Her Motherhood Wish (Parent Portal 3)

“Yeah. All the time. Any time he was home. Mom let me stay with him for as long and as often as he could keep me.”

“Was he still in San Diego? What about when you were in school?”

She shook her head. “He bought a small place here in Marie Cove shortly after their divorce. To be close enough to Mission Viejo to be able to get me to and from school.”

“Did he remarry?”

Why so many questions about the guy, he didn’t know. It just seemed important, somehow, that he understand this part of her. The father in her life.

“Nope. I think Mom was the love of his life.”

“But he wasn’t hers,” he surmised aloud. “She didn’t take to military life?” he was just guessing. But it sounded as if the two had remained on a friendly enough basis that they didn’t need parenting laws to dictate their time with their child.

She shook her head and then glanced away. It was the first t

ime she’d felt closed off to him since he’d taken her hand in the parking lot. Odd, since they were complete strangers.

Odder still that the sudden lack bothered him as much as it did.

The woman was pregnant with his child. He’d noticed a little swell beneath her dress as she’d gotten out of her car—of course, it could just be the natural curve of any woman’s belly, but...

She looked back at him then and shot all thought from his mind when she said, “It wasn’t the navy so much that caused their problems. My father...was not quite a slow learner, but close,” she said, speaking hesitantly as though choosing her words carefully. “He graduated from high school a year late and did well enough to make it as an enlisted man in the navy. He was educable. He just didn’t put a lot of two and two together on his own. Not in a book-learning sense. But because of that, I think, he had a way of understanding the things that really matter. He lived a simple life, and yet, most of the lessons I learned, the ones that serve me in the hardest times, I learned from him.” Her gaze had softened so much Wood almost got lost in it.

It took a second for her words to register, but when they did, they hit him like the swing of a two-by-four hanging from a crane. Had she just told him why she’d chosen him, an uneducated man, as her donor?

Because she’d so admired her own father?

He’d been planning to ask why. Mentally crossed that one right off his list. He did not want to hear that he’d been chosen because he was uneducated.

And because he had no immediate response, he sat there silent.

“He and my mom hooked up after her parents were killed in a boating accident. He was nineteen and she was eighteen, both working at a ’50s diner in San Diego. My dad was a huge comfort to her. She says even now that she doubts she’d have made it through that time without him.”

That reminded Wood of Elaina’s words about him...

Cassie’s soft smile struck Wood. Another one of those stand-out moments that he’d probably not forget, and yet one that had no context in his unemotional mindset.

“It was the summer after they’d both graduated from high school. He’d already enlisted, and she was due to start college in the fall. Her parents had just died a few weeks before, and one night they went together to a party on the beach and just kind of started hanging out after that. They slept together before he left for boot camp. And when he came back and was being deployed, they got married. I think she truly thought they had a shot at making it work. Dad loved her so much, was so good to her. She knew he was going to make a great father someday. All things she also still says today.

“But as soon as she started college, they grew apart. He was gone a lot, and when he was home, he couldn’t relate to most of what was captivating her. Didn’t know a lot about the business world or stock markets or marketing. But just a few months after they were married, Mom found out she was pregnant. By the time I was a year old, I think I was the only thing they had in common. When Mom graduated, with a great job offer in Mission Viejo, and he didn’t understand why she couldn’t just take the lesser job she’d been offered in San Diego, she knew that if she didn’t leave then, they’d end up hating each other. They were always kind to each other, respectful of each other... Mom and Richard, my stepdad, were both at his funeral.”

His biggest fear had just come to life in the form of two people he’d never met. Had Cassie’s dad’s lack of education, of potential, been at least partially responsible for the failure of his marriage?

He didn’t like Cassie’s story. At all. A man had loved his family with all of his heart, and it hadn’t been enough.

And yet...to have a woman like Cassie there, adoring him, looking up to him in her own way... Maybe her father hadn’t been all that unlucky after all.

Some people just had to take what was given to them. To see the gifts where they were.

That was intelligence in the way that mattered most.

“I’m an average learner,” he blurted, against his better judgment. “I’m not well educated, but I have the mental capacity to be.”

She blinked. Sat back. “Okay.”

“Just in case you think your kid is going to get genes like your dad’s from me. He isn’t. Or she isn’t.”

And he was doing a fantastic job of proving so.