Nikki Logan - Their Newborn Gift

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.’

GETTING Reilly to wait until his access weekend took a lot of ne-gotiating on Lea’s part. He’d wanted to come immediately on hearing the little stick was showing positive. What was he going to do, come over and stare at her non-existent belly for six hours? Lea’s fast talking had finally persuaded him to achieve as much as he could over the following few days so he could clear his schedule and spend a full day with Molly on his access day.

He’d shuffled his schedule around and left his station hands in charge of running Minamurra. Anyone else might have taken the opportunity to talk up how much work went into breeding and training the district’s finest working and endurance horses and how indispensible he was, but Reilly had simply shrugged and said, ‘I pay them well to make sure I’m expendable.’

Now Lea’s heart squeezed as she looked down her house-paddock to where Reilly and Molly stood discussing the two workhorses, Pan and Goff. The smaller horse lazed his way over to the fence as the humans approached—breakfast, he probably figured—and Reilly reached out and scruffed Goff’s mane high between his ears. The gelding ate it up, tipping his head in for more.

Traitor.

Molly imitated her father, stretching her little leg up to brace one foot on the first rung of the timber fence, resting back on her hip and folding her arms on the timber paling above it. On Molly, it looked adorable. On Reilly…

Lea turned away from the compelling portrait. They were nearly an hour into Reilly’s first visit and no disasters yet. That didn’t mean it wasn’t going to be the longest of days.