to switch the special's location--but they were pressuring him for a presell cut they could broadcast ASAP.
Which couldn't happen until the butler relented.
"Hello?" Holly snapped. "Are you listening to me?"
"What."
"I want to go."
He frowned, thinking she didn't have the brains to be frightened by anything short of an eighteen-wheeler with her name on the front grille. "Go where?"
"Back to L.A."
He nearly recoiled. "L.A.? Are you kidding--Okay, so not going to happen. Unless you want to get on Orbitz and ship yourself back like a piece of luggage. We have a job to do here."
Which given the hair across that butler's ass included a lot of doctoring and begging. The latter being Holly's milieu. And actually... if she was scared, that worked to an advantage. She could leverage fear with the guy. Men normally responded well to that kind of thing--especially proper gentleman types who surely channeled chivalry through every one of their dry, spindly bones.
"I really..." Holly pulled the silk lapels closer to her neck... so that the front of the robe stretched tight against her hard ni**les. "I'm freaking out."
Hmm. If this was a ploy to get him into bed... he wasn't that tired. "Come here."
He held out his arms, and as she came forward and put her body against his, he smiled as he stared over her head. God, she smelled good. Not that flowery shit she usually wore, but something darker. Nice.
"Baby, you know you've got to stay with us. I need you to work your magic."
Outside, the Spanish moss swayed in the breeze, the moonlight catching it and creating the illusion of chiffon, so that the trees looked like they were be-gowned.
"Something's not right here," she said into his chest.
Down below, on the lawn, a lone figure ambled into view. Clearly, Stan going for a stoner stroll.
Gregg shook his head. "The only thing that's not right is that damn butler. Don't you want to be famous? A special here's going to open doors for you. You could be hosting Dancing with the Stars next. Or Big Brother."
He could tell he'd gotten her attention, because her body relaxed, and to help her along, he rubbed her back.
"That's my girl." He watched Stan wander along, hands in pockets, head looking away from the house, long hair moving in the wind. Another couple of yards and he was going to be bathed in moonlight as he stepped out from under the trees. "Now, I want you to stay here with me--like I said, you of all people should know these ghost stories are never anything more than creaking floorboards. We have a job just because people want to believe in creepy shit."