“I WANT TO KNOW WHETHER I’M PREGNANT”
Doctor Nora Caine looked at the lovely blond girl before her. The girl sat on the edge of the cracked- leather table, unbuttoning her sweater.
“If you’ll just unfasten your brassiere, please.” The girl smiled for the first time, a small pixie grin. “I can’t. I’m not wearing one.”
Under the sweater was only a lacy slip. She slipped it down, exposing small breasts, very firm and taut. Nora touched them with an examining hand and the girl winced.
“Tender?” Sensitivity around the breasts was often the earliest sign of pregnancy.
“No, they’ve always been-ticklish.” Jill giggled.
The soft, secretive giggle, the suggested intimacy of that word ticklish, flicked Nora on a raw nerve, and it was a moment before she could recapture the impersonal professional look.

“I’M NOT THAT SORT OF FREAK!”
Dr. Nora Caine’s voice rose in anguish as she faced Jill across the room, shaken by the fervor and passion of the other girl’s kiss.
Precise and scientific on the outside, Nora was still a woman – passionate and longing to love and be loved.
She thought of Kit, her husband, a helpless cripple in a hospital bed, and felt a pang of remorse and pain. Yet, here was Jill, a tempting child-woman whose elfin beauty and sexuality were luring
Nora away from her husband.

And to complicate things further, there was Mack – big, strong, virile Mack who was Nora’s stepbrother and Jill’s lover.
These four people caught in their own private purgatory, struggled against overwhelming odds in their frenzied search for emotional happiness. Things came to an awful climax now as Jill told Nora in a passionate outburst of feeling:
“THE IDEA OF SLEEPING WITH A MAN MAKES ME SICK!”

Author’s Profile
Miriam Gardner was born in Albany, New York, and has been, at various times, a file clerk, music teacher, mimeo- graph operator and carnival performer. Her hobbies are reading science fiction novels, going to the opera and
listening to folk music.
She is the author of a number of other books as well as more than 30 magazine stories and articles, and has been writing professionally for the past nine years.