Expecting Miracle Twins

by Barbara Hannay

She could forget about the headaches, the heartburn and the tiredness. If she held in her mind this picture of her friends’ happy, smiling faces and the cute black and white images of their two little babies, she could blank out memories of Jake Devlin.

  She had done the right thing when she’d ended the phone call. It was the only sane way to approach this, wasn’t it? After all, if her fiancé hadn’t been able to stay in love with her when she’d been younger and prettier and not pregnant, how could she possibly expect a rake like Jake to stay interested in her now?

  It was a cold, blustery winter’s day when Jake returned to Sydney. He stepped out of the taxi and gusts of wind whipped at him. Sharp rain needled his face. Not exactly a warm welcome, but then he hadn’t expected one.

  On the overnight flight he hadn’t slept, but when he checked in to his hotel he went straight to his room, showered and changed and then hurried downstairs again to collect the hire car he’d booked. Rain lashed at the windscreen as he drove out of the hotel car park and joined the steady stream of traffic.

  For a fleeting moment he felt strangely disoriented. The busy arterial road in the frantic heart of Sydney was such a bizarre contrast to the moonscape world of the remote mine site he’d so recently left. He blinked to clear his head, changed lanes and took a right turn at the next set of lights. He’d planned to head straight to Roy’s nursing home but now he realised too late he was going the wrong way.

  He continued on, looking for a suitable place to make a U-turn, and he recognised the camping store where Mattie had bought the little gas ring and billy can for Roy’s tea party.

  This direction led to Will’s flat.

  To Mattie.

  Knots tightened in his gut and his heart began to thud.

  OK, OK. If he was already heading this way, he might as well drive past the flat. And if he saw Mattie’s car parked in the drive, he might as well go in. Get it over and done with. He had to see her at least once. Maybe he was fooling himself that she hadn’t really wanted to let him go, but he had to know the truth. Had to sort this out, face to face.

  In that disastrous phone call, Mattie had mentioned that she was so busy she’d begun telephoning Roy rather than visiting him. That had surprised Jake and he couldn’t help worrying that there was a problem. Why would the same girl who’d gone above and beyond in her efforts to please Roy suddenly be too busy to pay him an occasional visit?

  He still couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in some kind of trouble. At the risk of totally annoying her, he couldn’t let her go until he got to the bottom of this mystery.

  Mattie was working near a window in the lounge room, listening to the rhythm of the rain as she drew a preliminary sketch for another illustration.

  The book was almost finished and she wanted to have everything off to her publisher in the next few weeks—before the last weeks of the pregnancy drained her energy.

  She was concentrating hard, trying to capture exactly the right level of simmering excitement in Molly’s facial expression, when a sound from the street outside caught her attention. She glanced through the window and saw a sleek, low black car shooting a spray of water from the gutter as it pulled up in front of the flats.

  She wasn’t expecting anyone, so she paid the car a cursory glance and went back to her drawing. But then the car door slammed and Brutus began to yap.

  ‘Quiet, Brutus!’ Mattie glanced outside again, frowning. Her little dog only yapped to welcome people he knew and liked. Strangers were greeted by silence, or by a low, mean-spirited growl.

  Curious now, she watched a man make a dash through the sheeting rain. He was wearing a black waterproof jacket and blue jeans and she admired his considerable height, his thick dark hair and broad shoulders.

  Oh, God. Oh, help.

  No!

  It couldn’t be Jake.

  Her heart stopped beating altogether. The pencil fell from her nerveless fingers and clattered to the table, then her heart gave one terrified bound and began to hammer again. Painfully.

  Jake.

  It was Jake.

  Too shocked to move, she sat and watched as he flipped the latch on the front gate and dashed up the path, head down against the rain.

  She hadn’t heard from him since that dreadful phone call. She hadn’t expected him to come, had never dreamed he would come.

  Instinctively, she wrapped her arms over her ballooning stomach. One of the babies kicked, and then the other joined in. A kicking competition began.

  Jake knocked on the door and Brutus darted forward, yapping excitedly. Mattie tried to stand, but her knees shook and her legs refused to support her. What would Jake think when he saw her?

  He knocked again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  JAKE knew for certain that Mattie was home. Not only was her car in the garage, he’d caught a glimpse of her worried face at the window. But now she wasn’t answering his knock.

  Terrific. He wasn’t welcome.

  Stubbornly, he knocked again.

  Her little dog yapped madly and scratched on the other side of the door. At least Brutus was happy to see him.

  The Mediterranean-blue door remained firmly shut.

  He shouldn’t have come.

  Acid rose in his stomach. After Mattie’s clear rejection, coming here was close to the stupidest thing he’d ever done.

  Teeth gritted, hands clenched, he turned his back on the flat and scowled at the driving rain. No way would he knock on that door a third time. A man had his pride.

  Which meant he had no choice but to get out of here and bid Mattie Carey good riddance. He didn’t need this kind of angst in his life, couldn’t believe he’d allowed himself to become entangled in this mess.

  He turned, ready to make a dash for the car, when the door opened behind him and Brutus leapt out, yapping madly and jumping at Jake’s knees in an ecstasy of welcome.

  ‘Sit, Brutus. Down, boy.’

  Mattie’s voice. Jake looked up and there she stood in the doorway.

  Thud.

  Her light brown hair was a soft cloud about her pale face and her blue eyes were huge and worried. She ordered Brutus to settle and she bent to pat the dog, then straightened again. She was wearing a voluminous cherry-red tunic over dark grey leggings and black ankle boots. She was the Mattie he remembered.

  Even lovelier than he remembered. She had a special glow about her.

  She was…

  Jake went cold all over.

  No.

  No way. She couldn’t be.

  ‘Hello, Jake.’

  He couldn’t drag his eyes from the unmistakable curve of her stomach.

  No way. No!

  During her silence, he’d considered many possibilities.

  Never this.

  What did it mean? Was he going to be a father?

  The thought sent blood pounding through him. Dazed, he gestured in the direction of her middle.

  ‘Why?’ He gulped, couldn’t get the question out. Tried again. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t. I’m so sorry.’

  Couldn’t? What the hell did that mean? ‘What’s going on, Mattie? Why couldn’t you have said something?’

  She pressed shaking fingers against her lips, looked ready to cry.

  ‘You haven’t got a husband lurking in the wings?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘You are pregnant, aren’t you? It’s not…something else?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said, but she looked anything but fine. ‘I’m really well. And yes…I’m pregnant.’

  ‘OK. Right.’ Jake raised a hand to loosen his tie, realised he wasn’t wearing one. ‘On to the next question then…Is it mine?’

  The sudden eagerness in his voice shocked him. He hadn’t planned on fatherhood, had always made certain that he’d avoided any chance of unplanned offspring. But everyone knew these accidents happened. And Mattie would be the world’s best mother. And somehow the idea of her�
��

  Again, she shook her head. ‘Don’t panic, Jake. You’re not about to become a father.’

  Not the father.

  She might as easily have landed a king hit on Jake’s jaw. The result would have been the same.

  She had another lover.

  He was stunned. Flattened. Shocked by how disappointed he felt.

  He dragged in a ragged breath, let it out through clenched teeth and jerked his gaze from the dismay in her eyes to the glistening wet concrete on the driveway.

  A thousand questions rained on him. If the baby wasn’t his, who the hell’s was it? When had this happened? Before he’d met Mattie? Afterwards?

  Hell.

  Could he believe anything she told him? Short of a DNA test, how could he be certain that the child was his or was not his?

  He shot a searching glance at Mattie and high colour rose in her cheeks.

  Without quite meeting his gaze, she said, ‘This is a surprise.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘I mean, I wasn’t expecting to see you.’

  ‘I dare say.’ He couldn’t hold back the bitterness from his voice.

  Her hand fluttered protectively over her middle. ‘I know this is a shock, Jake. I’m sorry.’ A small huffing sigh escaped. ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘How complicated?’

  ‘Quite.’ She chewed her lip. ‘Very complicated, actually.’

  Before he could snap a biting retort, the bright colour in Mattie’s face faded, leaving a gravity that disturbed him. She took a step back.

  ‘You’d better come in. You deserve an explanation.’

  When he didn’t move immediately, she said again, ‘Please, Jake, come inside.’

  Until now, he hadn’t realised that he’d been secretly hoping to spend his leave with this woman. What a mistake. Jake-the-Rake Devlin never spent his leave with the same girl he’d been with on the last leave.

  Right now he should have been partying in Paris or skiing in the Snowy Mountains.

  But here he was, back in the flat with Mattie. A sinking sense of foreboding chilled him to the bone as he shrugged out of his coat and hung it on a peg by the door, then followed Mattie into the familiar lounge room. Will’s lounge room.

  Jake almost staggered under the weight of another alarming possibility. No, please, no. Don’t let the baby be Will’s.

  It wasn’t possible, was it? But Will had been so cagey about Mattie…and she was living in his flat…

  But surely they would have told him? A wave of panicky loneliness swept over him, the frightening sensation of loss that he remembered from his childhood.

  He shook it off and reined in his galloping thoughts.

  ‘Take a seat, Jake.’

  Mattie pointed to one of the leather sofas that faced each other on either side of the glass coffee table. He saw that she’d set a card table by the window and had covered it with her art paraphernalia. He remembered how she’d once sat cross-legged on the floor while she drew the illustrations for her children’s book. No doubt her burgeoning figure made that impossible now.

  ‘Would you like tea or coffee?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. Just the truth.

  With a worried little sigh, she sat opposite him.

  Opposite. Not cosily next to him, as the Mattie of old would have done.

  She looked down at her hands and he followed her gaze, saw that her fingernails had been painted a deep, glamorous red to match her top. The strong colour made her pale hands look elegant and sophisticated. Even lovelier than before.

  A handful of pebbles lodged in Jake’s throat and he manfully swallowed every one of them.

  ‘I’m really sorry you’ve found out like this,’ she said. ‘It’s the last thing I wanted. I know it’s a shock.’

  Biting back the barrage of questions he longed to fire at her, he cracked a bitter smile and very deliberately relaxed back into the soft leather upholstery, legs casually crossed at the ankles.

  Mattie watched him and thought how utterly wonderful he looked. If she wasn’t so nervous and anxious she would have been deliriously happy. How fantastic it would be to do nothing more than to sit here and feast her eyes on Jake Devlin.

  Oh…it was so good to see him again.

  He was wearing a cream cable-knit sweater and blue denim jeans. A five o’clock shadow darkened his jaw and his hair had been ruffled by the rain and wind, reminding her of the dangerously handsome pirate she’d met on the first day she’d arrived at this flat.

  She wished she could throw herself across the room and curl up beside him. She longed to feel his arms about her, to rest her head on his shoulder and to feel the soft bulky wool of his sweater against her cheek. She needed to bury her face in his neck and smell his skin, longed to feel his sexy lips on hers.

  Heavens, maybe pregnancy hormones had caused a spike in her libido, but she wanted nothing more than to rip off his lovely sweater and run her hands all over his gorgeous body. Wanted him to want her the way he’d wanted her last time.

  But she’d relinquished such privileges. And now Jake looked hard and distanced. The short gap across the coffee table was as vast as the Grand Canyon.

  Jake stretched an arm along the back of the sofa and his dark eyes rested on her pregnant tummy. ‘So this is why you’ve been so busy? This is your new creative project?’

  With nervous fingers, Mattie smoothed the hem of her tunic over her leggings. ‘To be honest, I’ve actually been more tired than busy.’

  ‘It’s rather late for honesty, Mattie.’

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted softly.

  ‘You’ve kept your condition a state secret. Why?’

  ‘I didn’t have much choice, Jake. I wanted to tell you, but I’d promised that I wouldn’t tell anyone.’

  Before he could open his mouth to fire another question, Mattie hurried on. ‘I suppose I could have asked for permission to tell you, but I was worried that, even if I did try to explain, you still wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘I have an honours degree in biological science. I do have a reasonable understanding of how these things happen.’

  Ignoring his sarcasm, she tried again. ‘This is a particularly delicate situation.’

  To her surprise, Jake’s skin turned pale despite his tan. ‘Please tell me the baby’s not Will’s.’

  ‘Will’s?’ Mattie almost choked on her shock. ‘Good heavens, no. How could you think that?’

  ‘From where I’m sitting, anything’s possible.’ As his colour returned, he said, ‘I presume all this secrecy is to hide the father’s identity?’

  She nodded. ‘And the mother’s.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She patted the firm mound of her stomach. ‘This is a surrogate pregnancy.’

  Jake’s brow creased. His mouth opened and shut, but he didn’t speak. He said nothing to reassure Mattie, or to help her through this awkward disclosure.

  When the silence became unbearable, she drew a deep breath and dived in. ‘My best friend Gina—Will’s sister—had a condition called endometriosis and it was so bad that the doctors more or less ordered her to have a hysterectomy. It was just awful for her. She was only thirty, and she and her husband, Tom, who’s the loveliest guy, were planning a big family.’

  ‘They could have adopted,’ Jake commented dryly.

  ‘Yes, they certainly considered adoption.’

  He shot her a withering glance. ‘But you had a better idea.’

  Mattie let out a gloomy sigh. This was exactly the reaction she’d expected from Jake. He wasn’t going to spare her a moment’s sympathy or understanding. She lifted her gaze to the ceiling as she searched for the right words.

  ‘I think this is a much better option. It means Gina and Tom can have their own children. The doctors were able to use Gina’s eggs and Tom’s sperm to grow the embryos.’

  ‘So now their baby is growing in your body?’

  There was no avoiding the clear disapproval in
his voice.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Across the room, their gazes locked. Mattie saw the shocked light in Jake’s eyes. He could never understand. He believed she was crazy.

  But it was no comfort to realise she’d been right when she’d anticipated this kind of reaction. It was no comfort now to know she should never have become involved with him. No comfort to face the truth that she’d been weak at the one point in her life when she’d needed to be really strong.

  Almost wearily, Jake asked, ‘So, when did this happen?’

  ‘After you went back to Mongolia.’

  ‘But I suppose you already had the surrogacy planned? You knew on the night you slept with me that you were going to go ahead with this?’

  ‘Yes.’ Mattie’s chin lifted. ‘But I don’t see why you’re on your high horse, Jake. This pregnancy isn’t any of your business.’

  ‘Really?’ he asked coldly.

  ‘You know you never planned a future with me.’

  His face was suddenly stern and as hard as granite.

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Jake. You can’t carry on like a playboy and then disapprove because I want to give my friends the wonderful gift of two babies.’

  This time his mouth stayed open rather a long time. ‘Two babies?’ he repeated faintly.

  ‘Yes. Twins. A boy and a girl.’

  The news sent him lurching to his feet. His throat worked as he stared again at her stomach. He dragged tense fingers through his hair. ‘How could you do this to yourself, Mattie?’

  ‘I’ve already told you. I wanted to help Gina and Tom.’

  ‘Oh, yes, of course. I should have known.’ His smile was falsely bright. ‘Saint Matilda.’

  The words hit her like a slap. ‘You’ve been talking to Will.’

  Jake shrugged.

  ‘You have, haven’t you? You’ve been talking to Will Carruthers about me.’

  ‘I had to tell him that we’d met. After all, we were sharing his flat.’

  ‘And he told you he called me Saint Matilda?’

  ‘Appropriately, as it turns out.’

  Jake turned his back on her and stared through the window at the rain, hands thrust in pockets, jaw at a stubborn angle, while Mattie smarted. Had Will suggested that she was crazy too? Surely not. He was Gina’s brother.