Their Newborn Gift by Nikki Logan Read Free Book Online

thing keeping her here on Earth. Eventhrough the distraction of what he’d watched happening, he’d been conscious that, the last time she’d gripped his entwined fingers like that, they’d been pressing into a motel mattress.
    He tried not to go back there any more, not to cloud what should be a business arrangement, regardless of how he’d held those memories in the past.
    Now she was asking for him. He hurried ahead of the nurse back into the room, inexplicably moved by the expectant hope in Lea’s rapidly clearing gaze.
    ‘Reilly.’ She peered at him bright-eyed as he sank down next to her. ‘How’s Molly?’
    Molly. Why had he expected different? He tried not to be jealous of a sick four-year-old child simply because her mother’s world began and ended with her. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to be? Wasn’t that how love worked in normal families? But it didn’t make him feel any less like he was only valued—once again—for what he could provide, rather than who he was.
    Was his life destined to repeat itself for ever?
    Lea didn’t need the pregnancy test to tell her Reilly’s embryo had taken, but she’d done it anyway. She couldn’t wait the extra few days before her results come back from the city; it had been hard enough to wait the obligatory two weeks.
    She pressed her warm cheek to the cool tile of the bathroom wall and groaned. She’d forgotten this part—the soul-destroying nausea. It had started almost immediately when Molly had been conceived too. It was how she’d finally realised she was harbouring a tiny life. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.
    She slid her trembling hand around to her warm belly as if the tiny being in there could turn off the sickness at will. At least she got to do this privately, for two more weeks anyway, until Reilly’s first access visit. Lord knew there was precious little about this pregnancy she would experience by herself. Between her sisters’ over-enthusiastic involvement, the doctors’ very clinical interest and Reilly’s presumptions, there were barely any secrets left.
    Her satellite phone rang. She glanced at it with suspicion.
    Surely Anna wouldn’t ring back so soon, not after Lea had practically hung up on her to go and lose her breakfast? She frowned. Maybe Anna had set Sapphie onto her. It wouldn’t be the first time her two sisters had teamed up like cattle dogs to muster her in one particular direction: theirs. They wanted to know whether there was going to be a new Curran in the family.
    Lea sagged against the wall. There wouldn’t be, even if she was pregnant. But she hadn’t told them that. Some small part of her was counting on the fact that she had nine months to think of a solution.
    The phone rang on. She ignored it. Even her gorgeous half-sister was beyond her today. Sapphie deliriously in love was twice as exhausting as Sapphie on a regular day. There was only so much sunshine and flowers a girl could take when her body was rejecting its own stomach-lining.
    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