Читать книгу Their Newborn Gift - Nikki Logan - Страница 10

THE conception of their second child was a far cry from their first. Even Reilly appreciated the irony.

Three weeks of blood tests, injections, headaches and hormones, until Lea’s body artificially ripened to bursting point, followed by scans every three days until her eggs were perfect for harvesting. Then the city specialist who had been flown in accessed Reilly’s tiny, frozen sample and injected the healthi-est thaw survivor directly into one of Lea’s eggs.

Shame had been a near-permanent resident in Reilly’s throat, knowing there’d been barely any sperm left, the rest biologically massacred by his over-zealous immune system.

Now, Lea stared rigidly at the beige ceiling and did her best to ignore him and the six people in the room all fussing around the business end of her body where her legs were braced in stirrups and her hospital gown was tented over her bent knees. As if she needed the privacy from herself.

Reilly’s gut tightened and his temperature raised. He hadn’t realised how humiliating this would be for her when he’d insisted on being present for the implantation. Or that every muscle in her body would tremble uncontrollably. Empathy washed through him.

They’d tried to convince him it was nothing they hadn’t all seen before, but the excited buzz and the number of personnel present seemed to indicate an ICSI implantation was something several of them had very definitely not seen before in their remote hospital posting. He could see the bright lights, the graceless position, the room full of strangers, were all starting to get to her. Even with sedation slowly kicking in.

His lips tightened. Could they make this any more uncomfortable for her?

Molly might not have been conceived in love, but at least it had been natural, the joining of two people who had connected for a preciously short time. In a bed. With sweat. This man-made artifice was so foreign.

But entirely appropriate under the circumstances.

Lea sighed, just when he might have himself. He glanced back at her eyes and saw they were getting more glazed as the sedation continued to take effect.

‘Lift your hips slightly, Lea? Good girl, thank you,’ the specialist requested from down near her feet. She flinched at something being done down there. Three pairs of eyes glanced up at her over blue hospital-masks, then at the clock on the wall. Was she taking too long to relax?

‘Why are all the blue people talking so loudly?’

At least he thought that was what she said. Her speech reminded him of the lost tourist they had found out on the far corners of Minamurra one time, half-frozen after a night in dry, sub-zero Kimberley temperatures.

Lea started to fight the sedation and he took her hands to stop her waving them about. She forced her head towards him, as though he were a life buoy in a tossing sea, and stared at him with vulnerable, anxious eyes. A pang bit deep in his chest. ‘You’re okay, Lea.’

‘Reilly?’ Her frown doubled even as her hand-hold grew tighter.

He turned to the nearest doctor. ‘Should she be in this much distress?’

The doctor rested his hand on her calf kindly. ‘She’s not really responding to the sedation as we would have hoped.’

Lea Curran doing something completely contrary to the norm? No surprises there.

‘We’ve ceased the feed now. It’ll ease off shortly.’ The doctor’s attention went back under the sheet as yet another man in blue bustled in the door and dived under the screening covers at the foot of the bed.

‘Jeez, buy a girl a drink first,’ Lea said, over-loudly, then started to giggle. Not in a good way.

Reilly stood. ‘Okay—essential personnel, stay. Everyone else, out.’ He was counting on everyone in the room assuming he was the loving husband, that he had a right to issue orders on Lea’s behalf. Apparently they did. Half the room left with baleful glares, only the chief doctor and two nursing atten-dants staying. Both of them kept a respectful distance.

At last.

Lea didn’t look at him but he was sure he heard her voice thank him.

The tiny whisper made him inexplicably tight-chested. If he hadn’t bullied his way in here, she would have been doing this completely alone. Where the blazes were her sisters? Had she even told them this was happening? What kind of a crazy family did she come from, anyway? Just when he thought families didn’t come worse than his own.

He shook his head. Neither the Currans or the Martins could be stranger than the family he and Lea were in the midst of making—one child conceived by accident, a second through negotiation, despite him having vowed all his life never to rep-licate the mistakes of his past.

The child they were making today might grow up mother-less, but there were worse things. Like growing up with a mother who created a child for what it could give her, rather than to bring a life into the world for its own sake.

A mother like his own.

Lea mumbled incoherently and Reilly forced his gaze back to her. Motives aside, this woman had brought him the miracle of fatherhood, not once, but twice. Long after he’d given up all hope of ever experiencing it. For that, she deserved his toler-ance, if not his friendship. He might not like her values very much, but Lea Curran had unintentionally given him the biggest gift of his life. Two children.

The doctor caught his eye and nodded. Reilly leaned in close to Lea’s ear and tightened his hand on hers. ‘They’re going to start now. Are you ready?’

Her glazed eyes met his and she nodded, just before her lashes slipped down to rest on her cheeks.

‘Wake up, Lea, you’ll want to see this.’

He risked a gentle stroke on her flushed cheek, just below where her lashes lay like freshly cut grass. She curled her face into his fingers and he gently ran his knuckles across her perfect skin, memory surging back. God help him if she remembered this later. ‘Open your eyes, Lea. Look at our baby.’

The word ‘baby’ brought her focus hurtling back, as though she’d suddenly realised what was happening. That she was being implanted, right now, and that the last man in the world she would want watching was here, holding her hand.

He let his hand drop with the pretence of taking her chin and turning her face towards the large-screen monitor. Every eye in the room was fixed on that screen, and the blurry shapes on it suddenly started to make sense to both of them.

Lea’s eyes widened as far as his. ‘That’s my uterus.’

He couldn’t help the heat that leached up his throat. There was something so intensely personal about looking at a woman’s womb. Fortunately, all eyes were on the screen, where a long, thin curette delivered the sole viable embryo into its thick, warm bosom of flesh.

‘Oh, my God.’ Lea said it. Or maybe he had. Her fingers found their way to his again.

A tiny dark mass trembled on the end of the glass straw for two heartbeats and then broke free, like an astronaut launch-ing weightlessly into space, suspended in the jelly-like delivery medium. Reilly’s eye locked onto that dark mass as the curette withdrew. His throat tightened up.

The specialist straightened. ‘All finished. Well done, Lea.’

From the corner of his eye he saw Lea glance up at him, and watched him staring at the tiny speck on-screen. ‘It’s amazing,’ he mumbled, and then his eyes dropped to hers and rested there a moment. This was as close as he’d been to her for five years. Since he’d warmed her naked body with his own. His heart kicked up a beat or two.

Her hand still held his in a death grip. She opened her mouth to say something.

‘How do you feel, Lea?’ The specialist appeared behind him and peered at her. Reilly slipped his hand free and moved back out of the way, letting the specialist in to question his patient. He saw her try to follow him with her eyes but he moved faster than her groggy head would allow.

Outside Theatre, he sank into the nearest empty seat, as buoyant as if he’d actually seen his child being born. He held a strange new glow close to his heart. This baby would know the sweet touch of its father’s unconditional love, not grow up as an accessory to its sister. He would raise it to love the country as much as he did, and eventually to take over Minamurra.

He blew out a controlled breath and wondered what his parents would say when they discovered their barren son was the father of not one but two children. Why did he feel like not telling them at all? He shook his head against the crazy urge to hand out cigars. Cigars were for celebrations, and this was hardly an event he’d want anyone congratulating him on.

He’d just created a life to save a life.

Built a baby.

It was a fraud.

And he knew all too much about that. In Reilly’s case, his own conception had been a double fraud. His mother had got pregnant back in the last weeks of the crazy seventies when her career as half of the country-western act Martin and Lynnd was looking shaky. The public scandal of her pregnancy had assured her place in the spotlight, and the fact that the father was her long-time singing partner had ensured a fast marriage and secure future.

Adele Lynnd was nothing if not goal-oriented.

Reilly had come along just as the wedding gifts had started to run out of warranty and the publicity had dropped off. A series of family spreads in popular magazines had ensured public attention peaked again. There was only one photograph of him as a child—the only one he still had, from an avenue other than a media photographer. Lucky he had been such a good-looking baby. Then again, as the articles said, how could he not be with such a gloriously handsome mother?

Reilly frowned. For most of his childhood, he had felt the sting of being an inconvenience, an irritation, but on those rare occasions when something he’d done had delighted his mother, he’d been gifted the full brilliance of her attention and her spectacular smile. It had worked on a young Reilly every bit as well as it had worked on the people of Australia.

No wonder he’d grown to be such an over-achiever.

It had been tough enough to explain walking away from the circuit at the top of his game to the reigning monarchs of country music. But telling them their trophy child wouldn’t be making any trophy grandchildren any time soon…

Not pretty.

Their reaction had reinforced his belief that he’d lost the one virtue he could have added to this stinking planet. The one thing that set him apart from every other ringer out there scrabbling for the handful of women prepared to live in the bush. The only thing that had made him a prospect for netting a good outback woman to grow old with: his top-grade, celebrity-issue, prize-winning Martin DNA.

If he’d been a stallion, they would have shot him. On the worst days, he wished they had.

‘Mr Martin?’ A passing nurse dropped her mask and gave him a pretty, sexy smile. He recognised the speculative sparkle of someone who was interested, and he frowned. For all she knew, the love of his life was next door being impregnated while she was out here flirting with him. The disrespect rankled.

Even though it was only Lea.

The smile dropped away as she read his disapproval. ‘Ms Curran is asking for you. She’s nearly ready to go.’

Reilly straightened immediately. Asking for him? He struggled to imagine it. Then again, she’d clung to his hand earlier like it was the only thing keeping her here on Earth. Even through the distraction of what he’d watched happening, he’d been conscious that, the last time she’d gripped his entwined fingers like that, they’d been pressing into a motel mattress.

He tried not to go back there any more, not to cloud what should be a business arrangement, regardless of how he’d held those memories in the past.

Now she was asking for him. He hurried ahead of the nurse back into the room, inexplicably moved by the expectant hope in Lea’s rapidly clearing gaze.

‘Reilly.’ She peered at him bright-eyed as he sank down next to her. ‘How’s Molly?’

Molly. Why had he expected different? He tried not to be jealous of a sick four-year-old child simply because her mother’s world began and ended with her. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to be? Wasn’t that how love worked in normal families? But it didn’t make him feel any less like he was only valued—once again—for what he could provide, rather than who he was.

Was his life destined to repeat itself for ever?

Lea didn’t need the pregnancy test to tell her Reilly’s embryo had taken, but she’d done it anyway. She couldn’t wait the extra few days before her results come back from the city; it had been hard enough to wait the obligatory two weeks.

She pressed her warm cheek to the cool tile of the bathroom wall and groaned. She’d forgotten this part—the soul-destroy-ing nausea. It had started almost immediately when Molly had been conceived too. It was how she’d finally realised she was harbouring a tiny life. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

She slid her trembling hand around to her warm belly as if the tiny being in there could turn off the sickness at will. At least she got to do this privately, for two more weeks anyway, until Reilly’s first access visit. Lord knew there was precious little about this pregnancy she would experience by herself. Between her sisters’ over-enthusiastic involvement, the doctors’ very clinical interest and Reilly’s presumptions, there were barely any secrets left.

Her satellite phone rang. She glanced at it with suspicion.

Surely Anna wouldn’t ring back so soon, not after Lea had practically hung up on her to go and lose her breakfast? She frowned. Maybe Anna had set Sapphie onto her. It wouldn’t be the first time her two sisters had teamed up like cattle dogs to muster her in one particular direction: theirs. They wanted to know whether there was going to be a new Curran in the family.

Lea sagged against the wall. There wouldn’t be, even if she was pregnant. But she hadn’t told them that. Some small part of her was counting on the fact that she had nine months to think of a solution.

The phone rang on. She ignored it. Even her gorgeous half-sister was beyond her today. Sapphie deliriously in love was twice as exhausting as Sapphie on a regular day. There was only so much sunshine and flowers a girl could take when her body was rejecting its own stomach-lining.

And if it was someone else on the phone? Ha. Who else would it be? Someone from Parker Ridge? She could count on one hand the number of people who’d rung her in nearly six years at Yurraji.

‘Mad horse woman.’ ‘City conservationist.’ ‘Bloody nuisance.’ She’d been called it all. Now they could add ‘single mother of two’ to the list of her apparent social-crimes. She didn’t care what people two hours away said about her. The only thing she cared about was Molly and twenty precious millilitres of stem cells.

She let the phone ring out. It rang again almost immediately.

Oh, for crying out loud! She jagged the phone up with the opposite hand to the one holding the home-test stick and barked a curt greeting. ‘What?’

‘Are we pregnant?’

Reilly was intimidating even without being in the room. Something about the way his voice rumbled across the phone line started a tremor spidering down her back. It had been like that when he’d first spoken to her in that pub. When he’d slid all six-foot-plus of himself into the shabby seat opposite her and refreshed the Chardonnay she’d been nursing all afternoon.

He’d spoken exactly as he looked: sexy as anything.

In her grief it had been easy to talk herself into it. Who would it hurt if she connected with someone just that once? Someone tall. Broad. Solid.

Someone alive.

Life, as it had turned out, was dangerously short. As her father had learned.

She stared at the tiny white stick in her hand. ‘We’ll know in ninety seconds.’

‘Do we just sit here in silence?’ He sounded testy across three hundred kilometres.

Despite her churning stomach, Lea smiled. So, Mr. Smooth was capable of getting ruffled. Good to know. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

‘What if you’re not pregnant?’

‘They’ve held a tiny fraction of your sample over. We try again.’

Reilly’s convoluted contract allowed for that. The legal documents were necessary, and not unexpected, but were still a slap in the face, a reminder that this was pure business to him. But after a second attempt there would be no sample left. No contract. No Molly. Lea straightened. ‘But there’s no reason it won’t take. It was six days old, and quite robust by embryo standards, apparently.’

She fought to keep the hint of pride out of her voice. She had no business feeling proud about this baby. In fact, she’d do better not to think of it as a baby at all, knowing she had to hand it over to Reilly. It was an umbilical cord, that was all.

Its job was to attach to her.

If she grew attached to it she’d never be able to fulfil the terms of Reilly’s agreement.

‘We haven’t yet locked down the timeline for my visits.’

Lea rubbed her temples. No, they hadn’t. She wasn’t sure she wanted him visiting Yurraji every four weeks. But it could have been much worse. ‘Will you come to us each month?’

‘Unless Molly would like to break it up a bit—see Minamurra occasionally?’

‘We’ll see.’ A dull thud started up behind her left eye. She’d grown so used to only worrying about the needs of her daughter and herself. Driving out to Reilly’s property would be doable, except in the final few weeks of her pregnancy.

Assuming she got pregnant at all from the implantation. Her eye went back to the stick. Nothing yet.

‘How is Molly?’

‘Molly’s…’ Not having the best week. She’d spent a lot of time in bed this week, pale and unhappy. It only shored up Lea’s resolve to get this new baby safely born. But there was no need to share her worry. ‘Sleepyhead is still in bed.’

‘Does she know I’m coming next week?’

‘End of next week.’ And not a moment sooner, thank you very much. ‘She does. She asks after you all the time.’ Unpalatable, but true.

Reilly considered that in silence. ‘Thank you for telling me.’

‘You thought I wouldn’t?’

‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’

Because I’m such a liar and a cheat. Lea knew she deserved some of Reilly’s anger, but not all of it. He’d been a willing par-ticipant that day five years ago. She’d been hypnotised by the local celebrity and district hottie with eyes straight out of a cologne advertisement.

What was his excuse?

‘I have no interest in robbing Molly of her father,’ she whispered.

Now. She almost heard him thinking it down the phone. ‘You told her I’m her father?’

‘No. Not while she’s so little. But I told her you were going to be the new baby’s father and you might like to be her daddy too.’ She cringed at how intimate that sounded.

‘A daddy that doesn’t live with you?’

‘Molly and I have been alone for so long, she doesn’t know any different. It’s going to be years yet before other people start making her doubt herself.’

A raven cawed outside Lea’s window. Reilly’s voice dropped a note. ‘Is that experience talking?’

She was not going to discuss her father with him. How she’d wished for most of her life to be free of Bryce Curran and his dodgy values. Fate had handed her the most tangible kind of freedom five years ago and she’d fallen entirely to pieces. She’d staggered to her car amid the suddenly booming silence at Yurraji and started driving in a daze. She hadn’t stopped until she’d found a town filled with strangers and rodeo competitors.

She’d left at dawn, just as bemused. And pregnant, as it had turned out. Her eyes dropped now to the hand clutching the damp stick and she felt the room rush around her like a whirl-pool. She sucked in a deep breath. And another.

‘Lea?’

She glanced across the living room to where Molly’s bedroom door stood ajar so that she could see her exhausted little figure twisted around the two-million stuffed toys that shared her bed. Her eyes fluttered shut.

Thank you.

‘Lea? Are you still there?’ Genuine concern saturated his words.

‘Sorry, I’m here. I’m just…’ She took a deep breath, and looked at the little stick. ‘Pregnant.’