Page 83 of The Irish Arrangement

Again, she jerked back to face me. “What?”

I would never get tired of surprising her and spoiling her. In bed and out of it.

“If that is what you want. And what she wants,” I added. Having a complete family here would be nice. If I had to dictate the future, we were only getting started.

“She’ll be eager to meet her grandbaby.” I furrowed my brow. “Which reminds me.”

“What?” She looped her arms around me, and I relished her loose embrace.

“She was protective. So much so that she was blunt to put me on the spot and ask whether I’d married you just to knock you up.”

She frowned.

That had been the plan. And that plan got screwed up along the way.

“Why would she think you could be knocked up?”

Cara shook her head. “I have no clue.”

“And what also doesn’t make sense is the lack of medical notes from anything that indicated that you’d lost an ovary during surgery.”

“How would you know?”

I smirked. “Cara. I make people talk. I move papers. I say get it done and it gets done.” How else did she think I’d taken over her mother’s medical care so easily?

“I tasked Ian with finding all your medical history. I wanted to know how slim the odds were with you.”

She kissed my chest. “If the chances of my fertility were that low, would you have left me?”

I rolled my eyes. “Letting you go was never an option.”

Her mouth dropped open. “But we shook on it!” She smiled, laughing.

I shrugged. “I lied. And no.” I leaned down to kiss her. “If you had slim chances of fertility, we’d keep trying. Forever. I want you, and only you, to be the mother of my children.”

She smiled up at me.

“Ian has yet to find any record of your enduring a surgery that would complicate your fertility. And when your mother seemed to think otherwise…”

Furrowing her brow, she seemed pensive and confused. “I don’t get it. When I had pain in my back and stomach, Mom rushed me to the city. The clinic near the farm wasn’t equipped for too much, and that was the one time she'd insisted on my father paying for anything for me.”

I nodded. “Right. There is a document of your having an appendectomy. But nothing more.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Then why was I told I’d lost an ovary and…?”

“Who told you that?”

Her face turned stony. “Keira. My father suggested that she stand in and talk to the nurses and doctors instead of ‘troubling’ him or me. My mom had to go back to the farm. It bothered her not to be there, but she had to make things work to count on our livelihood to continue.”

It was making more sense now.

“Keira had to have fudged the truth. Made up the stuff about my ovaries and whatnot.” She shook her head, growling lightly. “That bitch!”

She did it out of spite, I was sure. Just to hurt Cara.

“We’ll make sure you have the best medical care now. You and the baby both,” I promised as I cupped her face and kissed her tenderly.

Now that we’d found each other, I would never let anything stand in the way of ensuring that she was happy and healthy.

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