“It’s not the same since you took him off the market,” Harry lamented, as he performed a Pap smear and pelvic exam. “The rest of us have to work a lot harder to get the women to notice us without him there.”

She stared at the ceiling and prayed for mercy as he prodded her in places no man had ever gone before. “Sorry to interfere in your conquests,” she said through gritted teeth. She was going to beat the living daylights out of Nick for this.

“He seems really happy, though. After his friend John was murdered, we were so worried about him, but then he started seeing you and things seemed better.”

“It’s been a tough month for him,” she managed to say. “Julian Sinclair was a close friend of his, too.”

“I know,” he said, probing deeper.

How was it possible to go deeper? First, she planned to punch Nick square in the face. Then she would kick him right where he lived. Next she would stab him in the heart with a rusty steak knife.

Harry finally finished prodding, took off his gloves and told her she could sit up. “Everything checks out well, Sam, so let’s talk lifestyle and diet. Are you getting enough sleep?”

She thought of the long hours she kept at work and the late nights she’d had recently with Nick. “Sometimes.”

He frowned. “Diet?”

“I try to eat healthy, but it’s hard sometimes with my job.”

“How do you manage the stress?”

“I focus on breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth.”

“Well, that’s one way to cope.” Running through a checklist on his clipboard, he asked a bunch of questions. “Caffeine intake?”

“Some,” she said tentatively. Her last doctor had freaked out about her diet cola addiction.

“What’s some?”

“A few diet sodas every day. No biggie.”

“How many is a few?”

“I don’t know. I don’t keep count.”

“Guesstimate—two, three, six, ten? What do you think?”

“Six maybe.”

His eyes widened. “Six cans or bottles?”

“Um, bottles usually.”

“You drink six twenty-ounce bottles of diet soda a day? Every day?”

Sam squirmed under the heat of his stare. This was worse than when he’d had his hands in her unmentionables. “I don’t always finish them.”

“Six twenty-ounce bottles is one hundred twenty ounces of soda. In other words, a gallon.”

“Wow, all this and you can multiply, too.”

“I’d say we’ve found our culprit. The acid in the soda is no doubt eating away at the lining of your stomach. If you don’t already have an ulcer, you’re probably well on your way to one.”

“I need the boost. I can’t function without it.”

“Sure you can. You’ve just convinced yourself you can’t. It’s all psychological.”

So now he was calling her crazy? Nick would get another punch for that.