He smiled, rubbed her cheek with his thumb. “I can’t take that chance, either. Not with you. I very much want to be your friend, though.”
She smiled then, too. “So...we’re okay?”
He shook his head, frowned. “When weren’t we okay?”
“Are we okay to be in touch? Or is this it? I won’t see you again after today?”
“You want the truth?”
“Of course.”
Feeling as though they’d already bared their souls to each other, he didn’t see much point in holding back now. “I feel a bond with you. And with that child you’re carrying. Any chance I have to be in his life, tomorrow, next week and forever, I will accept with full responsibility and caring.”
“He doesn’t have a father,” Cassie said, then sucked in on her lips, as though biting them.
He waited.
“I can’t make any promises, Wood, but part of the reason I went to the Parent Portal was because I recognize that some people yearn to know where they came from. Look at the huge interest in familial DNA searches these days.” She shook her head, glanced away and then back. “I take full responsibility for this baby, but I won’t ever deny him the chance to know his father. If his father wants to know him.”
The sun exploded inside him. Burning him. Giving him the most acute pleasure. And hurting, too. “His father definitely wants to know him,” he said, knowing that with those words he’d just changed his life.
That there’d be complications and struggles and challenges beyond what he could see.
But he couldn’t take the words back. Didn’t even want to try.
Chapter Ten
“I clearly have no idea what I’m doing.” Cassie sat with her mom Sunday afternoon in chairs they’d brought out to the beach. As soon as she’d called to let her mother know about the week she’d had, the scare, and the better than not outcome, Susan Anderson had insisted on driving down from Mission Viejo, leaving her husband, Richard, at home to handle business there.
Sipping from an insulated water bottle, Cassie lodged the rubber-lidded metal container in the sand beside her and stretched her legs out. The chair was only a few inches above the ground and made it easy for her to get comfortable.
Physically.
Emotionally she was completely the opposite.
“You always know what you’re doing,” her mother said, hands folded across the black spandex of the one-piece suit that showed her fifty-six-year-old slimness off to perfection. Cassie hoped to have a body half as nice as her mom’s when she got to be that age.
“You always have,” Susan continued, her gaze blocked by the dark-lensed sunglasses she wore. But Cassie could pretty much see her expression anyway. Susan was not a warm, fuzzy woman—until it came to her only child. Cassie had never found her mother lacking in compassion, nurturing and support. “I remember one time when you were three or four. You were only allowed an hour a day of television, and then it had to be only material made exclusively for toddlers and young children. But one night you turned on a rather intense police procedural and were sitting in the living room watching it. I saw what you were doing but was more curious about why than I was ready to stop you. You kept looking behind you and then would turn the volume up louder. Eventually your dad came out of his den, where he went at night to watch his shows while I gave you a bath and read to you. He took the remote and turned off the television, reminding you gently that you’d already had your hour for the day and that those shows weren’t good for you.”
Cassie listened, not at all sure where this was going, but fascinated, just the same. Her mom rarely talked about the years she’d been married to Alan Thompson. Never when Richard was around, which was pretty much always.
“You nodded, and when he sat down, you climbed up into his lap, wrapped your arms around him and just sat there.”
She had no memory of the moment her mother was retelling, but she could remember sitting on her dad’s lap many times during her growing-up years. She’d always felt so safe and secure in his arms. Except when he’d been hugging her goodbye to go on deployment. She’d hated those times.
“I asked you later why you turned on the TV when you knew you weren’t allowed to do so, though I’d already figured it out...”
Cassie waited. Trying to remember her little-girl self, to remember how she’d felt or what she might have said. Her guess was she’d wanted to know what her father was watching. Or to watch it with him.
“You said that you thought Daddy was lonely and so you were making our room more like his so he’d come out and be with us.”
Oh.
Tearing up, she glanced at her mother. Wishing so hard she could remember having said that.
“Why haven’t you ever told me this before?”
Susan shrugged, shaking her head. “I’d honestly forgotten it. Just...hearing you talk about this man, Wood, the way you’re worrying about him being in your baby’s life, but not being able to be a real father to him...it just reminded me...”