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No. Not if he’d tried.
They glared warily at each other, like a cattle dog and a steer sizing each other up. ‘Why me, Lea—of every man in that pub?’
Her eyes rounded—not the question she was expecting, obviously—but she pushed her shoulders back and answered. ‘You stood out for two reasons. You were—’
‘Male and stupid?’
Her eyes hardened. ‘Attractive but unhappy.’
An ugly laugh cracked through his lips. ‘Unhappy? I’d just won the champion’s cup, I was surrounded by women and was working my way through a keg of celebratory beer. Why would I be sad?’
If she noticed how he’d remembered so much about that night five years ago, she didn’t comment. Lucky; it would be tough to explain.
She barrelled on, ignoring the question. ‘I’d had…I wasn’t feeling the best that night.’ Something in her expression told him there was a heck of a lot more to that story. ‘And there was something in your eyes that I recognised. Some pain that spoke to me.’
He snorted to cover up how close to the mark she suddenly was. No way was he going there. ‘I’m guessing my inheritance probably spoke to you loudest. Is it speaking to you now?’
She gasped. Her nostrils flared and she tossed her thick hair back. ‘Have I asked you for money?’
‘I’m sure you’re getting round to it.’
‘I’m not here for that.’
‘Then why are you here? Why now, Lea, five years into my daughter’s life?’ There was that word again. It was going to take some getting used to.
Deep shadows crossed her eyes. ‘Believe me, I wouldn’t be here at all if I had a choice,’ she blazed up at him. ‘We were doing just fine, Molly and me.’
Were? His eyes drifted to the little girl, who had Max in a delighted stranglehold. The cat swished his tail impatiently but knew better than to lash out.
Lea took a deep breath. ‘My daughter’s dying, Reilly.’
Reilly staggered backwards, and his eyes fell on the little piece of innocence tangled around his cat. He’d only discovered her moments ago. Then Lea played a particularly stinking card.
‘Our daughter’s dying,’ she continued, her voice dead and tight. ‘She has aplastic anaemia; it’s a disease of her bone marrow. I’m not a tissue match.’
He turned back to her tortured face, his mind buzzing. ‘You want to know if I’m a match?’
She shook her head. ‘Even if you were, the success of adult-to-child transfer is too low.’
He ran stiff fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t understand. What do you want from me?’
She took a deep breath and locked her hazel eyes onto his. He’d never encountered anything quite as beautiful as the loving determination burning there. For a split second, he wished it burned there for him. When had anyone looked at him like that? Ever?
The silence screamed. And then she spoke.
‘I need you to get me pregnant again so we can save Molly.’
Lea had never seen someone shrink like that right before her eyes. Reilly sagged back against the timber posts enclosing the veranda.
‘Molly’s dying?’
Well, at least he was focussing on the most important part. ‘Gradually.’ Her voice cracked and she swallowed hard. ‘Yes.’
He looked at her. ‘Is she in pain?’
Her heart softened. Very definitely the most important part. Finding he was still capable of the compassion and kindness she remembered was a relief. He hadn’t shown much of it until just then. ‘Not always. But she’s exhausted perpetually, and she bleeds very easily.’ And four-year-olds were prone to tumbling over all the time.
He nodded, digesting. ‘And having a second child will help her—how?’
Lea was prepared for this question. ‘Cord blood. And placenta. The baby wouldn’t be touched at all.’ She threw that in hastily, knowing it was what she’d want to know in his position.
‘Stem cells?’
Lea nodded. His eyes swam with uncertainty. His breath came heavily. Then he pinned her with his gaze. ‘How does it work?’
Lea lightened like helium. Was he considering it? She rushed to answer, knowing this stuff back to front. ‘Cord-blood stem cells can become almost any other type of cell in the body, whatever needs repairing—bone, tissue, muscle. Marrow, in Molly’s case. She can grow healthy marrow. She can make healthy blood.’
‘Don’t they have banks for cord blood now?’
Lea clamped down her frustration. Did he not think she’d thought of those things? Her child’s life had been worth an ex-ploration into every medical possibility. And every moral one. But she held her temper, moderated her breath.
‘The genetic mix of people from regional north-west Australia is too specific—part-indigenous, part-Asian islander, part-European. There’s nothing like that gene mix sitting in cord-blood banks around the world.’
‘What about a cousin or something?’
Another deep breath. Sapphie had already offered her new baby’s cord. Anna’s infertility was none of his business. ‘Not closely related enough. This treatment requires the cells to be from a full sibling.’
He tipped anguished eyes up to her. ‘A second baby could have the same condition.’
Lea shook her head. ‘It’s not genetic.’
He considered that. ‘A baby conceived with an agenda?’
Lea laughed, an ugly, angry sound. ‘Believe it or not, this is the best available chance Molly has. Please, Reilly; I know it’s unconventional, and I know I am probably the last person in the world you would want to help, but I’m not asking for me. I’m asking for that little girl.’ They turned to watch Molly leap off the chair and limp after Max along the veranda. ‘Your little girl.’
Reilly swung an angry gaze back to her. ‘Now that it suits you.’
She deserved that. ‘Any little girl, then. Your body produces billions of cures for Molly in a week. I just need one. Just one, Reilly.’ She grabbed at his shirt, willing to beg if that was what it took. Anything for Molly. ‘To save a child’s life.’
She watched the anguish turn to anger. Disgust leached out at her and he pulled away from her. ‘Let me see if I understand this—you tricked me out of one child, and now you’re trying to emotionally blackmail me into fathering another one?’
‘No. This is not blackmail.’
‘Really? “Give me a child or this one dies”—what would you call it?’
She sucked in a wounded breath. ‘The last act of a desperate woman! I didn’t have to tell you, Reilly. I could have just arranged to bump into you somewhere, sweet-talked you into a repeat performance for old time’s sake.’
He snorted. ‘You overestimate your charms, Lea.’
She knew she deserved the pain that lanced through her. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I wanted to be honest this time. I couldn’t do it that way again.’
‘Why not? You applied yourself so diligently to the task last time. Or have you forgotten?’
Never. He’d been so gentle that night, as she had fallen apart from grief in his arms, grief from losing the father she’d never been able to love. Grief enough to make her do something entirely out of character while the rest of her family had been off burying him.
She might have shoved it far down into her subconscious, but no; she’d never forgotten that afternoon. ‘I’ve lived with that decision for five years, knowing it was the wrong thing to do. Knowing I should have told you.’
‘You didn’t exactly rush to rectify it.’
She dropped her eyes and cleared her thick throat. ‘I was ashamed. I thought…’
‘What?’
She looked over at her baby. ‘Maybe Molly is sick because of me. Because of the lie I told, every day I didn’t tell you about her.’
All the anger drained from his handsome face. ‘You don’t seriously believe that?’
‘I believe in a whole bunch of things I never used to.’ She dragged her eyes up to his and hated herself for the tears that started to fill them. ‘But this is my price to pay, not Molly’s. She’s barely started on life.’
Indecision skittered across his face, and something else: a deep sadness. ‘There must be some other way to help her.’
As if she hadn’t exhausted every possible alternative before debasing herself before the man she never thought she’d see again. Before exposing her shame. ‘Do you think I’d be here now if there was any other possible way?’
His bitter laugh physically hurt. ‘I know you wouldn’t.’
But he hadn’t had her escorted from the premises. Maybe there was hope yet. He cast his focus out over his vast property, hid his thoughts. Then his eyes returned, a fork of brown hair falling into his eyes as he shook his head. ‘To make a child just to save a child…’
‘What—seems wrong to you? You’ve been a father for three minutes, Reilly. I’ve lived with that little girl for five years. Carried her, then held her for over four years. Nothing is too great an ask.’
‘But a baby…’
‘I would love this child just as much as Molly. And she’d adore a brother or a sister to grow up with.’ Instead of having to create imaginary ones.
‘It just seems…’ He looked over at Molly.
Lea grabbed his sleeve desperately. ‘They throw them away, Reilly. They toss twenty millilitres of precious, life-saving stem cells into an incinerator once the baby is born and the cord is clamped—the cells that could save Molly. How is that right?’
His brown eyes smouldered like coals as he considered her. It pained her to see disgust in eyes so like her daughter’s.
After an age, he spoke. ‘I’m sorry Lea. I can’t help you.’
She staggered back, speechless. She’d been prepared for a humiliating, difficult battle, but in her wildest imaginings she’d never thought he’d simply say no. Not the man she remembered. The man whose eyes had plagued her dreams for two years until she’d finally banished him.
‘You won’t help?’ His lashes dropped. Lea gripped his shirt-front with both hands. ‘You don’t have to do a thing. You’ll never even see us again. There’s no expense, no obligation, I promise. Just the…’ She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘conception.’ ‘We’ve done it before. Please, Reilly. Please.’
‘Lea.’ He took her icy hands in his and backed her to the side of the house. ‘You barely know me, so I’ll forgive your assump-tion that I would willingly impregnate you with a spare-parts baby and then walk away from any child of mine. But you aren’t hearing me.’
His jaw was rigid. ‘I can’t help you, Lea. I can’t give you a sibling for Molly.’ He twisted her clenched fingers away from his body. ‘You’ll have to find another way.’
CHAPTER TWO
THERE were no other ways.
The reality of that had sunk in well and truly overnight, after she and Molly had returned home to Yurraji. The poor kid was crashed out in bed, exhausted from the excitement of an all day road-trip, her exertions climbing Reilly’s stairs and then running around after his cat. That was all it took these days. It was now morning and Molly had slept through from sunset the night before. It was the kind of sleep Lea could only dream of.
The sleep of the dead.
Lea’s eyes filled with tears. It seemed impossible that she had any left at all after a night of silent sobbing. Reilly had been her best and her last hope.
And he’d said no.
The sheer injustice burned like battery acid in her gut. That a stranger could decide whether her daughter lived or died, and that he’d done so in a matter of moments. She twisted her entwined fingers until they ached.
She’d already called Dr Koek and broken the bad news, and her specialist had immediately gone into super-supportive, damage-control mode, citing statistics to show that cord blood from an unrelated, unmatched baby could work.
Statistically.
Maybe.
Lea let her head drop to the railing surrounding her house paddock. She would try unrelated cord blood—of course she would, as many times as the specialists would allow—but something deep down inside her told her it wasn’t going to work. This was the price she would pay—Molly would pay—for her past mistake.
Her sisters would pray to God and the universe, respec-tively, but Lea begged karma: please, please do not make my baby pay for something I did. Punish me.
Punish me.
A small mob of grazing kangaroos in the next paddock stood tall and looked east to the highway.
In the same moment, Lea realised there was no greater pun-ishment for a mother than to watch her daughter die. And then live a long, miserable life with that knowledge. Her stomach heaved.
The roos lurched into flight, springing away and covering the large paddock in a few easy bounds. Lea frowned and turned in the direction they’d been looking. She saw the advancing plume of red dust drifting up over the kurrajongs long before she heard the engine.
Moments later, a battered Land Rover picked its way down her rocky drive. She recognised it instantly and her gut lurched. The last thing she’d done before roaring out of Minamurra’s beautiful heart, right past this very vehicle, was to hurl a scrap of paper with her phone number and address at Reilly. She’d had no expectation that he would use it, and certainly not within fourteen hours. Not given the disgusted, pained expression on his face when she’d finally bundled up Molly and left.
Why was he here? She refused to let herself hope. He’d been brutally clear yesterday afternoon. She hardened her heart in anticipation of his next attack.
He parked his vehicle then loped towards her, looking as fresh as if he’d just stepped out of a shower, not driving since before dawn. Her mind whizzed back five years to the memory of him stepping out of the motel bathroom, unashamed and glorious. She forced herself to remember the man he really was.
‘Lea.’
‘Something you forgot to say?’ Some organ you forgot to rip out and pulverise under your boot?
His eyes flicked over her shoulder, looking at the horses grazing in the paddock behind her. Then they slid back to hers. ‘I came to see if you were all right.’ He must have realised how utterly ridiculous that sounded, and he hurried on. ‘And to explain. In case I wasn’t clear.’
She straightened against the cool of the morning; it wouldn’t stay that way for long. It would be forty Celsius by mid-morning. ‘You were perfectly clear. You won’t help Molly. I get it.’
He sighed. ‘Not won’t, Lea. Can’t.’
A sleepless night and complete emotional collapse had left her preciously short of patience. ‘Philosophical objections, I presume?’ she snapped. She’d been prepared for that; stem cells were a touchy subject all round. The only people she’d got absolute acceptance from were her specialist and her sisters.
His jaw flexed. ‘Physiological objections.’
Lea frowned.
‘Saying you took me by surprise yesterday is an understatement,’ he went on. ‘I was completely pole-axed. I wasn’t thinking straight. I should have stopped you when you took off—explained.’
He looked uncomfortable. Critically so. His eyes darkened a shade. ‘I was diagnosed two years ago. It has a long medical name, but the short version is that I sustained a string of groin injuries riding the broncos over the years, and my immune system kicked in to protect itself from the damage. But the antibodies didn’t only battle the infection.’
A cold chill crept through her. Lea knew all about the immune system from studying Molly’s condition.
‘The antibodies attack my sperm as though they’re foreign objects.’ He took an enormous breath. ‘I’m sterile, Lea.’
The dramatic way he paled as the word crossed his lips told Lea it was the first time he’d said it out aloud. Her mind spun. ‘But Molly?’
‘The specialists weren’t able to estimate how long ago it started.’
Not five years ago, evidently.
Sterile. Her first thought should have been for her daughter. Saying no because you couldn’t, or because you wouldn’t, was still a ‘no’. The ‘why’ made little difference to Molly.
But all the difference in the world to Reilly.
She thought about the man with the sexy swagger she’d met in the pub and tried to imagine him sterile. She remembered his potent, muscular body arching, taut, over hers and tried to imagine it barren. She looked at him now, really looked, at the extra lines in his skin, the caution in his manner, the shadow behind his eyes.
Double horror hit her. For Molly and for Reilly. That such a vibrant, virile man should be robbed of the chance to make children, the most fundamental biological right. He’d had tragedy in his life too.
‘I’m sorry, Reilly.’
He pushed past to walk towards the horses. ‘I’m not interested in your pity; I simply wanted you to understand my position.’
As if she could have missed it. Lea closed her eyes. She’d exposed Molly, brought this man back into her life, for nothing. He was powerless to help.
Her voice was as quiet as the morning. ‘I understand.’
‘What will you do?’
She shook her head. ‘We’ll try regular cord blood. Hope. Pray.’ Her voice cracked on that word.
‘That won’t work?’
Lea sighed, tight and small. It hurt her chest. ‘I don’t think so, no. But it’s something.’
Reilly stared hard at her. ‘She’s a great kid.’
It almost killed her to deliver a flat smile. ‘She is. The best.’
She stepped up to the paddock fence as one of her horses walked over. As always, she drew comfort from Goff’s softness and courage from his warmth. She could feel Reilly’s eyes on her through the silence. He stepped closer behind her.
‘Lea, if there was…’ He seemed uncertain; it didn’t suit him. He cleared his throat. ‘If there was a way despite my…’
Lea’s radar began to bleep. But, no, she’d felt like this walking up his stairs, and look how that had worked out. She forced down the little spike of hope, turned to him with a pur-posefully bland expression.
His eyes raked over her, wondering, worrying. ‘I told myself I wanted nothing to do with you. Even for Molly,’ he said. ‘But I lay there last night thinking about this little pixie of a kid and how she looks just like me at her age. And I realised I couldn’t do nothing. She’s my daughter. My blood. I spent most of the night online researching her condition.’
His tanbark eyes burned with intensity and he shook his head with disbelief. ‘I didn’t tell you about my situation so you could feel sorry for me. That’s the last thing I want. But you need to understand this is not a small thing you’re asking. Quite apart from the philosophical considerations, as you so aptly put it, I just don’t have millions of cells to work with. You’re not asking for something minor.’
That made it sound like…Her heart started to thud.
He broke a long silence. ‘When investigations first began, one of my many medicos recommended freezing a sample for later comparison, assuming we’d have something later to compare with. They used most of it up running a fortune’s worth of tests.’
Lea’s breath evaporated. Most.
He turned and looked at her. ‘But there is a freezer in a lab in Perth and it contains one single remaining sample, about the size of one of Molly’s fingernails.’
Lea’s heart lurched to a halt.
‘If it’s like the others, it won’t have a lot in it, but it may just have enough. Enough to help Molly.’ He stared at her in silence while her mouth opened and shut like a baby barramundi.
Words simply would not come, trapped behind a lump the size of a football in her throat. She had a sudden flash of a teenaged Molly—healthy and happy, her whole life ahead of her—cantering a greying Goff around the paddock. And Reilly, the man with only one shot at fatherhood, who was willing to spend it on a daughter he’d only just discovered. A daughter whose parentage he’d not even asked for hard proof of, so strong was his instinctive recognition that she was his.
Lea pushed up onto her toes and threw her arms around Reilly’s surprised neck. For a moment, the very barest of moments, his arms crept around her and a fluttering sense of rightness ghosted through her. But then his hands slid upwards, gripped her shoulders and pushed her firmly away, his eyes locking onto hers. She felt instantly cold.
‘I’m doing this for Molly. Not for you. I have no interest in helping you beyond what it does for my daughter.’
She ignored the hurt snapping at her heels like a cattle dog, accustomed to forcing down personal pain. Her vision blurred with tears. ‘I understand.’
‘And it’s not without a price. There’s something I want in return.’
‘Anything.’
His dark eyes glittered. ‘Careful, you don’t know what I’m asking yet.’
There wasn’t a single possibility she hadn’t thought about before driving to Minamurra, a compromise she wasn’t willing to make. She’d already given him her body, albeit in a moment of grief-stricken insanity. There was nothing he could ask that she wasn’t ready to grant. For Molly.
She tossed her head back and met his gaze head-on. ‘What do you want?’
‘First, I want to be able to see Molly regularly. I want to be part of her life.’
Lea took a deep breath. Since he was the one saving Molly’s life, that wasn’t unexpected. She would watch him like a hawk until she could determine whether he was a man like her father…or something else.
She nodded slowly. ‘Agreed.’
Reilly looked at her, his dark gaze unfathomable, probing, intense. The hairs on Lea’s neck stood to attention and her skin tingled.
‘And second…’
Here it comes. He was going to ask her for a physical com-mitment. A tiny part of her wasn’t dreading it. She remembered every moment from five years ago and the primal haven that was his embrace.
‘…I want custody of the child we make together.’
Gravity suddenly altered its fundamental principles. Lea would have gone down if not for Reilly’s iron grip on her upper arm.
‘Given the sacrifice I’m making, it seems a reasonable trade,’ he said. ‘You get Molly’s cordblood, I get an heir.’
CHAPTER THREE
LEA’S skin prickled despite the morning heat. To find hope only to have it ripped violently away again…Her hands shook. Her voice was strained.
‘No.’
‘Lea, think about—’
‘No!’ She marched off toward her house, heart thumping painfully. She needed to be close to Molly right now. Badly. How could he think, even for a moment, that she would…could…? Her chest tightened like a slingshot. She spun round, wounded beyond measure that he thought that of her. ‘You cannot ask that. It’s not fair.’
‘How fair was it to rob me of a child? To bring her to me only when you needed something?’
‘I had no choice!’
‘Neither do I, Lea. You’re handing me a miracle. How can I just shrug that off?’ He pursued her across the house-paddock, snagged her arm and spun her back round to him. ‘I remember something you said when we were together, about how discon-nected you felt from the world.’
‘I said way too much that weekend.’ Her determination to keep her distance had lasted all of an hour. After that first sweet time together, she’d opened up to him like he was her confes-sor, believing she’d never see him again.
‘I don’t have to tell you about loneliness, Lea. Surely you can understand why your request might be like a beacon in the darkness? The chance I believed I’d never have?’
Lea’s chest lifted and fell with her tumbling thoughts. Of course she could understand it. Molly had been her own beacon, even the very idea of Molly. It was why it had been so easy for her subconscious to subvert her morals five years ago and keep the pregnancy a secret. Her father had done such a prize job on her trust in men—in anyone—she’d given up any hope of meeting someone to have a child with. To have one simply gifted to her…It had felt very fated. Divine.
Was that how he was feeling? Damn him. ‘Reilly, you’re asking me to give you my child.’
‘And you’re asking me to give you mine.’