Deserving of Luke by Tracy Wolff Page B

Luke hadn’t brought Logan up after that first day, she’d thought he’d changed his mind. That maybe he hadn’t been all that impressed with his father after seeing him. But now she had to admit that her sister was probably right. She’d been so caught up in her anger, so caught up in her resentment of Logan, that she hadn’t seen it.
    So much for being a good mother. Her son was going through a crisis and she hadn’t even noticed that anything was wrong. A sense of failure invaded her, not for the first time since she became a mother,but for the first time in a while. It had been years since she’d felt this down, this helpless, this wrong.
    The question was what was she going to do about it?
    Logan’s words reverberated in her mind, his mention of court orders. His implication that she was a bad mother. His threats to take Luke from her.
    He couldn’t do that—she wouldn’t let him. She had a really good job in L.A., probably made more money than he did, if it came down to going to court.
    She wasn’t an unfit mother. She’d spent the past eight years making sure that Luke never felt the way she had growing up, that he never believed for a second that he was anything but an incredible gift to her. She might have only been seventeen when she’d gotten pregnant with him, but he hadn’t ruined her life. He’d given her a life.
    Without him, she didn’t know if she would have had the strength to walk away from her parents and their viciousness. She’d left because she knew she couldn’t bring a baby into the same toxic atmosphere that she had grown up in.
    And getting pregnant had given her a whole lot of insight, very quickly, into what Logan really thought of her. She’d been such a fool at seventeen, had convinced herself that the things she’d done to get attention in the past didn’t matter to him. What a joke that had turned out to be.
    Because while she’d been spinning all kinds of romantic daydreams about him, he’d been like all the other guys—using her to scratch an itch. She’d believed that he loved her as much as she loved him only to find out that he didn’t love her, and that he believed all the stupid rumors flying around.
    She was used to that kind of stuff from her parents, but Logan had seemed different. He had held her, whispered his dreams to her, told her that they would be together forever. Finding out it had all been a lie, finding out that he considered her nothing more than trash, had shattered her.
    She’d gotten over it—of course she had. He might have ripped her heart out once, but she’d spent the past nine years repairing it, and building a wall around her heart that he could never breach.
    Which is why she could do this. Why she could call him up and ask him if he wanted to meet them for ice cream. She would pretend that those long-ago nights and promises had happened to someone else.
    If Luke wanted to meet his father, wanted to try to build a relationship with him, then she wasn’t going to stand in his way—even if it ripped her apart. Her son meant everything to her. She’d always thought that she would brave the gates of hell itself for him. So surely she could handle making nice for a fewhours with the man who had made his existence possible.
    Right?
    Absolutely, she assured herself as she reached for the small phone book Penny kept in the cabinet beneath the phone. And if she had to superglue a smile on her face before she met him, then so be it. Luke was worth it. He was worth anything.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    T WO AND A HALF HOURS LATER, Paige wasn’t so sure. Not about her kid being worth everything because, hey, he totally was. But about letting Logan into his life. When they’d arranged to meet at the ice cream parlor at eight o’clock, Logan had sounded thrilled at the chance to finally meet his son, which was why she’d told Luke over