by Nikki Logan
Yet she kept that trembling hand more or less steady in his direction.
If this was what he could do for her, it was something.
He was with her in seconds, dropping down to ground level, sliding in under her to be the human equivalent of the cushions that were doing such a lousy job of supporting her. She sobbed his name between loud, pained strains but it was hard to know if it was relief or misery. She hooked her arms around his as she pushed back against him hard, her heels digging into the quilt spread out on the living room floor.
‘Nearly there, Bel. Good girl …’
His father rushed immediately to his mother’s side and Pop stood next to his nan and waited for instructions he knew would come. His nan smiled up at her husband with a love Flynn recognised and didn’t at the same time. He knew that smile well. But how had he never seen how full of love it was?
These two people had had as unpromising a start as he could imagine, yet they’d found their way to a true and evident love.
So maybe stranger things had happened than him and Bel working it out …
His nan’s voice was calm and clear when it finally came. ‘My curling set, please, dear?’
Bel whimpered in Flynn’s arms as Arthur hurried towards the stairs, but then he realised she was laughing, weak and pathetic. ‘Is this the best time to worry about your hair, Alice?’ The hint of a smile on her face was the only thing that gave him any reassurance at all that she wasn’t dying in his arms.
‘I need the clips,’ she admonished. ‘They’ll do to clamp the umbilical cords until we can get them to the hospital.’
Cords. Plural? One baby was still emerging, but …
Flynn lifted his eyes to the bundle of cloth in Denise’s arms—the very particular shape of it—and he crashed into his mother’s own teary gaze.
‘It’s a boy,’ she whispered, lifting the little swaddled bundle slightly. It was only then that he noticed the bruised, strangled looking cord in his mother’s clenched fist. He gasped: his mother was clamping shut the baby’s umbilical cord with her bare hand and had been for who knew how long. Her knuckles were white and shook from the effort of protecting the baby.
His son.
Drew’s son.
Bill seemed to notice at the same time and he wrapped his larger fist around his wife’s to lend her his strength.
Bel’s renewed screams brought Flynn back sharply. She needed him. He couldn’t do much other than brace her and be a human stress-ball for her Herculean fingers but he did that much, murmuring lame words of encouragement close to her ear that were totally drowned out by the inhuman sounds ripping from her.
They wanted—so badly—to be words of affection. Of love.
Sudden anger surged through him. This should not be Bel’s deflowering—afraid and on the floor, something this terrifying, this painful. He should have sucked it up and finished what he’d started that night of their wedding. Consummated the damn marriage. Not because it made much difference physically … but emotionally …
It shouldn’t be like this for Bel.
And then it hit him in a blinding flash, how stupid he’d been. How insanely ridiculous to cling to something as transient as a piece of flesh to prove their marriage had gone unconsummated, when that same flesh would never survive a birth.
He could have been the one Bel gifted with her innocence instead of some guy she might find in the future. He could have been the one to teach her safely, gently about a woman’s body. And a man’s. He could have had her and she could still have had the annulment he’d promised her when they’d first embarked on this desperate deception.
No one but the two of them would ever have known otherwise.
All this time … he could have had her body, if not her heart.
Instead, this would be what she remembered for ever about the day she lost her virginity.
But as she flung her head back for one final surging scream he saw something else in the face almost deformed with agony. Exultation. The barbaric glittering of her eyes, the blazing defiance. The part of her that was determined to bring these babies into the world carefully and quickly and defend them to her last breath.
His stomach turned over. And over.
This woman was a mother. Regardless of where the babies originated. Or who they belonged to. Or what the law decided. In the short time he’d known her, Bel had turned from girl … to woman … to mother. She’d blossomed under the care of his family, under his own touch, she’d opened herself to him and shown herself to be cut from different cloth to her sister. Though she had every reason in the world not to, she’d risked her heart and let herself care for the people in his family.
He looked in turn at every member of that family and it sliced him right through his middle.
Because he knew what he had to do …
But right now his only job was keeping her conscious and upright as the tiny precious life slipped silently into his nan’s waiting hands.
CHAPTER TEN
THE whole blue-tinged, not-breathing thing freaked Bel out much more when the first little boy materialised from inside her, because after everything she’d gone through emotionally and psychologically—and physically—to get them this far, it would be more than a tragedy for Gwen and Drew’s babies not to survive.
It would be unbearable.
But the second little boy was exactly the same bruised colour and this time she squeezed Flynn’s arm in reassurance—as if she’d been doing this for decades rather than minutes—as Alice deftly dealt with the cord with her ruined fabric scissors, knotted it and patted his tiny lungs firmly out of his aquatic existence and into this one.
Two boys. A tiny Flynn and tiny Drew of her own. Something to remember both of them by after she was back in London. She closed her eyes over a leak of tears and shared the news with Gwen as Alice cleared the second twin’s airways and cocooned him in warm towels. It was hard not to imagine the intense surge of love and warmth that coursed through her channelled straight from her sister, but it amplified overwhelmingly as Alice gently placed her little boy on her chest and then retreated to deal with the afterbirth. Denise approached with his older brother.
Both babies now had a hairdressing clamp in place to make sure the hand-tied knot in their umbilical cords stayed put.
Flynn’s hands shook as he reached around her to take the baby from Denise. Bel was torn three ways between a desperate desire to look at him, the baby resting on her chest and the one now safely curled in Flynn’s hands, so she focused on the babies and just leaned her head into the strength of Flynn’s hold in lieu.
‘Brothers …’ he murmured, and she knew he’d be thinking about Drew just then. They all were. Denise’s eyes shone with pain and a kind of healing and Bill tucked her against him gently. Alice’s face was split in a smile wider than the gully running down to the caves, even though she had the messiest end of the whole proceedings to still deal with.
The babies were perfect. Silent and overwhelmed by the curious new world they found themselves in, but they had everything in the right quantities. And they had their father’s eyes.
And their uncle’s, technically.
Flynn placed the tiny firstborn on Bel’s chest closer to his brother and both babies instinctively turned towards the other, fussing. She shifted them hard up against each other and they immediately settled.
‘They know each other …’ Flynn murmured.
‘They should. They’ve been each other’s world for eight months.’ Her crooning did nothing to draw their attention back to her but their eyes closed after a moment of the soft sound.
His deep voice rumbled, ‘They know their mother, too.’
Their mother. But there was no question, regardless of their genetic origins. She’d carried them, talked to them, loved them and birthed them. These children were hers.
The impossible responsibility of that washed over her in a wave of anxiety and her heart rate picked up. What did she know about being a pa
rent? To twins? In a tiny flat in London. What had seemed so straightforward in theory—when it was just an intangible one day—seemed insurmountable now. These were little human beings. There was no room for mistakes. Their needs had to come first.
‘They’re so small …’
‘Their growth was inhibited by each other and they’re a little early, but they’ll make up for lost time.’ Alice appeared next to her, wiping her hands on the last clean towel. It was only then Bel realised what a blood-bath the Bradleys’ living room had become. She owed them some serious linen. And a rug. And some dressmaking scissors.
Alice pushed damp hair from her own forehead and then looked at Flynn. ‘As soon as you’re ready, we need to get her to a hospital.’
All the colour drained from his face. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’
Her aged laugh was a bark. ‘She’s just given birth on the floor. Twice. That’s what’s wrong.’ She patted his hand. ‘She and the babies need a full check-up and some time in a comfortable bed, getting up to speed with all of this.’
His arms tightened. ‘I’ll take her myself. Now.’
‘Is that the best plan, Flynn? Squeeze two newborns and a traumatised woman into your luxurious two-seater … with no one along to assist if anything happens? Would an ambulance be a better idea, dear?’
Despite the pain and the anxiety and the overwhelming-ness of everything that had happened and was yet to happen, Bel had to smile. The whole Alice good-cop-bad-cop thing took some getting used to. As tough as a military sergeant while she was in labour, but as gentle as pie on her poor, shocked grandson.
‘I’ll do it on the CB radio,’ Arthur called from the kitchen where—bless his socks—he’d popped the kettle on for yet another restorative cup of tea before heading out to his vehicle. But, as Bel brought her eyes back towards the babies, she saw the tremor in Alice’s fingers and the pallor at her hairline. She’d been through quite a trauma, too. Seventy-nine-year-old women didn’t participate in marathons all that often. Bel tucked the babies tighter to her chest with one arm and reached out with the other. ‘Alice. Thank you. I could not have done this without you. These boys are alive because of you.’
Her lips tightened but Bel knew it was to corral the tears that threatened in her aged grey eyes. ‘Rubbish. They’re alive because of you. And Flynn.’ Although she hadn’t lost the speculative glint. ‘Though I don’t mind saying I don’t want to ever do that again. Not sure my heart is up to it. And there’s a reason I crawled up to this end of you, Bel. I think my knees have gone …’
Bill helped his mother excruciatingly to her feet and supported her to the nearest sofa, where she sank gratefully into it and tucked her trembling hands from view while her son clucked around her. Denise collected up all the soiled linen and disappeared upstairs before returning with a fresh quilt, which she draped over Bel and the babies.
Bel spent the time just staring at her boys—all three of them—and snuggling back into Flynn.
‘Are you in pain?’ he whispered against her ear.
You have no idea. And not all of it physical. But pain had no place here for the next few minutes. This was for them alone. She shook her head. ‘Look at them, Flynn. They look just like—’ too many ears in the room ‘—their father.’
His eyes glittered and he smiled. ‘I know.’
‘Look at those Bradley foreheads,’ Denise piped up from the sofa. ‘But if you ask me, they look more like Drew at birth. Flynn was so much darker.’
Bel’s whole body tightened up.
The glance Alice slid past Bel made her wonder if the wily woman wasn’t slowly piecing together the puzzle. Though, never correctly—there was no way she possibly could. Who in a million years could imagine what she and Flynn had done? But she was definitely doing quiet mental maths. ‘They don’t look much of anything at the moment, all squashed from the birth.’
‘I wouldn’t care if they ended up looking like your legendary Bunyip,’ Bel said fiercely. ‘I think they’re perfect.’
‘Hear, hear …’ Arthur said from the kitchen and suddenly the entire family began buzzing with excitement and remembering the births of their own children at great speed and volume. Bel sagged into the happy cacophony and stared at the two little people suddenly dominating her world.
Massively, overwhelmingly, entirely dominating.
Flynn kissed her sweaty head and murmured, ‘Need anything?’
‘Just to lie here. Just to look at them.’ Just to have you close. For however long it lasts.
Baby number one pressed its face to Baby number two and began sucking his tiny chin.
‘Should I try and feed them, Alice …?’ Her mouth dried at the thought. The terrifying learning curve began now. She really had no clue. Everything she knew about babies she knew from books or dolls. Yet she thought she could do this alone? She’d only just grown used to Flynn seeing her breasts; now they were going to become public property …
‘They feel like a feed about as much as you feel like one right now, Bel. They’ve been through an ordeal at least as traumatic as yours. Sleep and medical care are the most important things for the next little while. And contact with their parents. The rest will come in its own time.’
She was happy with that. Delaying the inevitable. Holding them—loving them—was the easy part. She’d willingly do that until the end of time.
The family bustle went on. Eventually Alice pulled herself to her feet and disappeared to take a well-earned shower.
Bel picked her moment and whispered to Flynn, ‘Alice knows.’
He looked at her sharply. ‘What do you mean?’
‘She felt … She knows I was a virgin.’
His lips tightened.
‘I didn’t think, Flynn …’
He squeezed her hand. ‘It’s not your fault. We both thought this would happen in a controlled medical environment.’ He glanced at his occupied parents. ‘Do you think she’ll believe it’s just a freak of nature?’
‘If I’d been quicker on my feet, maybe. She knows there’s some kind of secret, just not what it is.’
Flynn nodded. Thought. Hard. ‘Okay. Well, we’ll think of something.’
‘No. No more lies. No more half- and quarter-truths.’ She kept her voice calm for the babies’ sake but put all her seriousness into her eyes. ‘I’m done.’
He wanted to argue. She could see it. But the dark shadows at the back of his expression coagulated into visible pain. ‘I suppose it’s going to be a moot point soon, anyway.’
Bel frowned. What did he mean?
‘But you don’t have to deal with that now. We’ll talk about this more when you’re fully recovered. I’ll deal with any questions Nan might have.’
To spare her the humiliation? Or to control what was said? ‘No. I’m not hiding behind you, Flynn. I need to face the music. Tell them personally. It’s the least I owe them, especially after today.’ She caught and held his gaze. ‘I won’t taint the start of these lives with more deception.’
She felt his body sag behind hers. ‘Okay, Bel. When you get out of hospital. Just focus on getting you and these little blokes strong.’
They couldn’t go on calling them Baby number one or the little blokes. ‘We need to choose names, Flynn.’
Flynn’s large thumb brushed some of the rapidly crusting wax residue from the baby closest to him and, after a long thoughtful pause, said what they’d both been thinking.
‘Andrew?’
It was totally appropriate, given his origins, and anyone looking in from the outside would just see one brother honouring another. And he did have a kind of Andrew look about him. But knowing now how much of Flynn’s emotional heart was tied up in his past with his brother …
‘Are you sure?’
He thought about it some more and nodded. ‘I’m sure.’
She frowned. ‘But Andy for short.’ She didn’t think any of them could call him Drew without it hurting.
Flynn turned his eyes to the s
econd-born baby. He was harder. There was no male equivalent of Gwendoline, at least not one he’d have a hope of getting a classroom of school mates to pronounce correctly. Bel moved on to her sister’s middle name. Liana.
‘Liam?’
They both stared at the babies. Andrew and Liam Bradley.
‘Perfect,’ Flynn said.
The longer she stared at the sleeping infants, the heavier her own eyes felt. And as the natural hormone high wore off and the pain spread out to an awful, full body ache, the rigours of the birth finally registered on her exhausted muscles.
A drug-free home birth had definitely not been on her must-do list.
‘Sleep, Bel.’ Flynn pressed the words into her temple, tucking his arms more securely around them all and flexing his own muscles in anticipation of a long stay. ‘I’ll be here when you wake.’
But for how long? The thought drifted in and onwards as she started to doze into exhausted slumber, her senses filled with the smell of newborn baby and the warmth of the man she loved. Though it wasn’t entirely restful. Soon they’d have a verdict and one of them would be heartbroken and empty-handed.
Empty-lived.
And right up until Alice had placed Liam, hot and tiny, on her chest, she would have said it wasn’t going to be her. No way. But that was before the intense weight of two tiny lives bore down on her and before she realised that what they needed was what mattered most.
Although right now—like their mother—they just needed sleep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
BATHURST HOSPITAL was the nearest major centre and, because there were no serious complications with Andrew and Liam’s births, they got to stay there rather than be transferred to Sydney.
Which was not to say there were no complications at all. Liam’s little lungs struggled to drain as quickly as his brother’s and Andrew proved himself to be an unaccomplished feeder. Bel had been secretly relying on them knowing instinctively what to do and so she was more than a bit anxious to find they had to learn what went where every bit as much as she did.