Page 67 of Where the Wattles Bloom

Lachlan frowned. That couldn’t be right, surely? He squinted as he did the maths. ‘Um … how is that possible? You’ve only been here for seven weeks?’

‘I hate to break this to you but this isn’t an exact science. Unless you know your date of conception—’

‘Which we do.’

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘We know the date we had sex. But it’s possible I could have conceived up to a few days after that.’

‘Oh … kay.’

‘Which is why due dates are usually worked out by using the first day of the last menstrual period, because it’s the one date that is known.’

‘But … that would mean a woman would actually be less pregnant than the due date suggests, because she doesn’t ovulate until mid-cycle, right, and a period is the start of a cycle?’

She quirked an eyebrow. ‘Look at you go with your knowledge of the female fertility cycle.’

‘I aced sex ed,’ he said with a grin.

‘How very studious of you.’

Lachlan shrugged. ‘There were boobs.’

She laughed but got the conversation back on track. ‘Unfortunately for medical science, not everyone has a regular cycle. Mine is and always has been all over the shop. Which makes due date prediction a little dicier, and is why a full-term pregnancy is not actually forty weeks as most people think but anywhere from thirty-seven to forty-two weeks.’

‘So there’s like a … five-week fudge factor.’

‘Well, yes.’ She laughed. ‘Not quite the way we like to look at it, however.’

Lachlan shook his head and slowed the vehicle as they passed the first yellow blobs of wattle and the sign welcoming people to town. ‘It still seems to me like a lot of guesswork. Like … peering into a scrying bowl. Hell, even farmers use ultrasound.’

‘We do too. Pretty much everyone has a dating ultrasound in the first trimester, which works on actual foetal measurements and is much more accurate.’

Well, thank Christ for that. Ultrasound worked for him. ‘How many weeks do you need to be to have one of them?’

‘Usually seven or eight. Can be up to fourteen. But the earlier it’s done the more accurate as far as dating goes.’

‘Okay, so …’ He glanced across at her. ‘Should we get one of those?’

The light in her eyes dimmed a little. ‘No,’ she murmured as she turned to look out the window. ‘I … can’t.’

The brevity—the desolation—in her quiet words reverberated around the car as loudly as if they were back on the corrugations. She didn’t need to say she saw no point in a dating ultrasound for a pregnancy that wouldn’t go the distance. He heard it loud and clear.

‘Okay.’

Sure, it was his baby too, and Lachlan would like to know an accurate date and see a little heartbeat blipping away on a screen. But he couldn’t come in with jackboots and make a bunch of demands right now when Rowena was clearly struggling physically and emotionally.

His job right now was to support her. To be the easy part in amongst all the hard.

He wasn’t sure at what stage, how many weeks Rowena would have to be, for her to feel confident about the pregnancy, but he was damn sure now was not the time to ask.

Now was the time to start building a relationship, do the foundational work. Just be there. Show up. Make a connection outside what they’d shared in that room at The Stockman.

Be her go-to guy.

And if that meant cooling his jets on the things he wanted, then so be it. They were living under the same roof, he’d get to see her every day—that was enough for now.

Pulling up at the hospital main entrance a few minutes later, he said, ‘I’ll be waiting outside at nine.’

She reached for the handle, opened the door and threw a, ‘Thank you,’ over her shoulder before scurrying inside.