BWWM Interracial Romance 8: Mutual Attraction by Elena Brown Page A

of reach.
    Having promised herself that she’d get it done before going home that night, Barbara picked up her desk phone and dialed her mother’s cell phone.
    “Hey baby,” said her mother when she answered. “How’s your day going?”
    “Terrible,” said Barbara. “It looks like I’m going to have to stay late again tonight. I just wanted to tell you not to worry about me, and to not wait up.”
    “Barbara, honey, you know I don’t like how much time you’re spending at work these days,” said her mother. “It’s just not health for you, and it’s especially bad for the baby. You need your rest, and you know it.”
    “I also need this job,” said Barbara, lowering her voice so that her coworkers wouldn’t overhear anything. “You know I need to get this done. My future at this company depends on it.”
    “I know,” said Barbara’s mother. “Your father and I worked hard to give you the kind of choices we didn’t have, and I don’t want to see you giving up your life just to work all the time.”
    “Mom, this isn’t the conversation I want to be having right now,” said Barbara. “I have to get back to work, but I’ll see you at breakfast tomorrow, okay?”
    “Okay, baby,” said her mother. “I love you.”
    “I love you too mom.”
    Barbara hung up the phone and sighed. If it wasn’t one thing it was another. Could nothing in her life just be simple?
     
    Doctor Neil Edwards pulled his lab coat back off his shoulders and hung it on the hook next to his office door. It had been a long morning of seeing patients and dealing with the inevitable emergencies that always crept into his schedule no matter how much space he tried to leave for them, and he hadn’t yet had a chance to sit down for even a moment after nearly six hours on shift. He was hungry, he was tired, and he still had a long day ahead of him.
    Neil settled into his high backed leather chair and checked his phone. He still hadn’t received a reply to any of his calls or texts to Barbara, and he worried that he’d actually screwed up this time. Their relationship had started out as such a carefree thing only eight months earlier, but there had been almost nothing but trouble in the days and weeks following Barbara’s discovery that she’d become pregnant from a drunken night of passionate sex at Neil’s place.
    He cursed the stupid condom that had broken, and he berated himself once again for not taking the whole situation more seriously. So many women had come and gone during his years in med school and then as he rose to his position at Saint Joseph’s hospital, and he hadn’t always been responsible as he could have been. Of course, the drinking didn’t really help with that, and it was one of the reasons he’d made a big effort to cut back on his excesses over the last few weeks.
    Of course, that only made him want to drink even more.
    Neil licked his dry lips and thought about the bottle he used to keep in his desk. He’d never considered himself an alcoholic since he’d never consumed a drop while on shift, and he’d never been so driven to drink that he’d been unable to go without for a few days, but the truth was that he tended to rely rather heavily on the numbing effect of a glass or three of whiskey at the end of a tough day. It wasn’t that he drank all the time, but that he’d never been able to stop at just one glass.
    He’d been drinking when he’d talked to Barbara the night before. Not so much as to leave him slurring or yelling inappropriately, but enough to mess up his filters and to cause him to say some things that he still wasn’t sure he should have given voice to. There was a big difference between having a feeling and telling it to someone you were involved with, and he was pretty sure he’d jumped over that line with both feet last night.
    Neil picked up his phone and pressed the button that dialed his assistant.
    “Hi Ashley,” he said. “Could I get a cup of coffee and the