by Tracy Wolff
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.
CHAPTER FIVE
“WELL, 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.
LOGAN 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 sit
uation. 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.
CHAPTER SIX
“HEY, MOM. CATCH!”
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 grou
nd.
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.