After Maya had been turned into a vampire against her will, Gabriel, Yvette’s boss, had fallen hard for her. Yvette had her own eyes set on him at the time, and the fact that Maya had just swooped in and snatched him up within a week of meeting him had hurt.

But none of their earlier disagreements were evident now. Maya, who’d been a doctor before she was turned, had become a champion for her cause: to find a way for vampire females to become pregnant. But so far, all tests had resulted in a dead end; none of them indicated a reason for the infertility.

“Then I don’t get it. I always assumed that my eggs died when I was turned. But if my eggs are intact, why haven’t I gotten pregnant?” She’d had plenty of unprotected sex over the last decades, not just with vampire males but also with humans.

Maya motioned toward the chair in front of her desk, and Yvette sank into it. “You mean, apart from the fact that you haven’t been with a man since we met?”

That got Yvette’s hackles up, even though she had put herself on the shelf over the last few months. But that wasn’t Maya’s business. It was easy for Maya to talk: she had a man who loved her and was totally hot for her no matter what time of day or night. All she had were unsatisfying one-night stands, and she hadn’t even bothered with those in the last few months.

“That’s beside the point. I had lots of sex with virile men who, I know for a fact, have gotten other women pregnant. It’s just been a little slow lately.” Who was she kidding? She hadn’t been interested in anybody after Gabriel had bonded with Maya. Not that she was jealous or anything—the two were really suited for each other—but she’d avoided men, afraid to fall for the wrong guy again.

“Listen, Yvette, we’re at the very beginning of this. I don’t want you to lose heart. Just look at what we’ve already discovered: your uterus is built the same way as a human’s, which means the turning didn’t change that. That’s a good thing. Your fallopian tubes are clear and unobstructed, and your ovaries are stocked with viable eggs. The lab confirmed it.”

She tossed Maya a hopeful glance. “What happened with the donated sperm?”

“Good news actually.” Maya shuffled through her papers and pulled out one sheet. “Here’s the latest result. Bringing donated sperm in contact with your eggs resulted in a fertilized egg in the test tube. So there’s—”

“But my body won’t keep the egg. Is that it?” Just like the other miscarriages. Yvette pushed the memories away. She didn’t want to be reminded of those times. Nobody knew about her past. And she wasn’t going to dish about it now. If Maya knew about the miscarriages she’d had as a human, she would have never even tried to help her. She would have considered Yvette a lost case and stopped wasting her time on this futile undertaking, but Yvette couldn’t give up despite the obstacles.

Maya could never find out. But Yvette remembered everything: the pain and the disappointment—as well as her broken heart. She’d been married. Robert had wanted a family: her and kids, a dog and cat, a white picket fence surrounding their trim little yard…. What he’d gotten was a wife who couldn’t hold onto the life that was inside her. The first pregnancy had started well enough. He’d been ecstatic. He’d told everybody that she was expecting. Every day he’d showered her with flowers and other little trinkets. But one day, in the middle of her first trimester, she’d started bleeding. She’d miscarried. Robert had been disappointed, but he’d said they’d try again.

He’d been supportive then. Her husband had comforted her. Yvette had gotten pregnant again six months later. But it all had ended the same way. In her third month, she’d lost the baby. This time, her husband wasn’t as understanding. He’d accused her of deliberately jeopardizing the pregnancies.

Which was ludicrous. It hadn’t stopped him from leaving her, however. She wasn’t important enough to him. All he wanted was a child. And she couldn’t give him that, so he stopped loving her. She didn’t want that to happen again; she hadn’t let a man that close in a long time. With the next man, she wanted to know that she could give him everything he wanted. Then there would be no reason for him to leave her—and she didn’t give a rat’s ass about whether the man was human or vampire.

“Yvette?”

Yvette looked up and saw Maya’s concerned face. “We’ll have to be patient. You’re healthy, and there’s no apparent reason why you can’t get pregnant. I’ll just have to figure out what happens in a female vampire’s body during conception.”