The Bride Said, 'Surprise!'

“I know she is the kind of person who gives help, not the kind of person who asks for it,” Luke continued. He was determined to help Meg now in the gallant way he should have helped her before, even if it meant marrying her so Jeremy could have both a mother and a father. “If I am the father, she probably thought—back then—that because I was engaged to someone else, she was doing the right thing in not telling me. But she’s not. Not anymore. Not when her son wants answers so badly he’s resorted to asking anyone and everyone he thinks might know something. Whether Meg wants to admit it or not, the situation is only going to get worse until she levels with Jeremy and tells him who his father is.”

“Have you come right out and asked Meg if you’re Jeremy’s father?” Lilah asked.

Luke thought back to what had actually been said initially. “I asked her what Jeremy’s birth date was. She told me. And that seemed to eliminate me. Now I’m not so sure.”

“So she never actually said you weren’t Jeremy’s father,” John determined.

“No.” Luke rubbed the tense muscles at the back of his neck. “I asked her point-blank who Jeremy’s father was but she refused to answer the question directly. And instead, talked about making a series of mistakes that couldn’t be undone.”

“So she could still be talking about you,” John theorized bluntly, quickly realizing what Luke was getting at.

“If Jeremy was born prematurely, yes, then Jeremy could very well be my son.” Luke waited, hoping they would reveal what he needed to know. To his disappointment they didn’t.

“I understand what you want us to tell you, but…you really should get this kind of information from Meg,” Lilah said.

Luke had been afraid they’d have this reaction. “And if Meg still won’t tell me?”

John shrugged and exchanged a long, thoughtful glance with his wife before advising, “Then you wait until she trusts you enough to do so.”

Luke sighed unhappily. “That might never happen.” Which left him with even fewer options—find out on his own by whatever means necessary if Jeremy had been born prematurely or hire an attorney and demand a paternity test. Neither option appealed to him. More important, neither option was something Meg was likely to condone. Feeling more frustrated and shut out than ever, Luke knotted his hands into fists and shoved them in his pockets.

“We understand how you feel,” Lilah said gently. She reached over and patted his hand. “We’ve tried to get Meg to unburden herself to us. Or at least to do right by Jeremy’s father and tell him about his son. For a while I thought we had succeeded, because a few weeks after she learned she was pregnant she went off, determined to tell him.”

Luke’s hopes mingled with the fear that he wasn’t the only person Meg turned to in her grief and her need…fear that he might not be Jeremy’s father after all. “And?”

Lilah sighed. “Meg never said what happened when she returned, but it was easy to see she was absolutely devastated by whatever had transpired while she’d been gone.”

Luke’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. “You think Jeremy’s father abandoned her?”

“That was our guess. In any case Meg told us then that she was going to bring up Jeremy on her own. She didn’t want to do it that way, but she had no choice. We told her we would always support her, and we have.”

“Meg never came to talk to me,” Luke said, sad to realize all over again that he might not be Jeremy’s father after all. “If she had…you have to know I would have been there for her and for Jeremy.” It wouldn’t have taken a baby to get him to marry her, either. All Meg would have had to do was give him the slightest sign that they had a chance to be together, and he would have waited for her forever. As it was, seeing no reason to hurt Gwyneth with the truth, he’d broken off his engagement to Gwyneth without a decent explanation, hurting her unconscionably. And only following through on his promise and marrying her six months later because she was still so devastated and determined to wait for him, and he didn’t want to be responsible for ruining Gwyneth’s life, too. The bitter irony of it being, of course, that he had ended up more or less ruining Gwyneth’s life anyway, despite his efforts to be the best husband and father to their children he could possibly be.

“I don’t want to hurt Meg,” Luke said, meaning it with all his heart.

“Then be there for her now,” Lilah said gently.

John nodded. “Be her friend.”

The problem was, Luke thought, he wanted so much more than that where Meg was concerned. He always had. Always would.

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