Free Zoe and the Tormented Tycoon by Kate Hewitt

Village—’
    Zoe leant against the side of the building and closed her eyes. Cold sweat still prickled on her forehead and her mouth tasted metallic. ‘Is there?’ she said dully. She could barely even make sense of Karen’s words.
    â€˜Yes, of course there is! You sound a bit funny.’ Karen sounded torn between impatience and concern. ‘Are you all right?’
    Zoe leant her head back against the brick wall. For an insane moment she wanted to confide just how not all right she was. No, I’m not all right. I’ve been rejected outright by two men—maybe even two of the most important men in my life—in the space of two weeks. I don’t know who I am or what I want to be, and I know I should have figured that out by now. I’m so scared.
    â€˜I’m fine.’ Karen wasn’t the kind of friend who wanted to hear about those fears. She didn’t have that kind of friend.
    â€˜So are you coming tonight?’
    Zoe opened her eyes. ‘Yes.’
    She went out to the club with Karen and a bunch of New York friends determined to forget Thomas Anderson and Max Monroe. Both men—and their almost identical looks of sneering indifference—haunted her, their cold words of denial and rejection replaying in her mind, echoing through her heart. Still, Zoe tried to make a good show of it, dancing and laughing and flirting even though she felt so brittle inside, ready to break. After only an hour the club’s pounding music made her head throb, and the cocktail she’d been drinking tasted sour. She left it virtually untouched on the bar and went in search of the loo.
    The harsh lights in the ladies’ put her own pale face into awful relief. She looked terrible, Zoe thought rather distantly as she waited in line for an open stall, her arms creeping around herself in a self-embrace. Two women inskimpy dresses and stiletto heels were putting on lipstick in front of the mirror.
    â€˜I had such a scare last week,’ one of them said, her eyes on her own reflection, and Zoe found herself listening, curious despite her own sense of lethargy.
    â€˜Oh?’ The other woman asked in a rather bored drawl.
    â€˜Yes.’ She smacked her lips together and slipped her lipstick into her bag. ‘My period was three days late, but thank God I wasn’t…’
    â€˜Pregnant?’ The friend filled in as she put her own lipstick away. ‘What a nightmare.’
    Zoe watched them both sashay out in their spiky heels, and she didn’t move until the woman behind her in the queue tapped her on the shoulder. ‘Are you in line or what?’
    â€˜Oh, sorry,’ Zoe mumbled. ‘No, I’m not.’ She half stumbled out of the bathroom, her mind buzzing.
    Such a scare…three days late…thank God I wasn’t…
    Pregnant.
    Pregnant. Pregnant. Pregnant.
    The word beat a restless tattoo in her brain. Even in her numb state she could do the math. Her period had been due—what? More than three days ago. Almost five. And she was annoyingly regular, as predictable as clockwork, but—
    Max had used a condom. It had just been the one time.
    She felt like a teenager, stupid and careless, demanding that this couldn’t happen to her, it didn’t work that way.
    She couldn’t be pregnant.
    She wasn’t, she assured herself. She was stressed, she was unhappy; those things made a difference.
    Still, she could hardly stay at the club without the question answered, and without even making her excuses to Karen or any of her friends, she left the pulsing music and flashing strobe lights for the rain-slicked street. Shehailed a cab and headed uptown, stopping only at a twenty-four-hour chemist’s to pick up the necessary item.
    A pregnancy test.
    Twenty minutes later, back in the apartment, she stared at two pink lines, and then the leaflet explaining the results. She stared at the lines one more time, and then read the