Not that there could be an excuse for that.

But strangely, she wasn’t sorry she was pregnant. In fact, that was what ameliorated this mess, the one thing she was looking forward to. That…and, to her mortification, being with Rodrigo.

Which was exactly why she couldn’t accept his carte blanche proposal.

“Thank you for the kind offer, Rodrigo-”

He cut her off. “It’s neither kind nor an offer. It’s imperative and it’s a decision.” Now that was a premium slice of unadulterated autocracy.

She sent up a fervent thank-you for the boost to her seconds-ago-nonexistent resistance. “Imperative or imperious? Decision or dictate?”

“Great language recall and usage. And take your pick.”

“I think it’s clear I already did. And whatever you choose to call your offer, I can’t accept it.”

“You mean you won’t.”

“Fine. If you insist on dissecting my refusal. I won’t.”

“It seems you have forgotten all about me, Cybele. If you remembered even the most basic things, you’d know that when I make a decision, saying no to me is not an option.”

Cybele stared at him. Life was grossly, horribly unfair. How did one being end up endowed with all that?

And she’d thought he had it all before she’d seen him crook his lips in that I-click-my-fingers-and-all-sentient-beings-obey quasi smile.

Now there was one thought left in her mind. An urge. To get as far away from him as possible. Against all logic. And desire.

Her lips twisted, too. “I didn’t get that memo. Or I ’forgot’ I did. So I can say no to you. Consider it a one-off anomaly.”

That tiger-like smirk deepened. “You can say what you want. I’m your surgeon and what I say goes.”

The way he’d said your surgeon. Everything clamored inside her, wishing he was her anything-and-everything, for real.

She shook her head to disperse the idiotic yearnings. “I’ll sign any waiver you need me to. I’m taking full responsibility.”

“I’m the one taking full responsibility for you. If you do remember being a surgeon, you know that my being yours makes me second only to God in this situation. You have no say in God’s will, do you?”

“You’re taking the God complex too literally, aren’t you?”

“My status in your case is an uncontestable fact. You’re in my care and will remain there until I’m satisfied you no longer need it. The one choice I leave up to you is whether I follow you up in my home as my guest, or in my hospital as my patient.”

Cybele looked away from his hypnotic gaze, his logic. But there was no escaping either. It had been desperation, wanting to get away from him. She wasn’t in a condition to be without medical supervision. And who best to follow her up but her own surgeon? The surgeon who happened to be the best there was?

She knew he was. He was beyond the best. A genius. With billions and named-after-him revolutionary procedures and equipment to prove it.

But even had she been fit, she wouldn’t have wanted to be discharged. For where could she go but home? A home she recalled with nothing but dreariness?

And she didn’t want to be with anyone else. Certainly not with her mother and family. She remembered them as if they were someone else’s unwanted acquaintances. Disappointing and distant. Their own actions reinforced that impression. The sum total of their concern over her accident and Mel’s death had been a couple of phone calls. When told she was fine, didn’t need anything, it seemed they’d considered it an excuse to stop worrying-if they had been worried-dismiss her and return to their real interests. She didn’t remember specifics from her life with them, but this felt like the final straw in a string of lifelong letdowns.

She turned her face to him. He was watching her as if he’d been manipulating her thoughts, steering her toward the decision he wanted her to make. She wouldn’t put mental powers beyond him. What was one more covert power among the glaringly obvious ones?

She nodded her capitulation.

He tilted his awesome head at her. “You concede your need for my supervision?” He wanted a concession in words? Good luck with that. She nodded again. “And which will it be? Guest or patient?”

He wanted her to pick, now? She’d hoped to let things float for a couple of days, until she factored in the implications of being either, the best course of action…

Just great. A scrambled memory surely hadn’t touched her self-deception ability. Seemed she had that in spades.

She knew what the best course of action was. She should say patient. Should stay in the hospital where the insanities he provoked in her would be curbed, where she wouldn’t be able to act on them. She would say patient.

Then she opened her mouth. “As if you don’t already know.”

She barely held back a curse, almost took the sullen words back.

She didn’t. She was mesmerized by his watchfulness, by seeing it evaporate in a flare of…something. Triumph?

She had no idea. It was exhausting enough trying to read her own thoughts and reactions. She wasn’t up to fathoming his. She only hoped he’d say something superior and smirking. It might trip a fuse that would make her retreat from the abyss of stupidity and self-destructiveness, do what sense and survival were yelling for her to do. Remain here, remain a patient to him, nothing more.

“It’ll be an honor to have you as my guest, Cybele.” Distress brimmed as the intensity in his eyes drained, leaving them as gentle as his voice. It was almost spilling over when that arrogance she’d prayed for coated his face. “It’s a good thing you didn’t say ‘patient,’ though. I would have overruled you again.”

She bristled. “Now look here-”

He smoothly cut across her offense. “I would have, because I built this center to be a teaching hospital, and if you stay, there is no way I can fairly stop the doctors and students from having constant access to you, to study your intriguing neurological condition.”

Seemed not only did no one say no to him, no one ever won an argument with him, either. He’d given her the one reason that would send her rocketing out of this hospital like a cartoon character with a thick trail of white exhaust clouds in her wake.

No way would she be poked and prodded by med students and doctors-in-training. In the life that felt like a half-remembered documentary of someone else’s, she’d been both, then the boss of a bunch of the latter. She knew how nothing-starting with patients’ comfort, privacy, even basic human rights-stood in the way of acquiring their coveted-above-all experience.

She sighed. “You always get what you want, don’t you?”

“No. Not always.”

The tormented look that seized his face arrested her in midbreath. Was this about…her? Was she something he wanted and couldn’t get?

No. She just knew what she felt for him had always been only on her side. On his, there’d been nothing inappropriate. He’d never given her reason to believe the feelings were mutual.

This…despondency was probably about failing to save Mel. That had to be the one thing he’d wanted most. And he hadn’t gotten it.

She swallowed the ground glass that seemed to fill her throat. “I-I think I’ll take a nap now.”

He inhaled, nodded. “Yes, you do that.”

He started to turn away, stopped, his eyes focusing far in the distance. He seemed to be thinking terrible things.

A heart-thudding moment later, without looking back again, he muttered, “Mel’s funeral is this afternoon.” She gasped. She’d somehow never thought of that part. He looked back at her then, face gripped with urgency, eyes storming with entreaty. “You should know.”

She gave a difficult nod. “Thanks for telling me.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m not sure I should have.”

“Why? You don’t think I can handle it?”

“You seem to be handling everything so well, I’m wondering if this isn’t the calm before the storm.”

“You think I’ll collapse into a jibbering mess somewhere down the road?”

“You’ve been through so much. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I can’t predict the future. But I’m as stable as can be now. I-I want to go. I have to.”

“You don’t have to do anything, Cybele. Mel wouldn’t have wanted you to go through the added trauma.”

So Mel had cared for her? Wanted the best for her?

She inhaled, shook her head. “I’m coming. You’re not going to play the not-neurologically-stable-enough card, are you?”

His eyes almost drilled a crater of conflicted emotions between her own. “You should be okay. If you do everything I say.”

“And what is that?”

“Rest now. Attend the funeral in a wheelchair. And leave when I say. No arguments.”

She hadn’t the energy to do more than close her eyelids in consent. He hesitated, then walked back to her, took her elbow, guided her back to the bed. She sagged down on it.

He, too, dropped down, to his haunches. Heartbeats shook her frame as he took one numb foot after the other, slid off slippers that felt as if they were made of hot iron. He rose, touched her shoulder, didn’t need to apply force. She collapsed like water in a fountain with its pressure lost. He scooped up her legs, swung them over the bed, swept the cotton cover over her, stood back and murmured, “Rest.”

Without another look, he turned and crossed the room as if he’d been hit with a fast-forward button.

The moment the door clicked shut, shudders overtook her.

Rest? He really thought she could? After what he’d just done? Before she had to attend her dead husband’s funeral?

She ached. For him, because of him, because she breathed, with guilt, with lack of guilt.

She could only hope that the funeral, the closure ritual, might open up the locked, pitch-black cells in her mind.