Deserving of Luke (6 page)

Penny would understand. Paige would write a check to pay for the renovations then she and Luke would be free to be on their way. She was actually halfway to the door—halfway to her checkbook—when she stopped herself. After all, she'd run nine years before and what had it gotten her except a trip back to Prospect now and a closet full of old skeletons demanding to be laid to rest? If she ran now, she was afraid she'd never get another chance to reconcile with her sister.

That was the real reason she had come to Prospect, not this stupid old house, and she'd be damned if she'd let Logan steal her sister from her a second time.

She thought of Luke's face earlier, when he'd realized his father was within reach. Thought of Penny's smile when she realized that Paige was finally ready to put the past behind her, finally ready to reconnect with her after years of feeling guilty for leaving.

No, this time she wasn't going anywhere. She'd let Logan Powell run her out of town once before. She'd be damned if she'd let him do it again. Not when her son and her sister were the ones who would suffer from her inability to stick.

Though the decision was made, for what it was worth, she still couldn't bring herself to talk to Logan, to acknowledge his right to have anything to do with Luke. In her opinion, he was nothing more than a sperm donor. The fact that she was supposed to share her son with him simply because he had suddenly woken up… It didn't sit well.

The seconds stretched endlessly, ebbing and flowing like the ocean she could hear but couldn't see. The moment wasn't comfortable, not with everything still left unsaid. But it was real, alive with the fear, the uncertainty, the anger that pulsed between them and she was loath to let it slip away. It had been so long since they'd had anything real that she couldn't help savoring it, just a little.

Logan obviously didn't have any such reticence—one more sign that they weren't on the same wavelength. He cracked after only a few minutes, his voice deep and gravelly when he asked, “Are you going to say something?”

“I don't know what you want me to say.” She moved to sit on the swing, pulled her legs up under
neath her. Curling up was small protection, but she would take comfort wherever she could get it.

“Sure you do. You just don't want to say it.”

And there he was, the old Logan, the one she used to think she knew better than anyone else on the planet. Direct, honest, a straight shooter with a wicked sense of humor.

Considering how things had ended between them, that shouldn't make her smile. But it did. God, she was so much weaker than she'd thought she was. No wonder this trip was turning into an unmitigated disaster.

“When you say you want to be a part of his life, what are we talking about here? You want to see him a few times when we're in Prospect or are you looking for something more permanent?”

“He's my son, Paige. What do you think?”

“I think it was way too easy for you to turn your back on him once and there's nothing to say you won't do it again. I'm not going to let Luke get close to you, let Luke start to love and depend on you, if you're going to toss him aside when he's not a shiny new toy anymore. He deserves better than that and I won't stand by and let you hurt him.

“So if you really want to do this thing, if you really want to open this can of worms, you'd better think long and hard about exactly how you expect this to end up. Because until you know, until you're one
hundred percent certain, I'm not letting you anywhere near my son.”

“You know, this whole mother-of-the-year act is getting old. I mean, it takes a lot of nerve to act like you give a shit about a kid when you lost him in a supermarket your second day in town.”

The unfairness of the accusation had her defense mechanisms firing before she could think better of it. “Well, at least I knew what name to call him when I was looking for him. Which is more than you could have done.”

He paled even as his mile-wide shoulders went ramrod stiff. When he spoke, his voice was low, controlled. “And whose fault is that?”

“Yours, Logan. The fault is yours.”

He didn't respond and for long seconds she couldn't breathe, as if his anger had sucked up all the oxygen around her. The emotions seething between them grew into their own entity.

“We both know I could get a court order, demanding that you let me see him.” Disgust flickered across his face before he locked it away.

All of the feelings she'd ever had for him—love, rage, tenderness, hate, friendship, bitterness—combined inside her until she was choking on them. Choking on the minefield of their past and the fact that he still had the ability to hurt her, even after all these years. She didn't know if she had the energy
to negotiate her way around the landmines this time around. Not when so much was at stake.

“Are you threatening me?”

“Shit, Paige.” He ran a hand over his face, swore again. “Of course I'm not threatening you. But I want to see my son, want to get to know him. Is that so hard for you to believe? You've deprived me of eight years of his life. I don't want to miss any more.”

“I've deprived you. Is that how you see this whole thing?
Me
depriving
you?
”

“You kept my kid a secret.”

“Bullshit.” She was in his face now, years of pent-up anger spurring her on. “I told you I was pregnant right after I found out. I begged you to help me, to help him. Begged you to believe that I was carrying your child.

“So don't you sit here and tell me I kept him a secret. You're the one who didn't want him. You're the one who threw him away. And if you think I'm going to stand by and let you do it again because you threaten me with a custody hearing, then you're even stupider than I remember.

“You want to go to court? Fine. Bring it on, because I will be damned before I let an insensitive, egomaniacal monster like you anywhere near my son.”

She turned, would have stormed inside and
slammed the door behind her, if he hadn't grabbed her elbow and whirled her around to face him.

“I'm not doing this with you, Paige. We're both too old for the drama and I'm not doing it. You might have cast yourself as the innocent victim here, but we both know the truth. Any of half a dozen guys could have gotten you pregnant. It's my bad luck that I happened to be the one who actually did.”

“Well, if that's the way you feel about it, I guess we don't have anything left to talk about, do we? Because I'm not voluntarily sharing my son with anyone who refers to his existence as
bad luck.
I'll look forward to hearing from your attorney.”

Wrenching her arm from his grip, she all but dove for the house. As she closed the door behind her—making sure to slide the deadbolt into place for the first time since she'd gotten there—she was deathly afraid she had just made another gigantic mistake.

“W
ELL, THAT CERTAINLY
went well.”

Caught off-guard by the sound of her sister's voice, Paige nearly jumped through the ceiling. When she finally got her heartbeat under control, she turned to find Penny leaning against the wall.

“You heard?” Paige asked disgustedly, heading into the kitchen to pour herself another glass of wine. She'd left her other glass on the porch and as she still hadn't heard Logan's truck start, there was no way in hell she was going out there to get it.

“I did. Not hard since I was deliberately eavesdropping.” Penny followed her into the kitchen, puttered around a little bit and suddenly Paige found herself sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of hot chocolate and plate of chocolate chip cookies in front of her. She reached for one, took a big bite. And wished she was still a kid, when store-bought cookies really could chase her demons away.

“So, do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Let me rephrase.” Penny sat across from her. “Tell me about it.”

“There's not much to tell. Especially if you heard the whole conversation.”

“I didn't hear the whole thing, just the last ten minutes or so.” She reached for a cookie. “You'll talk to his attorney, huh?”

“I know, I know.” She slumped, barely resisting the urge to bang her head against her sister's hand-carved table. “But what was I supposed to say? He threatened me with a custody hearing.”

“Not to mention insulted the hell out of you. He's lucky I didn't kick his ass for that last crack of his. Asshole.”

“I know, right? How could he possibly think saying that was a good idea?”

“How could he possibly think
thinking
that was a good idea?” Penny echoed. “I mean, seriously, sis, I was wrapped up in all the drama of my first year in high school, but even I knew how far gone you were over him. There's no way you were cheating on him.”

Paige eyed her over the rim of her cocoa cup. “That's what you find objectionable? Not his belief that I was sleeping with
six
different guys while I was sleeping with him, but that he thought I was cheating on him at all?”

“That
is
the objectionable part. As long as you're
not involved with someone, you're allowed to sleep with whoever you want, whenever you want. The double standard is dead—and if it isn't, it should be. Who the hell is Sheriff Hot Pants to tell you differently? I can't believe he held your past against you.”

Paige choked on her cocoa.
“Sheriff Hot Pants?”

“Yeah, well, it's not like he's been sitting around pining for you.” Penny held up a hand. “No offense.”

“None taken.” Paige let the laughter relax her shoulders a little bit. “I don't know. Part of me wonders if I didn't deserve it—”

“You
didn't
deserve it, Paige. You didn't deserve any of the things he said to you tonight and not any of the things he said to you nine years ago. So what if you'd been with other guys before him? He doesn't know what you went through as a kid, doesn't have a clue how hard it was for you to grow up in this backwater town, where everyone knew that Mom had gotten pregnant while Dad was stationed overseas. Was it any wonder you were looking for love wherever you could get it?”

“I'm not sure it was like that. I mean, yeah, my therapist tells me all my early acting out was a way to get attention, to get Dad and Mom to notice me as something other than a whipping post. But I don't know. A lot of times, when I was doing it—hooking up with some guy I didn't know that well—it didn't
feel like that. It felt like a giant
screw you
to Dad, you know?”

“If anyone ever deserved to be told off, it was our father. At least by you.”

“I can't say that I really blame him. Plus, he did stick around. He stayed married to Mom, put a roof over my head and food in my stomach,”

“And never let you—or anyone else—forget for a minute that you weren't his.”

“Touché.” She inclined her head. “Was it any wonder, then, that Logan wasn't sure I was telling the truth? Like mother, like daughter.”

Penny tried to hand her another cookie. “Take it, you obviously need it. You're getting maudlin.”

“Maybe I am. But I never looked at another guy the entire time I was with Logan. I loved him.” She shrugged. “I didn't always feel like I deserved him—he was so smart and handsome and funny and nice, even when he was distant—but I loved him. Desperately.”

“And in the end, he was the one who didn't deserve you. What a kick in the ass that must have been.”

Paige laughed, but there wasn't much humor in the sound. “What am I going to do, Penny?”

“What do you want to do?”

“Lock Luke up until he's fifty. I couldn't stand if he got hurt because of mistakes that I've made.”

“I keep telling you, this isn't your mistake. It's Logan's.”

“Yeah, but does who's at fault really matter right now? When Luke's the one who is going to suffer if I make the wrong choice.”

“You know what I think?” her sister asked, reaching across the table and grabbing on to Paige's hand. “As long as you love Luke as much as you do, as long as you're always looking out for his best interests, I don't think he
can
get hurt. Not even by Logan. Not really hurt, anyway. You love him too much to let anything happen to him and he knows it.”

“But what if I can't—”

“No buts.” Penny pushed back from the table, stood up. “You need a good night's sleep and a few days to mull this over without obsessing about it.”

“I think that's impossible.”

“But you should still try. Give yourself a chance to breathe a little. You just got here and you're in the middle of all this. When the time's right, you'll know what to do.”

“Can I get a guarantee on that?”

“Absolutely. And I'll even make it a money-back one.”

“Easy for you to say when there's no cash involved.”

“Exactly. Now come on, I'll race you upstairs. It'll be like old times.”

Penny took off and as Paige chased her upstairs—which was indeed just like old times—she couldn't help wondering if her sister was wrong. Because from where she was sitting, it looked as though no matter what decision she made, it was going to be the wrong one.

 

L
OGAN WAS STILL SHAKING
with anger when he let himself into the garage of the small house he'd bought a few streets away from downtown. Throwing his keys on the kitchen counter, he went straight through to the fridge and pulled out a beer. Twisting off the cap, he drank it down in a few quick gulps before reaching for another one.

What good had he thought would come from seeing Paige tonight? She hadn't changed one bit and he should have realized that outside the diner. He'd been insane to think that they could handle this like two rational adults. Such a thing was impossible when one of them insisted on acting like a spoiled brat.

He really didn't like the role she'd cast him in—bad guy in this whole situation. It didn't sit well with him, as he was usually the one wearing the white hat. But even as he nursed his feelings of outrage, his conscience wouldn't let him leave it at that. Instead, he kept asking himself if he really thought Paige was the only one who had behaved badly tonight.

Sure, the circumstances were stressful. Add in the fact that he was still attracted to her—wasn't that a kick in the teeth?—and the whole situation had been explosive. He was probably lucky it had gone as well as it had.

If he considered custody threats and demands for attorneys going well, that is.

Shit. He shook his head, took a long sip of his beer. How had this thing turned into such a mess? And how the hell was he going to turn it around?

He walked over to the couch and flopped on the sofa, figured he'd flip through the channels until he found a late-night show that interested him. But once he was on the couch remote in hand, he couldn't move. All he could do was replay the moment he'd realized that the boy sitting next to Paige was his son.

He couldn't believe how much the kid looked like him—he was nearly a carbon copy. He wondered what Luke had looked like as a baby. And did his best to ignore the resentment burning in his stomach. He couldn't believe he'd missed his son's birth, his first steps, first word, first tooth. Hell, Logan had missed Luke's first everything.

Logan thought of his own family, of his brother and sister-in-law and their three kids. They'd documented everything about those kids, celebrated all of the milestones and little accomplishments. Had
bombarded the family with photos and videos of Jason, Courtney and Stacy until he'd thought they were going a little overboard. And yet, now that he had a son—even one he'd known nothing about—he understood. There wasn't a minute of Luke's life that he didn't want to see, wasn't a moment that he didn't want to recreate so that he could share it. And that would never happen.

He could have kicked his teenaged self's ass for being so shortsighted that he hadn't even considered the fact that, even if she had been sleeping with other guys, she'd also been sleeping with him. He should have realized that the baby she carried could have been his.

But he'd been too caught up in his anger and embarrassment to think that far ahead. Too stupid to think of all the different ways this thing could play out. But then,
stupid
had been his middle name back then. He'd fallen for Paige despite her reputation, had cared about her despite the fact that he knew she'd been with other guys. It hadn't mattered to him then, not when he'd gotten to know who he thought was the real Paige. Nothing had mattered but being with her and he'd thought she felt the same way.

Even when he'd started hearing the rumors about her with other guys, he'd ignored them. He trusted her. She said that she loved him and that had been
more than enough for him. Besides, he'd lived in Prospect long enough to know that only about one-tenth of the rumors circulating at any given time were true.

What he'd forgotten—or chosen to forget—was that most of the rumors, no matter how outlandish, had some kind of grounding in truth. So while he'd been fighting with his friends and family about her, about what kind of person she was, Paige had been making a fool of him. She'd been sleeping with half his football team and how many others?

For months after she'd left town, he'd thanked God that he'd woken up to that fact before he'd done something stupid like thrown away his plans to go to an out-of-state college in order to stay close to her. He'd been on the verge of turning down a chance to play football at the University of Washington when he'd found out the truth about her.

But now, knowing that his son had grown up without him, he wasn't so sure. If he'd never known that Paige was sleeping with his friends—had tried to sleep with his best friend—then he would have been there for Luke from the very beginning. He had loved her and would have tried to help her any way he could. And though things between them probably wouldn't have lasted—how could they have when they'd both had so much growing up to do?—that didn't matter. What mattered was finding a way to
be close to the son who didn't know him as anything more than an abstract concept.

He thought of how Paige had looked sitting on that porch tonight. Her hair had glowed in the light, lending her an almost otherworldly quality. How was it that she could look like an angel and yet be so devious?

How was it that even knowing everything that he did about her, that even being angrier at her than he could ever remember being, his body still responded to her closeness?

It was a nightmare, a fiasco, one he had no idea how to free himself from. But he had to free himself, had to find a way to make things right between them. Not relationship right, because obviously that was out of the question. Just because his body was stupid enough to still find her attractive didn't mean his brain did. There was no way he was giving her a chance to rip out his heart a second time.

But that didn't mean he couldn't be polite to her. Reasonable. Adult-like. No matter how much she'd hurt him in the past, no matter how upset he was that she'd kept his kid away from him for almost nine years, he had to put it away. Not forget about it—no, he'd never forget about it. But she was right. In this situation she held most of the cards and he'd be damned if he folded and went away.

No, he needed to ante up. If that meant biting his
tongue every time he saw her, then he could do that. He could do almost anything if it meant finally getting the chance to be the father that Luke deserved. He'd always wanted kids though his wife hadn't, and finding out that he had one—while a shock—made him happier than he'd been in a long time. He wasn't walking away from this.

There hadn't been that many things in his life that had mattered to him, even fewer that he hadn't quit when they got boring or complicated. But he wasn't going to quit on Luke, on this chance to be a father. He'd waited too long for the opportunity.

So he'd spend the next few days planning, give Paige time to calm down after the fight they'd had, and then it was full speed ahead. He would find a way to connect with his son, a way to get to know Luke and be a part of his life. Anything else didn't bear thinking about.