Beauty and the Wolf / Their Miracle Twins (38 page)

Not that she was, truly, family. She didn’t really have any of those left. Not that counted.

Tears prickled dangerously. God, where was Flynn?

But she’d have to get through crises all on her lonesome after she went back to England. Better to start now. ‘Okay,’ she croaked. ‘What do you need me to do?’

Alice took her through the basics of what was required, then disappeared into the kitchen briefly to wash her hands. When she returned they were bright red from the hot water and scrubbing. Denise stood by anxiously, waiting to be of more use.

Bel looked away as Alice did what she needed to do. Wow. If a few fingers were that uncomfortable going in, what were two little people going to feel like coming out …?

Alice’s voice drew her eyes back. ‘Relax, Bel. Remember your antenatal information. Your body is built to accommodate this process. Everything’s going to loosen up and expand. Babies have been slipping down birth canals for millennia.’

Slipping. That sounded good. Slipping sounded easy. And quick.

‘Liar.’

Alice chuckled and stared somewhere up towards the second storey of the house as she let her fingers do the walking. Assessing, measuring. Concentrating. The moment Bel felt the resistance of her body and saw the flare of confusion in Alice’s eyes, she knew she’d forgotten something major.
Major
-major.

Hymen.

The one Dr Cabanallo had left intact out of whimsy. The one the OBGYN told her would be taken care of by her body’s own natural changes when the birth process got fully underway.

The one tellingly still intact.

Which meant two awful things for Bel. First—she groaned deep down inside—that meant the birth process wasn’t even fully underway yet. And second …

She and Flynn were well and truly busted.

Months of lies fluttered like dead moths down around her prostrate form on the living room floor.

‘Mum?’ Denise asked anxiously, seeing Alice’s frozen demeanour. ‘Everything okay?’

The older woman didn’t take her eyes from Bel’s but they narrowed slightly. ‘Everything’s good. We have a way to go though. No need to rush. Denise, love, I’d kill for a cup of tea, if you wouldn’t mind?’

More tea. The country cure-all. Except it wasn’t going to cure this. Nothing was going to undo the expression on Alice’s face. As soon as Denise was out of earshot, the Bradley family matriarch leaned forward. ‘Is there something you want to tell me, Bel?’

Tears rushed forward. ‘I can’t.’

They narrowed further until they were little more than slits. ‘Why not?’

Because you’ll all hate me.

Because I’m a liar wanting to steal your only great-grandchildren away.

Because I’ve dragged your already fallen angel down even further into hell with me.

‘It’s not my story to tell.’ Her body spasmed again briefly and she flinched. ‘And it’s not the right time.’ No, the right time had been eight months ago, the day she’d met them for the first time. That window had well and truly slammed shut.

Alice regarded her steadily. ‘Later, then. Let’s get these children safely into our arms first.’

Bel sagged backwards and made no effort to hide her relief but Alice didn’t give an inch. ‘But make no mistake. As soon as everyone is safely recovered we will be speaking about this.
With Flynn.
There must be quite a story here.’

Oh, there was. A story of deception and collusion and fake marriage and secret love. Only she doubted Alice could even conceive how deeply Flynn was involved. They’d cling to their prejudices about the Rochester girls and no doubt speak of this day in whispered, appalled tones to the next wife that Flynn brought home.

The thought broke Bel’s heart but she disguised her cry amongst the slamming agony that hit her as her body tried to force these babies into the world early.

Bill and Arthur had long since given up drawing Flynn back into their conversation, reading his expression all too accurately. Bill took the turn-off down Bunyip Reach’s drive and rattled the final kilometre to the homestead. Flynn’s trip to town had been effectively aborted the moment his mobile pinged to announce it was back in range and down-streamed two days’ worth of emails and voicemail messages.

He’d only needed to see the subject line of one email from Sanders & Sanders to know:

Subject: FINDING RETURNED … NEXT STEPS?

You didn’t ask for next steps if you’d won. And what he found inside the message was
so far
from winning …

Arthur threw him another worried look. They’d had to keep driving after discovering that all of Oberon was incommunicado, two-hours further to reach the city of Bathurst. And two hours of stony silence returning wasn’t fun for anyone, least of all Flynn as his mind compensated for the silence with a flickering montage of images and memories of the past eight months.

He’d been stupid to close his eyes and ears to the reality of what was really going on with him and Bel. It had been so easy to buy into the temporary happy family fantasy and lose himself in introducing her to some of the pleasures of her body and learning what made her mind and soul tick. To let himself care. Not think about what was coming.

Or how this was going to end.

And now they were perilously close to that end. They had a verdict—albeit a wrong one—and in a few weeks they’d have the children safely delivered, too. Weeks. That was all he had to figure something out. Some way of ending this differently. So no one got hurt. Especially not the children.

The car lurched to a halt outside the homestead and Arthur looked around. ‘Where is everyone?’ Not even the dogs had come out to investigate the return of the prodigal Bradleys. Flynn unbuckled his back seat belt and climbed out.

He and his foul mood were a dozen steps ahead of his father and grandfather when the cry tore through the damp air—tortured and terrified.

Bel …

None of the Bradley men ran as a rule—it just wasn’t
country
to do more than amble—but all three of them ran now as they realised the women they loved were in trouble. Flynn just about took the door off its hinges as he burst into the homestead and then skidded to a halt at the sight that met him.

Bel—stretched out on the floor drenched in sweat, her whole
body heaving and shaking, her torso straining forward. Legs pulled up unnaturally hard.

His mother—horribly pale, standing off to one side, staring intently at the pile of clean cloths bundled in her arms.

His grandmother—too busy between Bel’s braced legs to pay any attention to the men who had just arrived.

‘One more, Bel. You can do it. We’re so close …’ His nan’s voice was firm and uncompromising, but he could see Bel clinging to that confidence like a lifeline. ‘Flynn Bradley, stop gawping and get in here,’ she said without looking up.

Only then did Bel notice him, her eyes sliding desperately to his. Full of fear. Full of pain and desperate relief. Her hand stretched towards him, trembling.

It was such an honest, heartfelt gesture …

His heart sucked into a tiny nugget and then exploded outwards. Every latent feeling he’d been ignoring—suppressing desperately—surged forward and tangled about his useless feet. He’d judged her, he’d used her, he’d teased her, he’d fought with her and he’d kissed her. He had so little to offer her in return.

Yet she kept that trembling hand more or less steady in his direction.

If this was what he could do for her, it was something.

He was with her in seconds, dropping down to ground level, sliding in under her to be the human equivalent of the cushions that were doing such a lousy job of supporting her. She sobbed his name between loud, pained strains but it was hard to know if it was relief or misery. She hooked her arms around his as she pushed back against him hard, her heels digging into the quilt spread out on the living room floor.

‘Nearly there, Bel. Good girl …’

His father rushed immediately to his mother’s side and Pop stood next to his nan and waited for instructions he knew would come. His nan smiled up at her husband with a love Flynn recognised and didn’t at the same time. He knew that smile well. But how had he never seen how full of love it was?

These two people had had as unpromising a start as he could imagine, yet they’d found their way to a true and evident love.

So maybe stranger things had happened than him and Bel working it out …

His nan’s voice was calm and clear when it finally came. ‘My curling set, please, dear?’

Bel whimpered in Flynn’s arms as Arthur hurried towards the stairs, but then he realised she was laughing, weak and pathetic. ‘Is this the best time to worry about your hair, Alice?’ The hint of a smile on her face was the only thing that gave him any reassurance at all that she wasn’t dying in his arms.

‘I need the clips,’ she admonished. ‘They’ll do to clamp the umbilical cords until we can get them to the hospital.’

Cords. Plural?
One baby was still emerging, but …

Flynn lifted his eyes to the bundle of cloth in Denise’s arms—the very particular shape of it—and he crashed into his mother’s own teary gaze.

‘It’s a boy,’ she whispered, lifting the little swaddled bundle slightly. It was only then that he noticed the bruised, strangled looking cord in his mother’s clenched fist. He gasped: his mother was clamping shut the baby’s umbilical cord with her bare hand and had been for who knew how long. Her knuckles were white and shook from the effort of protecting the baby.

His son.

Drew’s
son.

Bill seemed to notice at the same time and he wrapped his larger fist around his wife’s to lend her his strength.

Bel’s renewed screams brought Flynn back sharply. She needed him. He couldn’t do much other than brace her and be a human stress-ball for her Herculean fingers but he did that much, murmuring lame words of encouragement close to her ear that were totally drowned out by the inhuman sounds ripping from her.

They wanted—so badly—to be words of affection. Of love.

Sudden anger surged through him. This should not be Bel’s
deflowering—afraid and on the floor, something this terrifying, this painful. He should have sucked it up and finished what he’d started that night of their wedding. Consummated the damn marriage. Not because it made much difference physically … but emotionally …

It shouldn’t be like this for Bel.

And then it hit him in a blinding flash, how stupid he’d been. How insanely ridiculous to cling to something as transient as a piece of flesh to prove their marriage had gone unconsummated, when that same flesh would never survive a birth.

He could have been the one Bel gifted with her innocence instead of some guy she might find in the future. He could have been the one to teach her safely, gently about a woman’s body. And a man’s. He could have had her and she could still have had the annulment he’d promised her when they’d first embarked on this desperate deception.

No one but the two of them would ever have known otherwise.

All this time … he could have had her body, if not her heart.

Instead,
this
would be what she remembered for ever about the day she lost her virginity.

But as she flung her head back for one final surging scream he saw something else in the face almost deformed with agony.
Exultation.
The barbaric glittering of her eyes, the blazing defiance. The part of her that was determined to bring these babies into the world carefully and quickly and defend them to her last breath.

His stomach turned over. And over.

This woman was a
mother.
Regardless of where the babies originated. Or who they belonged to. Or what the law decided. In the short time he’d known her, Bel had turned from girl … to woman … to mother. She’d blossomed under the care of his family, under his own touch, she’d opened herself to him and shown herself to be cut from different cloth to her sister.
Though she had every reason in the world not to, she’d risked her heart and let herself care for the people in his family.

He looked in turn at every member of that family and it sliced him right through his middle.

Because he knew what he had to do …

But right now his only job was keeping her conscious and upright as the tiny precious life slipped silently into his nan’s waiting hands.

T
HE
whole blue-tinged, not-breathing thing freaked Bel out much more when the first little boy materialised from inside her, because after everything she’d gone through emotionally and psychologically—and physically—to get them this far, it would be more than a tragedy for Gwen and Drew’s babies not to survive.

It would be unbearable.

But the second little boy was exactly the same bruised colour and this time
she
squeezed Flynn’s arm in reassurance—as if she’d been doing this for decades rather than minutes—as Alice deftly dealt with the cord with her ruined fabric scissors, knotted it and patted his tiny lungs firmly out of his aquatic existence and into this one.

Two boys.
A tiny Flynn and tiny Drew of her own. Something to remember both of them by after she was back in London. She closed her eyes over a leak of tears and shared the news with Gwen as Alice cleared the second twin’s airways and cocooned him in warm towels. It was hard not to imagine the intense surge of love and warmth that coursed through her channelled straight from her sister, but it amplified overwhelmingly as Alice gently placed her little boy on her chest and then retreated to deal with the afterbirth. Denise approached with his older brother.

Both babies now had a hairdressing clamp in place to make sure the hand-tied knot in their umbilical cords stayed put.

Flynn’s hands shook as he reached around her to take the baby from Denise. Bel was torn three ways between a desperate desire to look at him, the baby resting on her chest and the one now safely curled in Flynn’s hands, so she focused on the babies and just leaned her head into the strength of Flynn’s hold in lieu.