Marrying For A Mom
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As if she were your daughter, Whitney silently finished for him. She studied him, fascinated. For a devil-may-care personality, he had the kindest heart. Always had. “Logan?” she queried, summoning the courage to touch him, to lay her hand on his forearm. “What is it?”
Logan’s eyes closed, shutting her out of his pain. He twisted slightly at the waist, and her hand dropped away, as he put the wallet back into his pocket. “We were in the process of adopting her, but there was a lot of red tape. It took us a long time to find the biological parents and when we located them, the father agreed to relinquish his rights—but the mother kept changing her mind. Then, last year, the mother finally signed away her rights and the adoption was in the final stages. But then Jill died, leaving me as a single father, and now the agency is stalling. The caseworker says my company takes too much of my time, and that they feel it’s in Amanda’s best interest to be raised in a two-parent household. She told me last week they have a couple who inquired about adopting an older child, preferably a girl. She left me with the feeling that they could remove Amanda from the house. Maybe within the next few weeks.”
Whitney went limp all over. She knew what is was like to be jerked out of one home and dropped into another. Her mother had experimented with boyfriends, and communes, and middle-of-the-night flights from unpaid landlords and unfortunate affairs. “Oh, Logan, I’m so sorry. If there’s anything I can do….”
“You can. Help me get this bear for Amanda before they take her away. I don’t want her to think I’m abandoning her. Hell, I’d do anything to keep her.”
“Does she have any idea?”
Logan shook his head. “The social worker’s intimated things to her, suggested that maybe she would like another house, with a new mommy…”
Whitney groaned, the small of her back sinking against the counter. “No. Tell me she didn’t say that?”
“Yeah,” he said grimly. “She did. I suppose she meant well. But Amanda will be traumatized if they take her away. She’s too young to remember her life prior to living with us. We’re all she’s ever known.”
Whitney’s vision blurred. She vividly remembered a grocery sack full of clothes, a nonchalant goodbye and a pat on the head from her mother.
“Sure, as a single dad, I’ve had a few mishaps along the way,” he confided. “But I’ve learned from them. I’ve even learned how to make fifteen nutritious variations of canned spaghetti.”
“Nutritious canned spaghetti?” She couldn’t help it—she laughed.
He lifted an apologetic shoulder. “On the food chain, it’s one notch above tuna, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.”
Whitney had to bite her bottom lip. Her cheeks ached from trying not to smile. Her mother had never even cared enough to even open a can of tuna, let alone slap peanut butter on a slice of bread.
“Whitney, listen to me,” he said earnestly. “If I replace that bear, and Amanda’s taken away, it’ll give her a connection to something she loved. She needs to know that no matter what happens, I’m there for her. I love that kid so much—so damn much—that the thought of losing her, just….”
A hot, hard lump swelled in Whitney’s throat; she willed her response to be firm, not shaky. God knows, she’d do anything for Logan. All he had to do was ask. “I can tell you right now I don’t have anything like it in the store. But I’ll find it,” Whitney said. “I promise.”
“Can you believe this? Can you believe I’m looking for a teddy bear?” he asked humorlessly. “Sometimes I think it would just be easier to find myself a wife. Maybe that would make the caseworker happy.”
Whitney stared into the depths of his ice-blue eyes and the most unimaginable thought crossed her mind. She just couldn’t bring herself to say it. Suddenly she was paralyzed by the awesomeness of it all.
She vaguely considered offering herself up as the sacrificial lamb.
“Whitney?”
A second slipped away.
“Yes, Logan?”
“Thank you,” he said simply. “For you to do this, especially after everything that’s happened…well, it makes me realize I overlooked something very special in high school.”
The expression of gratitude took her breath away. His praise was so unexpected. As teenagers, they had shared a few laughs, the same row of seats in study hall, and, on Senior Skip Day, one near kiss…something that, in later years, she’d silently regretted as her “one near miss.” Later, when Logan offered her ex a job, and he’d so badly messed that up, she had apologized repeatedly, hoping to redeem herself in Logan’s eyes. But Logan had been young and angry, and he’d stalked away.
After years of beating herself up over that horrific parting it seemed inconceivable that all she had to do to make things better was find a teddy bear. It was a small price to pay to be able to put the matter to rest, and get the man and the memories out of her mind.
Still, Whitney would never know what prompted her to say what she did next, maybe it was because she was a new woman and she had come of age, and into her own. She had the security, and the confidence to dare to remind him. “Not something,” she corrected quietly. “Someone. You overlooked someone. Someone like me.”
Chapter Two
Logan leaned back, as far as his leather desk chair would allow, and pinched the bridge of his nose. It had been a long, wearisome day. He was bone-tired and the house looked like a tornado had struck. Four hours ago, his third housekeeper quit to take care of her grandchildren in California, and he was at his wit’s end.
All he’d asked of the woman was to supervise Amanda after school and put a hot meal on the table. She’d accepted his generous paycheck, and done exactly that and no more. The laundry was piled up to the rafters, the sink was overflowing with dirty dishes and the carpets reminded him of one giant lint trap. Amanda had taken to writing her name on the TV screen, and playing tic-tac-toe in the dust on the coffee table. Games and toys, and shoes and socks were scattered in every room in the house, and the counters were a hodgepodge of newspapers, magazines, advertisements and old mail.
How had Jill done it? She’d managed to get Amanda to school on time, and he never remembered her scrambling to find a matching pair of shoes or digging through the couch cushions for lunch money.
This was the worst it had been. The worst.
He couldn’t ask his mom to fill in again. This was their busiest time of year at the marina, and his dad was already making noises about clearing cars off the lot to make room for the new ones that would be coming out.
Talk about being between the devil and the deep blue. His folks had already made it clear that he should give it up, that Amanda was too much responsibility for him right now. On top of everything else, he couldn’t bear to hear their “I told you so’s.” He supposed they were thinking of his best interests, but then, when it came to family, they’d always thought with their heads and not their hearts.