The Bridesmaid's Baby (8 page)

‘Yes,’ she said, but a shiver rushed over her skin and she wrapped her arms around her as she watched Will walk away.

At the bend in the track he turned back and lifted his hand to wave. Then he smiled. And kept walking.

He hadn’t been totally crazy, Will told himself as he strode back along the track beside the creek. He hadn’t committed to a full-on relationship with his brother’s ex. He’d simply offered to help her to have a baby.

This was purely and simply about the baby.

The baby Lucy longed for.

But it meant he’d be a father and he really liked that idea.

He’d be able to watch the baby grow. He’d help out with finances—school fees, pony club, whatever the kid needed. And who knew? Maybe, some day in the future, the kid might take an interest in Tambaroora, if it still belonged to the Carruthers family.

But the big thing was, the lucky child would have Lucy as its mother.

If any woman deserved to be a mother, Lucy did.

Will had dated a lot of women, but he couldn’t think of anyone who was more suitable than Lucy McKenty to be the mother of his child.

And it wasn’t such a crazy situation. Being good friends with his baby’s mother was a vast improvement on some of the unhappy broken family set-ups that he’d heard his workmates complain about.

But the details of the baby’s conception caused a road bump.

Will came to a halt as he thought about that. He snagged another grass stalk and chewed at it thoughtfully.

Any way he looked at this situation, leaping into bed with Lucy McKenty was stretching the boundaries of friendship.

But it was highly unlikely that she would agree to sex. Apart from the fact that Will was the brother of the man she’d planned to marry, and setting their friendship issues aside, Lucy was a vet. She used IVF all the time in her practice and she was bound to look on it as the straightforward and practical solution.

Except that she’d tried the clinical route once and it hadn’t worked.

Which brought him back to the alternative. With Lucy.

Damn. He could still remember their long ago kiss on the veranda.

He should have forgotten it by now. He’d tried so hard to forget, but he could remember every detail of those few sweet minutes—the way Lucy had felt so alive and warm in his arms, the way she’d smelled of summer and tasted of every temptation known to man.

Hell. There was no contest, was there?

IVF was most definitely their sanest, safest option.

Lucy was in a daze as she walked back to her ute. She couldn’t believe Will had given her suggestion serious thought. It was astonishing that he was actually prepared to help her to have her baby.

She couldn’t deny she was tempted.

Tempted? Heavens, she was completely sold on the whole idea of having a dear little baby fathered by Will.

It was the means to this end that had her in a dither.

Sex with Will was so totally not a good idea. The very thought of it filled her with foolish longings and multiple anxieties.

She’d loved Will for so long now, it was like a chronic illness that she’d learned to adjust to. But to sleep with him would be like dancing on the edge of a cliff. She would be terrified of falling.

If only IVF was simpler.

She’d hated the process last time. All the tests and injections and clinical procedures and then the huge disappointment of failure. Not to mention the expense and the fact that, if she wanted to try again, she’d have to go back on that long waiting list.

Oh, man.
Her thoughts went round and round, like dairy cows on a milking rotator. One minute she rejected the whole idea of having Will’s baby, the next she was desperately trying to find a way to make it happen.

Could it work?

Could it possibly work?

Lucy remembered again how she’d felt when she’d seen Will at the wedding rehearsal, standing at the front of the church with tiny Mia in his arms. Just thinking about it made her teary. He would be such a fabulous father.

She drove home, but when she was supposed to be pre
paring dinner she was still lost in reverie, going over and over the same well worn thoughts.

She found herself standing at her kitchen sink, thinking about Will again. Still. She caught sight of her reflection in the window and was shocked to see that she was cradling a tea towel as if it were a baby. And her face was wet with tears.

The picture cut her to the core and, in that moment, she knew she had no choice. She wanted Will’s baby more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life.

That precious baby’s existence was a hundred times more important than the method of its conception.

Tomorrow, she should tell Will she’d made a decision.

Early next morning, however, there was a telephone call.

‘Is that the young lady vet?’

‘Yes,’ Lucy replied, crossing her fingers. Calls this early on a Monday morning usually meant trouble.

‘This is Barney May,’ the caller said. ‘I need someone to come and look at my sheep. Four of them have gone lame on me.’

Lucy suppressed a sigh. Lame sheep usually meant foot abscesses or, worse still, footrot, which was highly contagious. There’d been plenty of rain this spring so the conditions were ripe for an outbreak.
Darn it.

‘Could you come straight away?’ Barney asked. ‘I don’t want a problem spreading through my whole herd.’

‘Hang on. I’ll have to check my schedule.’

She scanned through the surgery’s diary for the day’s appointments. It was the usual assortment—small animals with sore ears or eyes or skin conditions; a few vaccinations and general health checks for new puppies and kittens—nothing that her assistant couldn’t handle.

‘I’ll be there in about an hour,’ she told Barney.

‘Good, lass. You know where I live—about ten kilo-metres out of town, past the sale yards on the White Sands Road.’

An hour later Lucy knew the worst. The sheep indeed had footrot and it had spread from the neighbouring property via a broken fence.

After paring the hooves of the unlucky sheep and prescribing footbaths, she had to continue her inspection and, all too soon, she discovered more evidence that the disease was spreading beyond the Mays’ property, thanks to another farmer who’d really let his fences go.

Which spelled potential disaster.

Without question, it would mean a full week of hard work for Lucy. Her assistant would have to man the surgery while she toured the district, visiting all the farms as she tried to gauge just how far the problem ranged.

Each night she was exhausted and when she arrived home she had to face the surgery work that her assistant couldn’t handle. By the time she crawled into bed she was too tired to tackle a complicated phone call to Will.

And, because the Carruthers family farm was at the opposite end of the district from the initial footrot outbreak, it was Friday afternoon before she got to Tambaroora.

It was a beautiful property with wide open paddocks running down to the creek and a grand old sandstone homestead, bang in the centre, surrounded by a green oasis of gardens. Lucy could never think about Tambaroora without seeing the garden filled with summer colour and smelling roses, jasmine, lavender and rosemary.

By the time she arrived, Will and his father had already completed a thorough inspection of their herd and they
reported that their sheep were in good condition, but Lucy still needed to make spot sample checks.

Will hefted the heavy beasts she selected with obvious ease, and he kept them calm while she examined their hooves. She’d been dealing with farmers all week and she knew he made a difficult task look incredibly easy.

‘For someone who doesn’t think of himself as a farmer, you handle sheep well,’ she said.

‘Will’s surprised us,’ his father commented wryly. ‘We didn’t think he had it in him.’

A smile twisted Will’s mouth as his father trudged off to attend to a ewe that had recently delivered twin lambs.

‘I meant it,’ Lucy told him. ‘Not all farmers are good at handling stock. You’re a natural.’

He looked amused. ‘Maybe I was just trying to impress you.’

She rolled her eyes, but that was partly to cover the attack of nerves she felt at the thought of telling him she’d reached a decision about the baby. Her stomach was as jumpy as a grasshopper in a jar as he helped her to gather up her gear, then walked beside her to her ute.

‘Do you have to hurry away?’ he asked as she stowed her things. ‘I was hoping we could talk.’

‘About the baby idea?’ She spoke as casually as she could.

There was no one around, but Will lowered his voice. ‘Yes, I’ve been thinking it over.’

Her heart jumped like a skittish colt and she searched his face, trying to guess what he was going to tell her. If he’d decided to scrap the baby idea, she wasn’t sure she could bear the disappointment. She’d become totally entranced by the thought of their adorable infant and she’d convinced herself that this time it would work.

With Will as her baby’s father, she was confident of success.

She could be a mother. At last.

She forced a smile and willed herself to speak calmly. ‘So, what have you decided?’

W
ILL’S
eyes were almost silver in the outdoor light, so beautiful they stole Lucy’s breath. ‘I’d like to go ahead,’ he said. ‘I think you should try for a baby.’

‘Wow.’

‘So, are you keen too?’

‘I am, yes.’

He smiled. ‘Why don’t we go for a walk?’ He nodded towards the dark line of trees at the far end of a long, shimmering paddock of grain.

‘Down by the creek again?’ she asked, smiling.

‘Why not?’

Why not, indeed? It had always been
their
place.

As Lucy walked beside Will, they chatted about her busy week and she tried to stay calm, to take in the special beauty of the late afternoon.

Cicadas were humming in the grass and the sinking sun cast a pretty bronzed glow over the wheat fields.

She tried to take in the details—the tracks that ants had made in an old weathered fence post, the angle of the shadows that stretched like velvet ribbons across the paddocks.

She really needed to stay calm.

It was ridiculous to be so churned up just talking to Will,
but now that they’d agreed to go ahead with this baby plan they had to discuss the more delicate details, like the method of conception.

How exactly did a girl tell a truly gorgeous man she’d fancied for years that she’d carefully weighed up the pros and cons and had decided, on balance, to have sex with him?

As they neared the creek she saw two wedge-tailed eagles hovering over a stick nest that they’d woven in the fork of a dead tree.

‘I hope they don’t plan to dine on our lambs,’ Will said, watching them.

She might have replied, but they’d reached the shelter of the trees and her stomach was playing leapfrog with her heart.

It was so quiet down here. Too quiet. This part of the creek formed a still and silent pool and now, in the late afternoon, the birds had stopped calling and twittering. It seemed as if the whole world had stopped and was waiting to listen in to Lucy and Will’s conversation.

‘We need rain,’ Will said as they came to a halt on the creek bank. ‘The water level’s dropping.’

Rain?
How could he talk about rain? ‘Now you’re talking like a farmer.’

He pulled a comical face. ‘Heaven forbid.’

Lucy drew a tense breath. ‘Will, about the fine-tuning—’

‘Lucy, I think you’re probably right—’

They had both started talking at the same moment and now they stopped. Their gazes met and they laughed self-consciously.

‘You first,’ Will said.

‘No, you tell me what you were going to say. What am I right about?’

‘IVF. I know it’s what you’d prefer and I think we should go that route.’

‘Really?’

Oh, heavens. She hadn’t sounded disappointed, had she?

Will’s blue shirt strained at the shoulder seams as he shrugged. ‘I can understand that it makes total sense to you and I’m prepared to do whatever’s necessary.’

Lucy gulped as she took this in.

He watched her with a puzzled smile. ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

‘Oh, I…I am. Yes, I’m really happy.’ In truth, she couldn’t believe the piercing sense of anticlimax she felt. ‘I’m just surprised,’ she said, working hard to cover her ridiculous disappointment. ‘I spent the whole week worrying that you were going to back out altogether.’

Dropping her gaze to the ground, she hooked her thumbs into the back pockets of her jeans and kicked at a loose stone.

‘So what were you going to say about the fine-tuning?’ Will asked.

Lucy’s face flamed. Now that Will had agreed to IVF, there was no point in telling him her decision. He’d never fancied her in that way, so it would be a huge challenge to become intimate.

‘Lucy?’

‘It doesn’t matter now.’

‘Why not?’ Will swallowed abruptly and his eyes burned her.

‘Honestly, Will, it’s really great that you’d like to help with IVF. I’m very grateful. I couldn’t be more pleased.’

His grey eyes were searching her, studying her. Suddenly they narrowed thoughtfully and then widened with surprise. ‘Don’t tell me you’d come around to…to the other option?’

‘No, no. If you want to use IVF, that’s good,’ she said.

‘I didn’t exactly say it’s what I
want.’
A nervous smile flickered in his face, then vanished. ‘I was trying to look at this from your point of view. I thought it’s what you’d prefer.’

‘Thanks, Will. I appreciate that.’ Lucy bit her lip to stop herself from saying more.

He stood very still, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, and she knew he was watching her while she continued to avoid his gaze.

‘Or are you actually worried about IVF?’ he asked cautiously. ‘I know it didn’t work for you last time.’

Lucy drew a sharp breath, and let it out slowly. Without meeting his gaze, she said, ‘I can’t say I’m in love with the idea of going through all those clinical procedures again.’

‘The alternative is much simpler.’

‘In some ways.’ She knew her face must be turning bright pink.

To her surprise, Will looked as worried as she felt. He pointed to a smooth shelf of shady rock hanging over the water. ‘Look, why don’t we sit down for a bit?’

‘Very well,’ she agreed rather primly.

Despite the shade from overhead trees, the rock still held some of the day’s warmth and they sat with their feet dangling over the edge, looking down into the green, still water. They’d sat like this many times, years ago, when they were school friends.

How innocent those days seemed now.

A childish chant from Lucy’s schooldays taunted her.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Lucy with a baby carriage.

Now she and Will were putting an entirely new spin on that old refrain.

She picked up a fallen leaf and rolled it against her thigh, making a little green cylinder. ‘Are we mad, Will? Is it crazy for us to be trying for a baby without love or marriage?’

She sensed a sudden vibrating tension in him, saw his Adam’s apple slide up and down in his throat. He picked up a small stone and lobbed it into the water. ‘I don’t think it’s a crazy idea. Not if you’re quite sure it’s what you want.’

She let the leaf uncurl. ‘I definitely want to have a baby, and I really like the idea of having you as the father.’ She rolled the leaf again into a tight little cylinder.

‘But sex is a problem,’ Will suggested and his voice was rough and gravelly, so that the statement fell between them like the stone he’d dropped in the water.

‘It could be.’ Lucy concentrated on the leaf in her hand.

‘I know I’m not Josh,’ Will said quietly.

Her head jerked up. With a stab of guilt, she realised she hadn’t been thinking about Josh at all. Poor Will. Did he think he had to live up to some romantic ideal set by his brother?

If only he knew the truth.

But if she told him how she really felt about him, he might be more worried than ever.

No, this rather unconventional baby plan would actually work best if they approached it as friends.

Lucy looked down at Will’s hand as it rested against the rock. It was a strong workmanlike hand, with fine sun-bleached hairs on the back. She placed her hand on top of his. ‘I don’t want you to be like Josh,’ she said.

His throat worked.

‘But this might be too hard,’ she said. ‘Friends don’t usually jump into bed together.’

‘But they might,’ he said gently, ‘if it was a means to an end. The best means to a good end.’

She sucked in a breath, looked up at the sky.

The best means to a good end.

A baby.

‘That’s a nice way of putting it,’ she said, already picturing the sweet little baby in her arms. Oh, heavens, she could almost feel the warm weight of it, feel its head nestled in the crook of her arm, see its tiny hands. Would they be shaped like Will’s?

‘So what do you think?’ he asked.

Lucy nodded thoughtfully. ‘You’re right. It’s a means to an end.’ After a bit, she said, ‘It would probably be best if we took a strictly medical approach.’

Will frowned. ‘Medical?’

‘I can get ovulation predictors.’ She was gaining confidence now. ‘I’ll need to let you know exactly when I’m ovulating.’

His eyes widened in surprise.

‘You do know there are only a very few days each month when a woman is fertile, don’t you?’

‘Ah, yes, of course,’ he said, recovering quickly. He sent her a puzzled smile. ‘So what happens when it’s all systems go? Will you send me a text message?’ His smile deepened. ‘Or fly a green flag above your door?’

Lucy saw his smile and she felt a massive chunk of tension flow out of her. To her surprise, she found herself smiling too. ‘Oh, why don’t I just go the whole hog and place a notice in the Post Office window?’

Now Will was chuckling. ‘Better still, you could take out a full page ad in the
Willowbank Chronicle.’

Suddenly, it was just like old times. Laughter had always been a hallmark of their friendship.

‘What about hiring Frank Pope, the crop duster?’ Lucy suggested. ‘He’s a dab hand at sky-writing. Can’t you just see it written in the sky? Will Carruthers, tonight’s the night.’

Laughing with her, Will scratched at his jaw. ‘That’s a bit too personal. What about a subtle message in code?’

‘All right…let me see…something like…the hen is broody?’

‘In your case it would have to be the Goose.’

Lucy snorted. ‘Oh, yes. A broody goose.’

She collapsed back onto the rock, laughing.

Their conversation was ridiculous, but it was so therapeutic to be able to joke about such a scary subject.

Her anxiety was still there, just under the surface, but she felt much better as she lay on the warm rock, still chuckling as she looked up at the sky through a lacework of green branches.

She and Will would have to stay relaxed if this plan was to have any chance of working. Perhaps everything would be all right if they could both keep their sense of humour.

Will’s mobile phone rang a week later, when he was sitting at the breakfast table with his parents. Quickly, he checked the caller ID, saw Lucy’s name and felt a jolting thud in the centre of his chest.

‘Excuse me,’ he mumbled, standing quickly. ‘I’ll take this outside.’

His heart thumped harder than a jackhammer as he went out onto the back porch, letting the flyscreen door swing shut behind him.

‘Good morning.’ His voice was as rough as sandpaper.

‘Will, it’s Lucy.’

‘Hi. How are you?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

There was an awkward pause—a stilted silence broken only by a kookaburra’s laughter and the whistle from the kettle in the kitchen as it came to the boil. Will’s heartbeats drummed in his ears.

Lucy said, ‘I was wondering if you were free to come to dinner tonight.’

‘Tonight?’

‘Yes, would that be OK?’

Will was shaking, which was crazy. This entire past week had been crazy. He’d been on tenterhooks the whole time, waiting for Lucy’s call. He’d actually lent a hand with drenching the sheep, much to his father’s amazement. He’d enjoyed the work, even though he’d originally made the offer simply to keep himself busy, to take his mind off Lucy.

‘Sure,’ he said now, walking further from the house, out of his parents’ earshot. ‘Dinner would be great. I’ll bring a bottle of wine. What would you prefer? White or red?’

‘Well, I’m making lasagne, so perhaps red?’

‘Lasagne? Wow.’ As far as he could remember, cooking had never been Lucy’s forte. Perhaps she’d taken a course? ‘Red it is, then.’

‘See you around seven?’

‘I’ll be there.’ And then, because he couldn’t help it, ‘Goose?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is this—?’

‘Yes,’ she said quickly before he could find the right words.

Will swallowed. ‘OK, then. See you at seven.’

He strolled back into the kitchen, body on fire, affecting a nonchalance he was far from feeling.

‘I won’t be home for dinner this evening,’ he told his parents.

His mother smiled. ‘So you’re going out? That’s nice, dear. It’s good to see you catching up with your old friends.’ She was always happy when she thought he was seeing someone. She’d never given up hope of more grandchildren.

Will’s father looked more puzzled than pleased. This was the longest stretch his son had spent at home since he’d left all those years ago. Will knew they were both surprised, and expecting that he would take off again at a moment’s notice.

But Gina and Tom’s babies were to be christened as soon as Mattie and Jake returned from their honeymoon, so it was an excellent excuse for him to stay on.

As he tackled the remainder of his bacon and eggs he wondered what his parents would think if they knew he planned to help Lucy McKenty to become pregnant before he headed away again.

Half an hour before Will’s expected arrival, Lucy’s kitchen looked like a crime site, splattered from end to end with tomato purée and spilt milk, eggshells and flour.

She wanted everything to be so perfect for tonight and she’d actually had a brand-new whizz-bang stove installed. She’d even taken a whole afternoon off work to get this dinner ready for Will.

So far, however, the only part of the meal that looked edible was the pineapple poached in rum syrup, which was precisely one half of the dessert.

How on earth had she thought she could manage stewed
fruit and a baked custard as well as lasagne? She’d never been much of a cook and these dishes were so fiddly.

But now—
thank heavens
—everything was finally in the oven, although she still had to clean up the unholy mess and have a shower and change her clothes and put on make-up and set the table. She’d meant to hunt in the garden for flowers for the table as well, but the dinner preparations had taken her far too long.

She was never going to be ready in time.

Guys never noticed flowers anyway.

In a hectic whirl she dashed about the kitchen, throwing rubbish into plastic bags, wiping bench tops and spills on the floor, hurling everything else pell-mell into the dishwasher to be stacked again properly later.