CHAPTER FIVE
OLIVEFELTASif the rich brocade walls in this very strange doctor’s office had come crashing down around her. She made her eyes as round as possible. “Not that I’m aware of.”
“Do you suspect?” he pressed, his voice a growl.
“I don’t... I don’t...”
“Go in and take the test,” he said.
She did all she could to make herself sink more heavily into her seat. “You can’t make me.”
“Olive,” he said.
“I...”
Her face drained of all color. “Do not pass out,” he commanded.
“You can’t tell someone not to pass out,” she said. “You’re unreasonable. Barking orders like that. A person doesn’t choose to pass out, it just happens. And if you keep looking at me like that, all the blood is going to drain out of my head and I am actually going to do it. I’m going to faint dead away at your feet. And you just said you didn’t want that, so maybe you should try being less of a scary jackass.”
She was breathing hard, her hand pressed to her forehead again. “I don’t... I don’t... It’s just that... It could be many other things.”
“It likely couldn’t be,” the nurse said.
“There are a lot of reasons that women miss their periods.”
“Mostly it’s pregnancy,” the nurse said.
Olive felt dizzy. She’d trained her whole life to run her father’s company. She knew how to focus on that at the exclusion of everything else.
She didn’t know how to be a mother.
She’d never even considered the possibility.
Facing the prospect of her whole world changing like this....
She couldn’t bear it.
“It was just two periods.”
“Likely pregnancy,” the woman said.
“I did not ask,” Olive said, directing her ire at the poor woman sitting there looking white-faced and unsure of what to do. Olive had a feeling that she was about the same color. The pallor of being confronted with her potential pregnancy—a word she had not even wanted to think—with Gunnar in the room was... Far too much.
“Though I bet if I was you wouldn’t send me to prison,” she said, laughing weekly. It really was a terrible joke. Then, all of it was.
“Go and take the test. Prioritize the results,” he said to the nurse.
And Olive found herself obeying. All the while, she thought she would find a way to slip out the back. But there was no back. The bathroom was as beautiful and lush as the rest of the place, with pink wallpaper and a crushed velvet chaise lounge in the corner. “Great. A fainting couch. I needed one earlier.”
The little lab cups seemed utterly at odds with the rest of the place. Clinical, where the rest of it wasn’t. And it did not take long for her to gather a sample, and leave it in the little two-sided cabinet in the wall.
She sat down on the couch for a second, and then laid on it.
Her heart was pounding. What would she do? What would they do?
Right now, she had no idea what he would do, and that was the terrifying question in all of this.
Gunnar was furious with her. Absolutely mad with outrage. And he had every right to be, she supposed. She had found all these ways to try and justify her actions. Things that had made it all seem... Reasonable. Yes. She had found ways to make it feel reasonable. But it wasn’t. And she knew that.