Clay by Jennifer Blake

check with your office first. It seemed that you or Nurse Fenton might do a better job of explaining the process and its benefits.”
    “Really, Janna.” The surgeon’s voice was pained.
    “I’m sorry if you’ve made the trip for nothing. AsI said, I only expected to talk about it with Nurse Fenton.”
    “She had other obligations,” he said, his tone distracted. “I decided to combine this visit with a few hours of scouting the lake for the bass tournament this weekend. At least, I suppose that will be held in spite of yesterday’s unpleasantness?”
    “Unpleasantness?”
    “Some kind of drowning accident. It was on the news.” Dr. Gower waved a narrow hand in a dismissive gesture. “But we seem to have a more important problem here. You have a man inside with you. Who is he, a boyfriend or live-in lover?”
    The question was so unexpected that she was thrown off balance. “What?”
    “I heard a male voice as I approached the house, so naturally I investigated. The view through the curtain wasn’t the best, but the gentleman appeared quite comfortably installed in your bed.”
    Janna stared at Lainey’s doctor. Meticulous in his speech and manners, he always appeared rigorously clean, an excellent quality in his profession. She’d never seen him anything less than formally dressed, and often wondered if he changed to casual wear or got dirty while fishing. He’d been agreeable to Janna in a distant fashion on Lainey’s initial visits, but his primary attention had been for her daughter. Certainly he’d shown little personal curiosity before tonight. Her amazement was in her voice as she said, “You were spying on me.”
    “Not at all,” Gower answered, shifting his gazeaway from her. “It was a simple precaution. I needed to know if you were alone. Since you weren’t, I was forced to wait for a chance to speak to you, not the best use of my time.”
    “I’m sorry, but I didn’t realize…”
    “That isn’t the point. May I remind you, my dear, that the instructions you were given to isolate your daughter, abandon contact with family and friends and restrict your movements, were designed to protect us all.”
    “I know that.”
    “Sexual activity is important to human health. No one understands this better than I do,” he went on with scarcely a pause. “Still, you must control your libido under the present circumstances. I’m afraid that your private life will have to wait.”
    “The circumstances have nothing to do with my private life!” Janna declared in rising anger. In fact, she had no private life as this man understood it.
    “No, but who you permit to know about our association may be extremely important, since it could jeopardize everything. I thought I had impressed upon you the need to be discreet.”
    To reassure him on that point would be easy. All she had to do was open her mouth and tell him that the man inside was the prospective relative donor, and that he was helpless to prevent the removal of a kidney. She couldn’t do it. Something inside her, some reaction to the doctor’s scolding tone, some simple instinct or internal prohibition, prevented the words from forming. Moreover, she wasn’t so sureClay was that defenseless. His response was bound to be violent, in spite of his bonds, if Dr. Gower or anyone else came at him with a sedative-filled syringe. It would require at least two people to subdue him for transport to the medical center, and possibly more. Why that hadn’t occurred to her before she didn’t know, since it was so obvious. She hated the idea of witnessing it, much less being a part of it.
    Another factor was the doctor’s obvious reluctance to accept a kidney from a source other than the one used by the center. What that meant was unclear. She didn’t know—and wasn’t sure she wanted to know—the exact black market conditions that provided the kidneys he implanted. She suspected that they were obtained from accident victims who had never