Deserving of Luke by Tracy Wolff Page B

were in for as they tried to rehab this house. It really was a disaster.
    â€œLook, how I once felt about your past is pretty much a moot point, don’t you think?” he asked. “What’s important is Luke and where we go from here.”
    For a second he didn’t think she was going to respond, but finally she sighed and said, “So, where do you see this going?”
    There it was, the question he had been asking himself since he got his first glimpse of Luke that afternoon in Prospector’s. He’d turned it over in his head a million times in the last ten hours, and though he still had a lot of unanswered questions—a lot of concerns and misgivings—there was one thing he was certain of. “I want to be a part of his life.”
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    E VEN THOUGH SHE’D PREPARED herself for it, even though she’d known it was coming, the words were still a tremendous blow. How could they not be? Luke had been hers—exclusively hers—almost from the moment she’d known of his existence. The idea that she was now expected to share him with someone else—and not just anyone else, but with the man whohad rejected him, rejected her, without listening to her side of the story—grated the way nothing else ever had.
    Her knee-jerk reaction was to snatch up Luke and run as fast and as far away from this god-awful town as she could possibly manage. In L.A. she had friends to support her, a job that paid the bills very nicely, a kickass attorney who wouldn’t let Logan within a hundred yards of Luke. It sounded really tempting.
    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?”
    â€œI don’t know what you want me to say.” She moved to sit on the swing, pulled her legs up underneath her. Curling up was small protection, but she would take