Their Newborn Gift by Nikki Logan Page B

courage in fearing it but doing it anyway.
    He’d felt like her father in that moment.
    He might not have been present for her first steps, her first tooth or her first words, but he’d given Molly her first ride and, stupid as that was, it felt fantastic. His heart hadn’t stopped pounding.
    And then she’d started crying. As soon as Lea had explained why, he was reminded how little he was Molly’s father. Lea could read her daughter clearly across a paddock; he had been right on top of her but had had no clue he’d overwhelmed her.
    He knew nothing. Lea was right; how on earth was he going to raise a child by himself?
    That thought neatly brought his mind round to the hot handprint he swore he could still feel burning through his jeans. The way Lea had squeezed his calf to reassure him that Molly was okay; he forced his lips together. He’d asked her to give up her baby. She should resent the hell out of him, not be hurrying to make him feel better.
    And he should resent her for her tunnel-vision obsession about stem cells, rather than fixating on how her hand felt onhis leg. Besides, compared to what they’d done to each other in the past, touching his calf should have been way down on the Richter scale.
    Should have.
    His heart was only now returning to its steady beat. He slowed Pan to a gentle walk and circled a big clearing, turning back for the Yurraji homestead. He’d come all this way on instinct. Riding out was what he usually did when he needed to clear his head or work off some steam. It used to be the number one way to get some distance from his visiting parents, neither of whom rode horses—despite what their one-hundred-percent-country publicity photos showed. He’d take off in the care of one of the local ringers far from their reach and not come back until he’d exorcised whatever teenaged demon was at his heels.
    Yet suddenly all he wanted to do was get back to his daughter and his…
    He straightened his back. What was Lea Curran to him—his ex-lover? His surrogate? Not his friend, that was for sure. She was the woman using him a second time to save a child she’d effectively stolen from him.
    And he was Reilly Martin, the king of the circuit, independent and successful despite his lousy upbringing. He relied on no one. It was how he’d taken a sprawling but picturesque dud of a cattle station and turned it into a successful equine breeding-and-training concern: determination. Focus. Being alone.
    He shouldn’t be itching to get back to either of them. He slowed Pan’s progress. His nerve-endings might want one thing, but his mind knew better. Reilly Martin didn’t hurry home to anyone.
    He was halfway back when Pan’s altered gait and sudden nervous dance caught his attention. He looked round and his breath caught deep in his chest: thirty healthy horses of different colours spread out across a distant clearing like a spilled bag of jellybeans.
    Lea’s brumbies. He reined the mare to a halt and twisted in his saddle to watch the mob.
    They were relaxed and grazing while their leader kept awatchful eye on the stranger on horseback. Reilly’s eye moved across the herd just as keenly, recognising some of the finest wild horseflesh he’d ever seen. Then he looked at the stallion and knew why—he was wild, savage and utterly spectacular. Lucky these horses were under Lea’s protection or the best of them would be in trucks heading south to the sale yards.
    The rest would be on their way to the dog-food factory. Wild horses were at the bottom of the food chain in the north.
    The brumbies had the right idea, living in isolation, limiting contact with outsiders, focussing solely on the business of survival. And the continuation of their mob.
    Survival and family. Family and survival. There was something in that.
    Reilly calmed Pan and turned her for the homestead. Maybe there was a difference between wanting and needing. He wanted to get to know his daughter, and if his explosion of