The Marine's Baby, Maybe
Page 1
Praise for Rogenna Brewer
With a blend of wit and charm, Rogenna Brewer is a modern-day Jane Austen.
That Guy Who’s Always at Starbucks
Magnificent!
Longtime Reader
Rogenna Brewer writes from the heart and hits you in the gut.
Fellow Author
Copyright © 2018 by Rogenna Brewer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by Rogenna
images depositphoto.com
Created with Vellum
For my Family
Contents
About the Book
Prologue - Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Prologue - Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Rogenna Brewer
Falling in love is not what they're expecting...
Wife. Widow. Mother-to-be.
All Caitlin Calhoun wanted was to honor her late husband by having his baby. But thanks to an unfortunate mix-up, her baby’s father is her husband’s half-brother. Caitlin would like to keep that little secret between the two of them.
Marine. Uncle? Biological baby-daddy?
“Lucky” Luke Calhoun Jr. has always been unlucky in love. Family is the last thing the battle-hardened Marine expected to have––not with all the bad blood running through his own. But he’s not the kind of man to turn his back on his child or the child’s mother.
Can the unluckiest Calhoun of them all convince Caitlin he’s the real deal?
CryoBank of San Diego
Luke Calhoun Jr.
SSN#523XXXXXX
Dear Service Member:
When our military readied you to deploy, CBSD stepped forward to ensure the future of your family by providing semen collection and storage services free of charge for the first year. We would like to continue to serve you as you continue to serve our country.
Thank you for choosing CryoBank of San Diego. We understand the importance of your decision. Please take a moment to consider your future family dreams.
__Continue to store my specimen for the discounted military rate of $350.00 per year.
__Donate my specimen.
__Destroy my specimen.
Sincerely,
Carol Livingston, Director CBSD
Visa and MasterCard accepted
Chapter One
CAITLIN STOOD AT THE MAILBOX outside the home she was in the process of vacating and reread the letter addressed to her late husband, Lieutenant Luke Calhoun, United States Navy. She’d barely been a bride before she’d become a widow.
Luke had been a Navy SEAL killed in action.
Eighty-nine days, nine hours and nine minutes ago two men in uniform had come knocking on her door. One of these days she’d stop counting down to the minute, but right now she had less than sixty of them before the military housing inspector arrived to sign off on her departure from officers row.
The single-story house looked like every other house on the block, but it was the only home she and Luke had ever known together. The military had given her written notice and ninety days to vacate the premises. That deadline was today and Caitlin was up to her Playtex gloves in cleaning, which needed to be done in short order.
Movers were coming and going around her. She didn’t have time to stop and think about how much she missed eyes so green and so full of life her heart ached whenever she looked at the emerald-and-diamond engagement ring nestled against her wedding band.
Still, she needed a moment to collect her thoughts. Freeing her long blond hair from the loose black band, she reread the letter again. Her heart pounded with the implication.
Sperm bank. CryoBank was a sperm bank.
And her husband had made a deposit without telling her? Her husband had done a lot of things he didn’t talk to her about—that was the nature of his business—but this?
He should have at least mentioned his semen in storage. They’d never discussed children, except to acknowledge that they both wanted them—someday. Well, someday had arrived for Caitlin.
She didn’t know whether to skip up the street and kiss the mail carrier on his bald head, or sink down to the curb for a good cry.
“Pete!” she called out, realizing she’d forgotten to give him her change-of-address form. She didn’t belong anymore, as evidenced by the number of Navy wives who hadn’t shown up to help her pack. Women she’d once called friends had separated themselves from the grim reminder of her reality. The Casualty Assistance duo could come knocking on any one of their doors next.
She met Pete—dispatcher of correspondence and sound advice—in the middle of the street, surprising him with a peck on the cheek. “Thank you, thank you so much for everything.”
“And just what am I supposed to tell the missus about the lipstick on my collar?” he teased as Caitlin went skipping back across the street.
“Tell her you just delivered the best news of my life!” Twenty-four was way too young to be spending that life alone. Caitlin hurried back to the house, weaving her way between movers. Two coming. Two going.
“Not that box.” Pam, Caitlin’s one true friend, redirected the barrel-chested driver. He turned around and set it down inside the door before going farther into the house for another.
Pam followed him around the corner to the back bedroom while Caitlin, still holding on to hope with that bundle of mail, stopped to lift a cardboard flap. She knew she shouldn’t. This was the box filled with Luke’s uniforms and destined for the thrift store on base.
She had the flag that draped his casket. His medals. His letters of commendation. Her memories.
Those were the things she’d allowed herself to keep.
But after all the hours spent sorting through the things she couldn’t, it was his uniforms that were the hardest to part with. She knew she shouldn’t, but she dug out one of his desert-drab T-shirts that had been sent home from Iraq and buried her nose in it. How dare he still linger to torture her this way? She needed him now more than ever, and all she had to hold on to was this damn ugly khaki T-shirt.
“Caitlin?” Pam tucked a bobbed strand of dark hair behind her ear.
“Just this one.” Caitlin held tightly to Luke’s T-shirt.
She’d met him the first day of spring at the Annapolis Yacht Club’s traditional burning of the socks—after which no member could be caught wearing socks with their deck shoes.
He’d been a guest lecturer at the Naval Academy.
She’d been a bored debutante/grad student who thought he looked good in his uniform. It had been love at first sight.
After a brief courtship they’d married in a lavish spring wedding, followed by a honeymoon in Europe. Then came her move to San Diego. His deployment to the Middle East.
By summer she was a widow.
“I’m not ready to let him go.”
“Oh, honey,” Pam sympathized. “I know. But you have to…”
Not if she had his baby.
Luke’s baby.
Was she really considering having his baby al
one?
“…oh, look at the time,” Pam said, checking her watch. “I have to pick up the boys from school.”
“Of course,” Caitlin said as her friend deserted her for the responsibilities of single parenthood—single, meaning Pam’s husband was deployed. She was not by any stretch of the imagination really alone and would never understand the direction of Caitlin’s thoughts. So Caitlin kept those thoughts to herself.
“This is the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do,” her father had said as he’d walked her down the aisle for a second time, this time toward her husband’s coffin.
“But you’ll get through this, I promise. No major decisions, Caitie. Not for the next year at least. Give yourself time to grieve.”
Caitlin ignored her father’s advice and let all the past-due bills and collection notices fall to the floor. But she held on to that T-shirt and that letter from CryoBank. Luke had promised her the world. Apparently he’d gone into debt trying to give it to her. Did he think he had to buy her love? He’d been such a gentle and generous lover, how could she not have loved him?
But she had a funny feeling she never really knew him.
“Please take a moment to consider…”
Future. Family. Dreams. She was going to have his baby. Before she forgot what it was like to dream about the future, to have a future.
Caitlin winced at the three-week-old postmark. Like most of Luke’s mail, the letter had been forwarded from his Command. She only hoped she wasn’t too late.
“One last gift, Luke.” Her words echoed off the ceiling and the empty walls as she punched the numbers from the letterhead into her cell phone.
She didn’t even hear the mover coming up behind her until he cleared his throat. “Will that be all, Mrs. Calhoun?”
CryoBank of San Diego
Luke Calhoun Jr.
SSN#523XXXXXX
Dear Service Member:
When our military readied you to deploy, CBSD stepped forward to ensure the future of your family by providing semen collection and storage services free of charge for the first year. We would like to continue to serve you as you continue to serve our country.
Thank you for choosing CryoBank of San Diego. We understand the importance of your decision. Please take a moment to consider your future family dreams.
__Continue to store my specimen for the discounted military rate of $350.00 per year.
__Donate my specimen.
__Destroy my specimen.
Sincerely,
Carol Livingston, Director CBSD
Visa and MasterCard accepted
Chapter Two
HEADED BACK TO HIS TENT AFTER mail call, Master Sergeant “Lucky” Luke Calhoun Jr., United States Marine Corps, put his X next to destroy with the nubby pencil he carried on patrol. He was too cheap to cough up three-fifty and, after four tours in the Middle East, too jaded to think he could make anyone’s dreams come true.
He’d be happy if everyone just stopped killing each other—a strange sentiment for a guy who spent most of his time at the beautiful Desert Palms Resort, aka Camp Victory, Baghdad, Iraq, looking through the cross-hairs of a sniper’s scope. He did his job, and he did it well. That didn’t mean he had to like it.
He was ready for a change of scenery. Soon enough.
Pushing back the tent flap, Lucky ducked inside.
Private “Tick” Tanner lay stretched out on his rack, reading a letter with the identifiable CryoBank logo. He looked up as Lucky walked in. “You get one, Sarg?”
“Everyone in the unit got one.” Tossing his mail aside, Lucky sat down on his own rack and stowed his rifle in the folds of the wool blanket beneath. The blanket kept the sand out of his weapon. Or at least it was supposed to.
Nothing could keep the sand out in the desert.
They ate it. Drank it. Slept in it. Even breathed it in. War was one hell of a dirty job, no matter how you looked at it.
“So you gonna, you know, pay for storage?”
Without the imminent threat of biological warfare, it seemed like a waste of money. “No.”
“Tick, Tick.” Sergeant Eddie Estes sauntered over with a care package from home. “You don’t know Lucky. He’s so cheap, when they handed out the specimen cups he—”
Lucky cut him off with a glare.
Estes mouthed, “twice.” and held up two fingers.
“Funny,” Lucky said without humor.
Grinning, Estes tossed a can of Pringles his way. Lucky caught it in midair.
“Were we supposed to fill those cups?” Tanner looked from one to the other.
“Dumbshit.” Estes threw another can and beaned the kid in the head. Maybe Tanner had been hit in the head once too often. Or maybe he was just that young. Lucky’s money was on that young.
The kid was barely nineteen.
“So, Eddie,” Tanner said, “you’re not going to pay for storage, either? What about donate?”
“They want a piece of me—” Estes plopped down on his own rack and opened a can of sour cream and onion “—they can pay me just like they would any other slob off the street.”
“CryoBank isn’t in the free-storage business,” Lucky felt compelled to point out.
“But what if…” Tanner started to say. “You know—”
Lucky was ready to put an end to this conversation. He never let himself think about the what if. Some guys believed every tour after the first was borrowed time. Lucky wasn’t the superstitious type. But he believed in making his own luck. “You don’t have to make up your mind right this minute,” he reassured the kid. “Why don’t you sleep on it?”
Lucky didn’t have that luxury. Half his mail was from a collection agency and didn’t even belong to him. And he did have to deal with that problem sooner rather than later.
He opened the first collection notice. Normally, he wouldn’t open someone else’s mail. But when that someone was his dead half brother—his dead half brother with his same name—well, he felt entitled. The mail mix-up was happening more often now that Little Luke had been KIA.
In the past they’d forwarded any misdirected mail directly to the other with a brotherly, thank-you-very-much note attached. Except thanks wasn’t the sentiment. At least not on his part. Lucky felt the shame of his resentment burning a hole in his gut. He was the older brother. He should have been the bigger man.
The George Foreman brothers had nothing on the Luke Calhoun boys. The Foremans had a father who had given them his name because he loved them. Lucky’s own father didn’t know the meaning of love.
At least not with his pants zipped.
Growing up, Lucky had been Junior. Luke had come along four years later as Little Luke because Big Luke’s secretary had wanted everyone to know the father of her baby. As if there had been any doubt. That had ended Lucky’s parents’ marriage around the same time Lucky’s brother, Bruce, was born.
Big Luke’s secretary became the second Mrs. Luke Calhoun Senior. Little Luke became the favorite son while Junior became the forgotten one.
After that he’d stopped going by Junior.
Eventually, Big Luke’s brother, John, had moved in—which was how Lucky’s uncle became his stepfather. Years later another half brother—or was that first cousin? He was never quite sure which—was born. By the time Lucky’s mother had Keith the town gossips couldn’t wag their tongues fast enough.
Calhouns were bad blood.
Lucky shuffled the first collection notice to the back and opened the next one. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Luke. Luke’s mother––the home wrecker––had finally packed up Little Luke and moved away, while Big Luke had moved on to Mrs. Luke Calhoun Senior number three. There were no more half sibs—that Lucky knew of, anyway—but with his father being fifty-five, with a wife two decades younger, it still wasn’t out of the question.
As soon as Lucky had turned seventeen, he’d left Colorado, without looking back. That had been ten years ago.
He kept in touch with
Bruce. Called his mother twice a year, on her birthday and Mother’s Day. Rarely spoke to his uncle, because neither of them were talkers. Never to his father. Heard all the family gossip through their sister, his crazy aunt Dottie. And until Luke had been killed, Lucky had never felt a twinge of anything familial for his two half brothers.
Maybe he was incapable of love.
At least with his pants zipped.
Glancing at the bills in his hand, Lucky took a deep breath and let it out again. Three months ago the chaplain had woken him from a sound sleep to inform him of his family’s double tragedy.
Like Lucky, Bruce was a Marine. But like Luke, Bruce had gone through SEAL training and the two were with the same Navy SEAL team when it happened.
Luke had lost his life.
Bruce had lost his leg.
With two Calhouns down for the count, Lucky had earned a free ride home—if he wanted it. Instead, he chose to stay at the Desert Palms Resort, where the bulk of his mail came in the form of past-due bills and collection notices belonging to a dead man. A man he’d never called brother.
Today’s bills were the third and final notices from a jewelry store. The twelve-thousand-dollar diamond-and-emerald engagement ring had an unpaid balance of over six thousand dollars with interest and late fees.
Mail in hand, Lucky picked up his Pringles canister and headed for the long Internet access lines. He had two Morale, Welfare and Recreation buildings to choose from—Area 51 and Dodge City. He headed in the direction of building 51F.