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screening covers at the foot of the bed.
    ‘Jeez, buy a girl a drink first,’ Lea said, over-loudly, then started to giggle. Not in a good way.
    Reilly stood. ‘Okay—essential personnel, stay. Everyone else, out.’ He was counting on everyone in the room assuming he was the loving husband, that he had a right to issue orders on Lea’s behalf. Apparently they did. Half the room left with baleful glares, only the chief doctor and two nursing attendants staying. Both of them kept a respectful distance.
    At last.
    Lea didn’t look at him but he was sure he heard her voice thank him.
    The tiny whisper made him inexplicably tight-chested. If he hadn’t bullied his way in here, she would have been doing this completely alone. Where the blazes were her sisters? Had she even told them this was happening? What kind of a crazy family did she come from, anyway? Just when he thought families didn’t come worse than his own.
    He shook his head. Neither the Currans or the Martins could be stranger than the family he and Lea were in the midst of making—one child conceived by accident, a second through negotiation, despite him having vowed all his life never to replicate the mistakes of his past.
    The child they were making today might grow up motherless, but there were worse things. Like growing up with a mother who created a child for what it could give her, rather than to bring a life into the world for its own sake.
    A mother like his own.
    Lea mumbled incoherently and Reilly forced his gaze back to her. Motives aside, this woman had brought him the miracle of fatherhood, not once, but twice. Long after he’d given up all hope of ever experiencing it. For that, she deserved his tolerance, if not his friendship. He might not like her values very much, but Lea Curran had unintentionally given him the biggest gift of his life. Two children.
    The doctor caught his eye and nodded. Reilly leaned in close to Lea’s ear and tightened his hand on hers. ‘They’re going to start now. Are you ready?’
    Her glazed eyes met his and she nodded, just before her lashes slipped down to rest on her cheeks.
    ‘Wake up, Lea, you’ll want to see this.’
    He risked a gentle stroke on her flushed cheek, just below where her lashes lay like freshly cut grass. She curled her face into his fingers and he gently ran his knuckles across her perfect skin, memory surging back. God help him if she remembered this later. ‘Open your eyes, Lea. Look at our baby.’
    The word ‘baby’ brought her focus hurtling back, as though she’d suddenly realised what was happening. That she was being implanted, right now, and that the last man in the world she would want watching was here, holding her hand.
    He let his hand drop with the pretence of taking her chin and turning her face towards the large-screen monitor. Every eye in the room was fixed on that screen, and the blurry shapes on it suddenly started to make sense to both of them.
    Lea’s eyes widened as far as his. ‘That’s my uterus.’
    He couldn’t help the heat that leached up his throat. There was something so intensely personal about looking at a woman’s womb. Fortunately, all eyes were on the screen, where a long, thin curette delivered the sole viable embryo into its thick, warm bosom of flesh.
    ‘Oh, my God.’ Lea said it. Or maybe he had. Her fingers found their way to his again.
    A tiny dark mass trembled on the end of the glass straw for two heartbeats and then broke free, like an astronaut launching weightlessly into space, suspended in the jelly-like delivery medium. Reilly’s eye locked onto that dark mass as the curette withdrew. His throat tightened up.
    The specialist straightened. ‘All finished. Well done, Lea.’
    From the corner of his eye he saw Lea glance up at him, and watched him staring at the tiny speck on-screen. ‘It’s amazing,’ he mumbled, and then his eyes dropped to hers and rested therea moment. This was as close as he’d been to her for five years.