Reborn to Dodge the Bad Marriage novel Chapter 42

Chapter 42 Page Three, Line Four

Ovia bit down on her lip and looked to Julian for help.

He didn’t so much as glance at her. He was looking down at Nora, and when he saw the clip in her hair had slipped, he reached up and set it straight.

He did it without thinking. They’d been married since that morning, and the gesture looked like twenty years of it.

Nora let the silence sit. “Future great healer, don’t tell me you can’t read it. If you can’t, say so. Staring at my husband won’t help you. You still don’t get to see his abs, and even if you did, you wouldn’t get to touch them.”

The sheer nerve of it pulled a laugh out of Julian. “Nora.”

He didn’t mind it in the slightest.

That title had put Olivia up on a pedestal she couldn’t climb down from.

If she couldn’t read a blood panel, she had no business calling herself the heir to a medical dynasty.

If she read it out, it went badly for her and worse for her grandmother.

She weighed the two and decided her own reputation mattered more.

“It’s Julian’s blood work. It shows larkspur and ghostbloom pollen in his system.”

Nora waited. “And?”

Olivia thought she’d missed something and read it through again. She hadn’t. “That’s all of it.”

“You’re sure?” Nora said.

Nora sounded certain enough that Olivia almost doubted herself, but the page hadn’t changed. “I’m sure. That’s all.”

Nora smiled. “You told this room the appetite medicine I gave him had blackroot in it. So where did the blackroot go?”

Something went out of Olivia’s face.

“Oh.” Nora drew the word out, and the mockery in it was total. “So the future great healer isn’t very good at her job after all, and she mistook an appetite remedy for a poison.

“And then your grandmother, to make your diagnosis come true, had somebody dose him with larkspur, which presents exactly like blackroot, and pinned it on me?”

Olivia shouted. “That is not what happened!”

Nora laughed lightly. “That isn’t all of it either. Your grandmother worked in the ghostbloom pollen so you’d end up in bed with my husband, didn’t she?”

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Chapter 42 Page Three, Line Four

That did it. Olivia went red and screamed at her. “Nora, I have never done a thing to you. Watch your filthy mouth!”

Noa’s smile went cold. “Read me page three, line four.”

Olivia turned to page three and ran her finger down to the fourth line. Every trace of color left her face, and! her fingertip shook.

Nora tipped her head. “What now? Suddenly out of your depth again?”

Olivia looked up at her and thought, for the first time, that Nora had been right. She should have walked out with her grandmother.

Then she wouldn’t be standing here taking this.

She looked at Julian, then at Constance, then at Sienna, who normally trailed her everywhere.

Not one of them said a word for her.

Olivia’s eyes went red, and under Nora’s stare she ground it out. “It’s… a spike in hormones.” She’d put it as delicately as she knew how.

Nora wasn’t letting her off. “No need to be delicate, and skip the technical term. Nobody here is a doctor. Say it in plain English.”

Nora pushed until something in Olivia gave, and Olivia screamed it out. “It means a man’s sex drive goes through the roof.

“Larkspur and ghostbloom pollen together, once the poison is cleared, leave him desperate for it!

“Nora! Have you humiliated me enough?”

She was in tears by the end of it. She turned and ran, and from the way her arm came up to her face, she was still crying on the way out.

Nora had no mercy in her and raised her voice to twist the knife. “Miss Blithe, you’re an educated woman from a great medical family. Don’t go throwing yourself at a married man. Next time you’ll get a lot worse

than this.”

That made her run faster, and she missed a step and went down flat on her face.

Sienna shot Nora a poisonous look and went after her. “Olivia, wait for me!”

Nobody had ever made Olivia Blithe cry and run before, because nobody was willing to cross the Blithes.

The rest of the room traded looks.

Tessa came over to Nora. “Nora, sweetheart, do you know medicine? Did you clear the poison yourself? Does that mean he isn’t going to die?”

Marlene smiled. “Well, Julian certainly married well. First Olivia, now Nora. Next time a rumor goes around that he’s been poisoned and he’s on his way out, none of us will have to worry at all.”

On the surface, both of them were concerned about Julian and full of praise for Nora. Underneath, they

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Chapter 42 Page Three, Line Four

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