Private Entrance (The Butterfly Trilogy) (19 page)

     That was a year ago and now she wore his engagement ring and was terrified she was carrying his child.

     Her laps finished, Ophelia pulled herself out of the pool and into the sparkling morning sunshine. It had been a good work-out and she must get back to her room, face the pregnancy test. She hadn't tested herself last night when she arrived at the resort because it was so late and she had been exhausted from the talk show and the long drive. And this morning she had left the kit unopened because she had wanted her morning workout first.

     Ophelia chided herself for putting it off. Procrastination was a weakness she despised. Yet here she was doing it. Time to face up to taking the test.

     As she towel-dried her short black hair, she noticed a couple of women on the lounges reading her book. She shook her head in amazement. No one, absolutely
no one
, believed her when she said she had not set out to write a popular diet book.

     Well, David believed her. But then, David was in love with her.

     Dr. Ophelia Kaplan, university professor of anthropology, had unwittingly caused a sensation three years prior when she published a book titled
Bread Kills.
A diatribe against the consumption of flour-based products, she
had gotten the idea while comparing the teeth of prehistoric people with those of the ancient Egyptians. Mummies showed that the Nile Valley dwellers suffered from shocking, almost epidemic, gum disease, tooth decay, dental abscesses. Along with circulatory diseases and other evidence that pointed to widespread diabetes.

     Ophelia had asked herself what could have caused such a drastic and radical change in health from pre-pharaonic times to pharaonic? There was only one answer: bread

     "Human physiology," she had stated in her thesis, "evolved over four million years, adapting to the environment around it. Our hominid ancestors scavenged for eggs, lizards, birds, roots, seeds and berries. Occasionally they killed larger game. But our digestive systems, our pancreases, our metabolisms evolved to suit the food we were taking in. And then, a mere ten thousand years ago, suddenly we were making bread, eating honey, drinking alcohol. These three poisons—refined flour, sugar and ethanol—were never meant to be ingested by humans. Ten thousand years has not been long enough for our digestive systems to adapt and evolve to handle these substances. This is why we are so overweight today, why we suffer myriad health problems and why Type II diabetes is on the rise. We are born with the digestive tracts of hunter-scavengers. Perhaps in four million years we will evolve a pancreas and fat-storage system that can handle such an overload of sugar—for that is what flour is—but until then we are poisoning ourselves."

     The book was originally small, academic, and not meant for popular consumption:
The Shift From Hunter-Gatherer Society to Agrarianism and Its Impact On the Pathology of Bronze Age Peoples.
The initial printing was intended only for college bookstores, but word of mouth had spread among students and then into the public sector because, to everyone's amazement, those who adopted the prehistoric diet found their excess pounds melting away.

     The University Press re-vamped the book, giving it a hip new cover and a new title derived from one of the chapters because it had consumer appeal. Ophelia's book was currently condemned by The Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine, the American Heart Association, the Surgeon General,
and the U.S. Department of Health because they said she wasn't a qualified dietician or medical doctor. Ophelia's response was she hadn't written a diet book. It was a
history
book. If people chose to use it as a template for eating habits, it was their responsibility.

     Finally she arrived at her room in the main building, the lavish rococo of the Marie Antoinette Suite, and her heart began to race.

     
The box in the bathroom. The pregnancy test kit.
It frightened her. The box, placed among her toiletries, stood ironically next to her birth control pills.

     
What if I am pregnant?

     Get a hold of yourself, Ophelia. You are strong, you are a fighter.

     She called room service and ordered lunch, then she showered and dressed and finally reached for the box.

     She looked at herself in the mirror. Her body was sinewy with not an ounce of fat. Sleek and strong. Put a club in her hand and she could be an Australopithecine foraging in Olduvai Gorge. She could fight saber-tooth tigers.

     When she saw how her hands shook as she opened the package, she mentally scolded herself. This was no time for irrational fears. Where was her scientific objectivity? Ophelia reminded herself that she was first and foremost a scientist and should take the rational approach to this, as she would to any laboratory test.

     The insert read:
This product can detect the pregnancy hormone as early as three days before you expect your period. The amount of pregnancy hormone increases as pregnancy progresses.

     Which meant there would be no false positive, not a whole month after her period was due.

     
Test any time of day.

     Now was as good a time as any.

     
Two pink lines pregnant; one pink line not pregnant.

     Was it too late to pray for one pink line?

     
Result in three minutes.

     The longest three minutes of her life.

     Ophelia unwrapped the test stick and read the instructions:
Hold test
stick in your urine stream for five seconds. Lay the test stick down on a flat surface with the clear side facing up. You will see a pink color moving across the clear top to indicate that the test is working. Read your result after three minutes.

     Ophelia had never been so nervous in her life. Not when she had read from the Torah before the congregation at her Bat Mitzvah, not when she had applied for post-grad studies under one of the most stellar anthropologists in the world, not when she had sat for her oral exams for her PhD. No courage in the world could hold up to two pink lines.

     She closed her eyes. The phone call from her sister five years ago: "
Ophelia, little Sophie has stopped crawling! And she won't reach out for anything. She was so active last week and now
—"

     Her mouth ran dry and she scolded herself again for being afraid. It's a simple chemical test, that's all. Just pretend you're in a lab, running a fluorine analysis of fossilized bones. Place the ion selective electrode on the specimen, make three replicate measurements, calculate fluoride content, enter the data on a spread sheet for statistical evaluation.

     Removing her panties, she straddled the toilet and started to pee. With a trembling hand, she lowered the test strip and—

     Dropped it.

     Right into the toilet.

     "No!" she shouted, jumping away from the porcelain bowl before she was finished. She stared in horror at the plastic strip floating on the surface of the water. She started to reach down but stopped when she thought of germs. The water might be clean but how clean was the bowl?

     Traipsing back into the living room, furious with herself—this would never would have happened in a laboratory! Had her hand really been shaking, she who was
always
in control, or was it an unconscious act of sabotage?—she picked up the Guest Services book and frantically flipped through it, wondering where she could find an emergency pregnancy test kit.

     A resort that specialized in romance and sex, that offered on the Room Service menu flavored body paints and candy sex toys, would they have pregnancy test kits? She found it: a drugstore for the convenience of the guests was located in a place called the Village.

W
HEN
C
OCO AWOKE, THE FIRST THING THAT CAME TO HER
mind was Kenny and how sexy he was in a hometown boyishly innocent way.

     And his electric touch.

     As she lay in the crisp, clean sheets, listening to birdsong on her patio, and relishing the soft fuzzy realm between sleep and wakefulness, she closed her eyes...

     
I open my door and Kenny is standing there. He is wearing his sexy tuxedo, but I notice he has no shirt on under the jacket. "I need your help," he says, blushing shyly. He has three shirts on hangers. "I don't know which to wear for my performance tonight."

     
I let him in and pick up the scent of his cologne as he passes. He has just showered. I wonder if his skin is still damp. His blond hair is spiky in the back where the comb missed. I reach up and rake those naughty little spikes down with my fingernails.

     
Kenny turns, surprise on his face, his cheeks flushed. "Which shirt?" he asks.

     
I pretend to be interested when all I care about is seeing what's under the tuxedo. "Try them on, that way I can tell."

     
He slips out of the jacket. He is slender and pale, not surfer-tanned as I had imagined. But the paleness excites me, it makes me think of imprisoned men in need of being set free.

     
When I see that the zipper of his trousers isn't done all the way up, but open just below his navel, my breath catches in my throat. He has a nice abdomen. It looks hard. I wonder how hard the rest of him is.

     
He puts the pale pink shirt on, with ruffles at the front. He doesn't button it, but lets pale chest show through as he says, "What do you think of this one?"

     
I have to make sure the shirt fits. I slide my hands under the starched fabric and around to the back until my fingers meet so that Kenny and I are chest to breast. I remember with a shock that I haven't finished dressing! I am only in bra and panties. No wonder he blushed when I opened the door.

     
"Feels like a good fit," I murmur and feel his breath minty and cool on my cheek. "I'm not sure about the pants, though. I think you could use a smaller size."

     
My hands slip down to his lower back, making him groan, and then farther still until I clasp his tight round ass.

     
Kenny's hands are on me now, tentatively, as if in scary uncharted territory. I gasp. He knows how to explore a woman's back, teasingly up to the bra hooks and down, making me think he is going to set my breasts free, and then not, turning my heat up.

     
I am about to insist he get on with it, but he steps back and says, "Maybe I should try on another shirt."

     
I allow him to slip out of the pink one but stop him from reaching for the blue. "The trousers," I say, "are wrong." I tug at the waistband and he says in embarrassment, "I'm not wearing shorts."

     
I know this. It's why I want the pants off.

     
"Wait," he says, backing away. "I came for another reason. I've decided to add an assistant to my act. Would you like the job?"

     
"What would I have to do?"

     
"Just look pretty and wear this." Now I see that, along with the shirts on hangers, he has brought a small bag.

     
"What is it?"

     
"A magician's assistant costume. If you can fit into it, you have the job."

     
He withdraws two tiny swatches of sequined material. Is he kidding? That costume would-n't fit a mouse. But there is challenge in his tone and I'll be darned if I will back down.

     
"Very well," I say, "but you have to close your eyes. No peeking." I know I can go into the bathroom to change, or just turn my back, but I'm putting him to a test. If he peeks, he's no gentleman. But I run into a snag. The hooks at the back of my bra won't cooperate. The drawback of having large breasts, it requires four hooks to defy gravity. With my long acrylic fingernails, I am helpless to undo the fasteners.

     
Kenny's eyes are still shut. I press against him and whisper, "Unhook my bra. But don't look. If you peek, I will have to punish you."

     
He fumbles around in back and gets the job done. I toss the lacy cups to the floor, my eyes on his eyes. He hasn't peeked so far, but the way his eyelids are fluttering, I can tell it's a struggle.

     
The costume is impossibly small. I remove my panties and step into the sequined thong, but can get it only halfway up my thighs. This costume was made for Twiggy!

     
I give up, and when I straighten, I catch Kenny with his eyes open. Now I shall have to punish him...

     "Whoa!" Coco said out loud.

     This was not a good sign. Time was passing and she had a man to find.

     After a cold shower and a hot breakfast, keeping Kenny and his electric touch—and gentle voice and sad story and sexy hands—as far from her thoughts as she could, Coco consulted the crystal. "Daisy, don't let me down," she said, sitting in the sunshine, hoping the desert ethers would open up the spirit world and give her a break. "Tell me something more about the man I am supposed to find here."