Deserving of Luke (7 page)

“H
EY
, M
OM
. C
ATCH!”

Paige looked up from the hole she was digging in time to see Luke's football soaring straight at her head. Dropping her shovel, she reached out her arms and caught it. Calling her action
catching
was a slight exaggeration for letting the ball hit her in the chest, hard, before she wrapped her arms around it.

But as she threw it to her son, she refused to dwell on her lack of football prowess. Why should she, when it was the sport she was best at? What she really hated were the spring months when Luke played baseball and expected her to practice with him. Not much on earth was worse than trying to catch that small, hard white ball—except maybe trying to hit it.

And with basketball, winter wasn't much better, she admitted as she took the ball in the chest again, certain that this time she would end up with a pretty spectacular bruise. Ignoring the pain shooting through her left breast, she tossed the ball a second time—and couldn't help the spurt of pride that came
when she realized she'd spiraled it. It had been completely accidental—despite the fact that their neighbor in L.A. had taught Luke how to throw a spiral two years ago, and then had tried to teach her. She was usually an abysmal failure at it, unlike her son, who already had the arm of a future championship quarterback, or so his last coach had told her.

Didn't it just figure that she had a son who was an incredible athlete when most days it was an accomplishment if she could keep her feet from going out from under her? Definitely Logan's genes at work.

“Sweet throw!” Luke called, taking the opportunity of her obviously improved football prowess to fire a sweet spiral of his own at her. Putting her hands out—though she wasn't sure if she was trying to catch the thing or ward it off—it hit her solidly, bending back her right index finger before she fumbled and the ball fell harmlessly to the ground.

She cursed under her breath, then curled her fingers in and out numerous times, trying to determine if her eight-year-old had managed to break her finger.

Luke laughed, even as he jogged over. “Sorry, Mom. Are you okay?”

She mock glared at him. “I don't know. I'd probably be better if my kid stopped trying to kill me with a football.”

“It's not murder if you willingly participate,” he
answered with a smirk that was so like his father's that it took her breath away.

When she finally managed to suck air into her lungs, she answered, “Says you.”

“Says anyone.” He tossed the ball up in the air, spun it, caught it without even looking. Then repeated the process again and again. “So, I finished all the chores Aunt Penny gave me.”

“All of them?” she asked. “Because I know how much you hate to weed—”

“All of them,” he confirmed, his quick grin melting her heart as it had been doing since he was an infant. “I was even extra careful to only pull out the weeds that looked exactly like the ones she showed me.”

“I'm sure her tomatoes and bell peppers will thank you for that.” She waited for him to get to whatever was on his mind. It didn't take long.

“So, I was wondering …”

“Yes?”

“Can we go get ice cream? It's been four days since I've had anything with sugar in it and really, Mom, I can only eat so many of Aunt Penny's whole-wheat pancakes with germs before going nuts.”

Paige laughed. “Wheat germ, kid. Not germs. Wheat germ.”

“Yeah, well, they taste pretty germy. Come on, Mom. Please?” He batted his eyes at her and she felt
herself cave, even though she knew exactly what he was doing.

“Oh, wow, look at you. Bringing out the big guns, huh?”

“I wouldn't do that…Mommy.” He looked practically angelic when he said it, his smile so smooth and bright that she had to blink to avoid being blinded.

Again, she couldn't help wondering how she'd ended up with such an amazing, wonderful kid. Sure, his coloring and athletic abilities came from his rat of a father, but she didn't have a clue where the rest of him came from. A natural born charmer, he could talk anyone into anything—even her, and she was well-known at work for being about as far from a pushover as someone could get.

She shuddered to think what would happen when the kid got a little older. She was going to have to invest in a good air horn to keep the girls away.

“I'll tell you what. Why don't you help me finish planting this tree and then we'll both go inside and get cleaned up? We can try to talk Aunt Penny into going into town for dinner. If you eat all your vegetables, I'll take you for ice cream.”

“Sure. No problem.”

She narrowed her eyes at the easy acquiescence. “French fries do
not
count as a vegetable.”

“Aw, Mom.”

“You can
aw, Mom
me all you want. That's the
deal. Vegetables—preferably green—in exchange for ice cream. Take it or leave it.”

Luke paused, considering. “Two scoops?'

“Of vegetables? Absolutely.”

“
Moooooooom.
I meant ice cream.”

“Oh. You did? I thought you were anxious for a full plate of asparagus.”

He made a gagging noise. “Broccoli in exchange for two scoops of ice cream—strawberry and cookies-and-cream. That's my final offer.”

“Your final offer, huh?”

“Yep. Take it or leave it.”

She reached out and tweaked his nose. “I guess I'll take it, then.”

“Woo-hoo!” he exclaimed, going up on tiptoes to brush a kiss across her cheek. “Thanks, Mom! You're the best.”

Paige pretended to buff her nails against her shirt. “I try.”

“You succeed! Now come on.” He yanked at her. “Let's get the tree.”

“We need to finish the hole first. It's not deep enough for the root ball.”

“So what?”

“So what? It won't do us any good to plant the tree if we don't make sure it's going to survive.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “All right, all right.” He reached
for the shovel and began digging enthusiastically, a huge grin on his face.

When they were finally finished, she herded him to the house for a shower. With an almost nine-year-old's typical aversion to any water he couldn't swim in, Luke mumbled and grumbled about that part of their bargain all the way to the house. But once they got inside, he made a beeline—whooping and hollering—for the only working shower in the place.

“What's that all about?” Penny asked as she—and her do-it-yourself plumbing manual—came out of the downstairs bathroom.

Paige shook her head at the sight of her beautiful sister dressed in painter's overalls, and covered in something she'd rather not know the identity of. Penny—and her stubborn determination to do almost all the work at the inn by herself—was the primary reason they only had one working bathroom at the moment.

“I promised him we'd all have dinner and ice cream in town, provided it was okay with you.”

“Are you kidding me? I'm all about ice cream.”

“And germy pancakes.”

“Of course— Wait. What kind of pancakes?”

Paige explained Luke's take on wheat germ and they both laughed. “I guess I still need to work on that recipe before I serve it to the guests,” Penny said, crossing to the kitchen to wash her hands.

“I like them.”

“Yeah, but you like almost anything. You've got an industrial-strength stomach.”

“Hey. My stomach has served me well through the years.”

“I know. Remember that time we climbed the trees in Old Man Witherspoon's orchard and gorged on cherries? You were the only one who didn't get sick.”

“I do remember. And it was a good thing, since I had to get all of you home.”

“I thought Mom was going to kill you for letting me get so sick.”

“Not that that was anything unusual. Mom always wanted to kill me.”

An awkward silence descended and Paige waited for all the platitudes Penny had voiced through the years. Waited for her sister to defend their mother, as she always had. Waited for her to ask when Paige was planning to stop by to see their parents since she'd been in town nearly a week and hadn't gone near the house they had both grown up in.

But Penny didn't say anything for the longest time, so long that Paige started to head upstairs, figuring Luke was probably done with his shower. She was halfway to the staircase when Penny finally spoke.

“They were wrong.”

Shock ricocheted through Paige and for a second she was sure she had heard incorrectly. “What?”

“To treat you the way they did. They were wrong. Terribly wrong. Mom especially. I never understood why she felt the need to punish you for her mistakes.”

Pain ripped through Paige, sharp little shards of glass that embedded themselves in her bloodstream, leaving small, bleeding wounds behind wherever they touched. “It's no big deal.”

“It's a very big deal. The way they treated you was awful. I'm sorry I never stuck up for you. I was afraid of making things worse.”

“It wasn't your job to stick up for me. I was capable of doing that myself.” But it would have been nice not to have felt so alone all the time, not to have felt as though it was her against the world. Maybe she wouldn't have—

Things were what they were and her past was what it was. Bemoaning it now wasn't going to change anything. She hadn't spoken to her mother—or the man who had raised her—since she'd left town, pregnant and alone, all those years ago. “No. It
was
my job. And I failed at it. I should have opened my mouth.”

The pain grew sharper, and Paige knew if she didn't get out of there quickly, she was going to say something she regretted. Penny might not understand
what her parents had done to Paige, but she still loved them. Confessing what Paige thought of them wouldn't help anything.

“Look, Luke is going to be down any minute. We need to get ready to go to town—”

It was as if Penny hadn't heard her. “I didn't say anything then, but I learned from my mistake. I'm not going to keep my mouth shut again when saying something could change how things play out.”

The resolve in her sister's voice stopped Paige in her headlong flight upstairs. “What are you getting at?”

“I know I said the other night that Logan was a complete asshole—and I'm sticking by that assessment. But, Paige, have you noticed that Luke has made an excuse every day to go into town? Today it's ice cream. Yesterday it was a wheel for his skateboard. The day before it was a trip to the library to get books.”

“He's a little bored. It's very different here than it is in Los Angeles and—”

“He's not bored. He's looking for a chance to bump into Logan again.”

Icy shock replaced the pain of a few minutes before. “What?”

“He knows his dad is in town, knows he works in town, and is doing everything he can to get there to see him. He wants to meet his father.”

Even as she opened her mouth to deny her sister's words, Paige couldn't help wondering if Penny was right. Hadn't she noticed Luke's spectacular disinterest in his skateboard after she'd bought him the new wheel—it still sat in the bag in the corner of their room where he'd left it after they'd gotten home yesterday. And hadn't she wondered why he hadn't asked for ice cream one of the days they were in town? It wasn't like Luke to pass up an opportunity to ask for his favorite treat. Unless…

Unless he'd been planning this whole thing all along.

Unless he had been making excuses to go into town every day in an effort to run into Logan.

Unless he really did want to meet his father.

Idly, she wondered what tomorrow's excuse was going to be.

When Luke hadn't brought Logan up after that first day, she'd thought he'd changed his mind. That maybe he hadn't been all that impressed with his father after seeing him. But now she had to admit that her sister was probably right. She'd been so caught up in her anger, so caught up in her resentment of Logan, that she hadn't seen it.

So much for being a good mother. Her son was going through a crisis and she hadn't even noticed that anything was wrong. A sense of failure invaded her, not for the first time since she became a mother,
but for the first time in a while. It had been years since she'd felt this down, this helpless, this wrong.

The question was what was she going to do about it?

Logan's words reverberated in her mind, his mention of court orders. His implication that she was a bad mother. His threats to take Luke from her.

He couldn't do that—she wouldn't let him. She had a really good job in L.A., probably made more money than he did, if it came down to going to court.

She wasn't an unfit mother. She'd spent the past eight years making sure that Luke never felt the way she had growing up, that he never believed for a second that he was anything but an incredible gift to her. She might have only been seventeen when she'd gotten pregnant with him, but he hadn't ruined her life. He'd given her a life.

Without him, she didn't know if she would have had the strength to walk away from her parents and their viciousness. She'd left because she knew she couldn't bring a baby into the same toxic atmosphere that she had grown up in.

And getting pregnant had given her a whole lot of insight, very quickly, into what Logan really thought of her. She'd been such a fool at seventeen, had convinced herself that the things she'd done to get attention in the past didn't matter to him. What a joke that had turned out to be.

Because while she'd been spinning all kinds of romantic daydreams about him, he'd been like all the other guys—using her to scratch an itch. She'd believed that he loved her as much as she loved him only to find out that he didn't love her, and that he believed all the stupid rumors flying around.