Their Newborn Gift

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.