Free Almost Mine by Lea Darragh Page B

scooping me up and carrying me up the path and to the homestead and to our king-sized four poster bed inside the cornflower blue room that would hold us until he proved himself right.

    ‘Angel?’ Nick fluttered his lips over my face. ‘I think it’s really happened this time,’ he murmured as he lay propped on his elbows above my exhausted body later that evening. I kept my eyes closed as his soft lips covered them with silent kisses. ‘Cate?’ he coaxed. ‘Open your eyes.’
    I slowly lifted my heavy lids and warmed at his assured expression. ‘How can you be so sure?’ I asked him, and he answered me with a confidently wide, brightened smile as he brushed my dishevelled honey hair from my face.
    ‘Because, my queen,’ he kissed my mouth, ‘we finally have a nursery fit for a princess.’
    Nick lifted himself gently off me and relaxed on his elbow beside me, plumped on pillows and swallowed by our heavy woollen doona. I reached for the side table where I retrieved a thermometer. My temperature indicated that perhaps he was right.
    I replaced it and sighed happily. ‘Or a prince.’
    ‘Yes, angel, or a prince.’
    ‘I’d love to give you a son.’
    ‘You would? You wouldn’t prefer a daughter?’
    I closed my eyes again.
    ‘Are you sleeping?’
    ‘No,’ I let out a deep sigh. ‘I don’t care if our baby is blue or pink or green or yellow. It’s been two years. I just want to be a mother.’
    He kissed me again. ‘And so you will.’
    ‘I wish you were right.’
    He reached for me and pulled me close, resting his warm hand on my belly. ‘We’ve talked endlessly about this. We’re not doing that, remember?’ he said as his fingers roamed.
    ‘Doing what?’
    He burrowed into my neck, stroking the tender spot below my ear with the tip of his nose. ‘Wallowing.’
    ‘I’m not. I’m just a little…’ I trailed off.
    ‘Scared? Perturbed by our lack of success? Didn’t I just assure you that we made a baby?’
    ‘You did.’
    ‘So you have no need to wallow, or to be scared or perturbed. Is it that you doubt me, then? Is that what’s bothering you?’
    ‘I never doubt you,’ I told him with assured confidence as I sleepily rolled into him and moulded to his body.
    ‘So why not be happy?’
    ‘Do you know what would make me the happiest woman in the world?’ I kissed the soft hair that covered his chest; my lingering lips, roaming like his fingers, answered the question for him.
    ‘Show me,’ he murmured before kissing me deeply as he lifted my leg and fit it to the shape of his waist. He entered me, giving me no need make any move of my own.

    It was Test Day; the day that I would find out whether or not Nick and I had in fact made a baby on that wistful afternoon two weeks ago, and, as always on Test Day, I allowed myself to feel the excitement that I couldn’t deny if I tried.
    In the few minutes before the result came to light I was always drawn into the fantasy that I was pregnant, and I’d allow myself to feel love for the child growing inside me, just as I did two years ago when I was actually having a baby. I pictured myself bringing the baby home from hospital and placing him gently into his bed, and feeding him on the balcony as the warm sun shone and the birds sang and butterflies fluttered in the garden. I imagined birthdays and the excitedly frantic ripping of wrapping paper on Christmas morning. I imagined reading a bedtime story to my child, and just as he drifted and I tucked him in, he would sleepily say, ‘I love you, Mummy’ and I would weep because they are the sweetest words to hear from such a sweet boy. I’d never voice these thoughts aloud, to anyone, not even to Nick. I knew I was being cruel to myself, but, nonetheless, they were there. So, why not indulge in them; that is, after all, the point of a fantasy isn’t it?
    ‘You know, my clairvoyant told me that a baby was in the near future, so I just know that it will be positive,’ Lucy’s voice