by Nikki Logan
She laughed. ‘Riding.’
‘Hmm. That won’t be happening. This whole thing is an exercise in safety.’
Her heart dropped; as if she needed the reminder. This was all about Molly and the unborn baby. She shook her head. It was as it should be. She’d been foolish never to let herself think about what a bad combination a sickening Molly and impassable roads would be. Or the risk to the cells she carried if something went wrong. Reilly had offered an olive branch decorated with a great big common-sense ribbon. His airstrip was set up for the outback Flying Doctor service; he even had his own light plane if it came to that. He had staff, mountains of food and an enormous empty house where she and Molly could have their own private space. And he was on the good side of the highway that flooded every wet season.
Lea had only had the lumpy, questionable warmth of her Curran pride.
It hadn’t been enough to risk her daughter’s future for.
‘Coming here is not something I’m particularly comfortable with, Reilly. But I’ve already made enough decisions based on what I need. It’s taken me over five years to work it out, but I know that now. I won’t be taking any unnecessary risks.’
Her deep, enduring loneliness had never been the right reason to have a child. Nor her all-consuming hunger to be a mother. But what about making a new child…? She caught herself stroking her swollen stomach again and forced her hand away.
She was bonding with this baby. That was not good. She didn’t know this child yet. She felt it, yes, but she didn’t know it. As hard as it would be, handing it to Reilly would still be easier than watching Molly die a painful, slow death. Knowing it was loved and safe and would have a good life with a good man…
She lifted her eyes to his and realised he was a good man. A man who just desperately wanted to be a parent. Just as she had.
He yielded under her intense regard. ‘Why don’t you both rest for a bit?’ he said, shuffling to his feet. ‘You can unpack later on.’
After packing all morning and a three-hour drive, exhaustion dogged her heels, despite her best attempts at keeping it at bay: pregnancy trade-off number one. Lea missed having the stamina of her youth—heck, of last year! She rubbed her neck.
‘That sounds heavenly,’ she said. ‘Making fingers and earlobes sure takes a lot out of a person. I have no idea how mum did it while…’
She practically gasped at what she’d been about to say. Reilly finished for her.
‘While she was pregnant with you?’
Lea swallowed. She’d never spoken of this to anyone. She shook her head. Flicked her eyes to his. ‘My sister. Mum was pregnant with Anna when her breast cancer was diagnosed. I don’t know how she did it, considering what carrying a child takes out of you when you’re healthy.’
His dark eyes were bottomless and entirely compassionate. ‘She must have been a strong woman—to go through with the pregnancy, knowing she’d never get to see the child grow up.’ He reeled back, maybe realising what he was about to say.
And to whom.
‘It’s okay, Reilly. It helps keep it in perspective. All I have to worry about is being left alone myself. Mum had to leave two tiny daughters in the care of a faithless husband.’
Reilly’s head dropped. ‘Your father cheated on your mother?’ Lea nodded. ‘And she knew?’
‘How could she not? It happened in the kitchen just metres from her room.’
Reilly swore. ‘How do you know?’
Lea sank onto the bed, staring out at the purple blanket of flowers on the pond. ‘They weren’t very quiet. I got up. I was too young to understand what I was seeing. But I got more than an academic education at boarding school, and I heard things over giggled conversations that put it all into heart-breaking context.’ She took a deep breath. ‘It was the night Sapphie was conceived.’
The silence was massively telling. ‘But you’re close to your half-sister, regardless?’
She shrugged. ‘Sins of the father and all that. I grew up with Sapphie. I loved her as a friend long before I knew she was a Curran.’ Even longer before everyone else knew. ‘I felt dirty for years, holding onto that secret. As though suspecting made me somehow a terrible friend.’
A worse daughter.
‘Did you tell your father?’
‘God, no! That nasty little secret festered into a soul-sore until the day it just burst from my lips—that I knew what he’d done while my mother lay dying two rooms away.’
He had not looked her in the eye since.
‘No wonder the two of you had a difficult relationship,’ Reilly said.
‘We never recovered. I didn’t want to. What kind of a man would do that?’
Reilly sank down onto the bed across from her. ‘A weak, frightened one? Desperate to make the pain stop just for a moment?’
Lea stared razor blades at him. ‘Are you defending him?’
He raised both hands. ‘Ah, no. That would be suicidal. Was the question rhetorical?’
Her chest heaved. She pressed her lips together. ‘No. I would like to understand. Would you do it?’ she whispered. ‘You’re a man.’
‘I’d like to say I wouldn’t.’ His warm eyes held hers. ‘But until I’m in his position, watching my wife die by degrees, I can only speculate.’ He shook his head. ‘Did he love your mother?’
She shrugged. ‘He said he did.’
‘Maybe the chance of just a few minutes of comfort and oblivion in the arms of an eager, living woman was too strong? Maybe he couldn’t be strong for everyone.’
Lea stared, closer to understanding just how flawed, how human, her father was than ever before.
‘I think we’re all capable of doing things out of character when we’re desperate,’ Reilly continued.
Wasn’t that the truth?
‘Things we might not be proud of later.’
The tone of his voice drew her eyes to his in time to catch the dying flash of something indefinable. Regret? Sorrow?
Molly-of-the-impeccable-timing came scuffing into the room just then, and Reilly seemed suddenly to realise he was sitting on a bed with Lea. He leapt to his feet. ‘I’ll leave you to your unpacking. I have a few things to be doing outside. See you later, Lea. Night, Molly.’
Then he was gone.
Lea helped Molly change the sheets on her mattress to her favourite ones with puppies on them and then slipped her into her pyjamas. She tucked her heavy-eyed daughter into bed unbathed, and she was asleep before Lea had even unpacked one suitcase.
She thought about her mother as she started on the second case. Had she felt this same bone-deep despair at the thought of never seeing Lea growing up, of leaving her alone? Karen Curran must have had much more personal strength than her eldest daughter.
Everyone seemed to have more personal strength than her. Look at what Anna had been through. Sapphie, too. Even Jared.
Jared’s strength, after everything he had been through, was what she modelled herself on for years afterwards. Because of him, she went back to school with renewed purpose and graduated with honours. But her father even managed to ruin that by trying to palm her off on Jared to get him to stay on Jarndirri, like some kind of twisted mail-order bride. Things had got horribly awkward between them then, so she’d taken herself and her online university-course to live with her maternal grandfather in Parker Ridge. Far away from her father.
He’d practically packed for her.
Her chest ached at the irony as she slipped the last of her clothes into the giant chest of drawers. Here she was, unpacking that very same suitcase in Reilly Martin’s house—the father of the child she’d created the day her own father had been buried.
Was that some weird kind of cosmic wheel? Going over and over the past sure wasn’t changing the future. It wasn’t helping her to move forward. Maybe it was time to do something differently.
Exhaustion dogged her. The smell of horses and fresh straw wafted in on the warm evening breeze. Reilly’s effective air-con was uncomfortably cool to her,
after years of slugging it out naturally. She crawled up onto the bed and pulled the light sheet up over her body, tucking her hands around her emerging belly, her eyes slowly losing focus in the sea of green and purple outside her window.
One by one, the sounds of the day dropped off until the only thing she could hear was the drone of distant insects, and even those seemed to merge, as she slipped into dream, into the thrum-thrum of a tiny heartbeat.
Reilly stood on the veranda and stared through the open doorway at the woman within. She’d slept so long, he’d felt compelled to come and check that she was breathing. She was; the same deep, slow breath of the frogs that slowed their metabolism so they could ride out the blistering summer deep below the baked earth.
This little frog wasn’t waking until morning. And Molly was zonked out next to her, draped in pretty puppy-sheets that Lea must have brought with her from home. For Molly, a dusk bedtime was normal.
Lea, not so much. Shouldn’t she eat something? If her body had thought food was more important than rest right now it would probably have woken her up. Wouldn’t it? He glanced sideways at the darkened doorway.
Watching her was like looking on Sleeping Beauty frozen in time, locked in her glass case for eternity. It was only the fairy-tale image that lessened the creep factor he felt standing in the shadows of her doorway, staring.
He’d not handled himself well the other day. Inviting her to stay—his lips twisted at the word ‘inviting’—had been a spontaneous and completely un-thought-through piece of Martin brilliance. In that moment, it had seemed like the best idea in the world, because in that moment his hormones had still been ruling play.
That much he understood. It was the deeper connotations that had him frowning.
Now he stood gazing on her sleeping form like it was some kind of holy relic. Drawing peace from her serene expression, from the way her hands still curved protectively around her belly. The softness of her lips that parted as though on a sigh. Fearing how badly he wanted to touch them again.
His fingers burned with the need.
What the blazes was wrong with him? One minute he wanted to shake her, the next he was fantasising about her lips. His emotions were like a bull ride.
Enough.
He stepped in from the veranda and reached around to close the two sleeping beauties behind glass double-doors for the night, and as he did one of the hinges protested loudly.
‘Reilly?’
He froze where he stood then turned slowly, his heart thumping. Lea was still asleep, murmuring. Murmuring his name in her sleep. It shot straight to his gut—south of his gut, actually.
‘It’s okay, Lea. Sleep now.’ His own voice was thick and low. And enormously strained. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
She made an indecipherable sound and let herself tumble back into oblivion. He pulled the curtains across and locked the doors behind him, sending Lea and Molly into complete darkness. Then he turned back to the light of the veranda, leaned back against the wall and finally released his breath.
His heart beat so hard, it ached…
It didn’t take a psychology degree to understand what was going on here. His body was responding to a range of instinctive cues as ancient as the granite ridges surrounding them. Answering the glowing fertility of hers. Animal attraction, pure and simple.
It was the dying days of the dry season, the land all around him was building up to the wet, the most abundant, verdant time of the year. The time when waterholes swelled, enthusiastic amphibians burst from their underground burrows and wildlife started pairing up so that their offspring emerged just as the new, sweet grasses did.
Sex was going on all around him. Everywhere.
And he hadn’t been with anyone for months—more than months. Since his diagnosis. But Lea Curran wasn’t his usual type. He liked women blonde, eager and available. Not prickly, brunette…and pregnant.
He marched off down the veranda back towards the front door. Maybe that was it—pure biology? She was already pregnant, she represented no biological risk whatsoever. But she did represent what he’d only just accepted he’d never have—a female large with his child.
And that was disturbingly seductive. No matter what his head said.
Two hours later, he was rattling around alone in the main part of the silent homestead as always. The sprawling house was designed to take a large family without popping a seam. Pity it had never had more than three people in it at one time.
And likely never would. It would be just him and the baby. And Mrs Dawes, who’d been the housekeeper since he was tiny.
Holding out for the right woman seemed pointless when he had nothing but a big, empty house and roomfuls of other people’s antiques to offer a woman. The kind of woman he wished for would go elsewhere, to a man who could offer children. Family.
It had been years since he’d last been truly attracted to the women he slept with. Had felt the kind of interest that lasted longer than an evening. The kind of interest that built anticipation like the onset of the wet season, and then wasn’t fully released by the first downpour.
Nearly six years, if he was counting. The weekend Molly was conceived.
He finally let himself go right back into the seductive, taboo detail. Repeatedly. Knowing he’d fathered a child with Lea gave the memories a primal kind of resonance. Caveman Reilly showed his face again. He imagined himself buried to the hilt inside all that fertility, creating their new child, his genes multiplying radically in her belly through more traditional means.
His groan was a tortured mix of regret and passion and it was all he could do not to take himself back to Lea’s bedroom door.
But that was just lust talking. Welcome, definitely; it was a timely validation that fertility was the only function he’d lost. If his body’s reaction to Lea’s ample charms was any indication, it was more than ready for a road test, evidence that he was half a man, at least. Staring down the barrel of forty years of emptiness, wandering around the house dwelling on the family he’d never have—it was hardly the stuff libido was made of. Reilly Martin didn’t do emptiness well. He’d made a specialty of filling the empty places.
He glanced at the cupboard above the microwave where he knew Mrs Dawes kept a bottle of cooking spirits. It was the only alcohol he allowed in the house. And it bothered the heck out of him that he knew exactly where she kept it.
‘Hey.’ The soft voice came from behind him.
Reilly spun as though she’d caught him cracking the top on the bottle. She was fresh from waking, a crease still marking her sleep-flushed cheek, looking more relaxed and at ease than he’d ever seen her. Except when she’d run with the brumbies that time.
That Lea made him think of tangled sheets and tongues. This Lea was almost childlike.
‘Did I miss dinner?’
She was hungry. He knew it. ‘I figured you needed sleep more than supper.’
‘I think I did. But now I’m ready to eat one of your horses. Do you mind if I make myself something?’
Visions of cooking spirits evaporated on his chuckle. ‘If it protects the livestock, help yourself.’
She ate like she rode, full throttle. Unapologetic. Watching her polish off Mrs Dawes’ leftover steak-and-kidney pie was like watching locusts swarm. Even for a countrywoman she had a healthy appetite.
‘Is that you or…?’ At her questioning look, he nodded from her empty plate to her belly.
She grinned and stretched back, satiated. ‘Would it be wrong to blame the pregnancy?’
The silence that fell didn’t feel awkward.
‘Tell me about Anna,’ he surprised himself by asking. Getting to know her better hadn’t been on his radar when he’d pressured her into staying at Minamurra. ‘What’s she like?’
‘Everyone loves Anna.’
‘Not what I asked.’
Lea sighed. ‘She’s the perfect outback wife: smart, loyal, determined. She and her husband Jared make a good pair.’
&n
bsp; ‘I sense some history here.’ It wasn’t a question. Dark eyes regarded her steadily.
Lea pushed away from the table and loaded her dish and cutlery into the dishwasher before crossing to the polished kettle sitting on the hob. One quick button-press had the flame magically popping into life. She turned back into the patient silence and waved her hand dismissively. ‘I was the oldest, so sometimes Anna and I clashed. You know siblings…there’s always history.’
‘Nope, can’t say I do. I’m a Martin original.’
Said with levity but hiding such sadness. ‘Take it as read that there’s always baggage between siblings, especially sisters. It doesn’t mean we love each other any less. There’s nothing Anna wouldn’t do for me. And vice versa. Sapphie too.’
He watched her long and hard before finally speaking. ‘That’s nice. Special.’
The stare went on just long enough to bring her tiny neck-hairs to attention. For Lea it just was. She couldn’t imagine not having Anna or Sapphie—or Jared and Liam, for that matter—a phone call away.
Time this conversation turned two-way.
‘You were an only child?’ she asked.
‘I was. Childbearing was not something my mother wanted to do again once she got over the novelty factor.’
Lea polished her hand over her tummy, knowing how wonderful her first pregnancy had been for her. Despite the aches and the sickness and the tiredness. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why? I had it great. Fantastic property. Famous parents. Everything money could buy.’
She remembered what he’d said at the waterhole. ‘And no one to share it with.’
Reilly laughed, a harsh, unforgiving kind of sound. ‘As it happens, I don’t play well with others.’
Lea felt compelled to say something. ‘I’m sure that’s not true.’ Although she was very sure it was. Suddenly a familiar sensation drew her focus down to her body. Her hand followed her gaze.
‘You’re smiling?’
Her head snapped back up. ‘I’m sorry. It’s…’ She smiled again, completely unable not to as joy filled her. ‘It moves sometimes, when I’m not expecting it. I’ve only just started to feel movement. I was beginning to worry.’