Game Plan Of The Heart

“Well,” he said, “sorry to have bothered you. Two blocks which way?”

She pointed, not even trying to hide the fact that his departure filled her with relief. Apparently she was not one of the ones in search of a diamond ring and a wedding date. Bowen was amazed to find himself slightly miffed at this rare display of immunity to his masculine charm.

In a moment of insanity, he thought of staying, making small talk, getting around to the pizza and beer thing.

Sanity came back in a gratifying rush. This situation promised to bring nothing but confusion and chaos to his well ordered life.

He turned swiftly to go, promising he would never look back. He would never think about that question in the night. “Are you my daddy?”

He would never think about the little boy’s large green eyes or her somber golden brown ones again.

He would make a clean getaway. In moments he would be back to his neat and tidy life. He was willing to bet the prank phone calls were over.

But his clean getaway was impeded by a sturdy little body that was suddenly planted in front of him.

“What grade do you teach?” Justin asked, his words laced with just a touch of desperation.

Desperation that made Bowen realize the only one he’d been fooling was himself. He could never walk away from the Burnadettes without knowing the answer.

Was he this little boy’s dad? The possibility was remote. One in a million. One in a billion. One in a trillion, maybe.

But people did win lotteries all the time. And they got struck by lightning. Weird coincidences threaded human existence. At school last week, all the female teachers had been talking about a TV program they’d seen where two guys who met in a bar and became best friends for life later discovered they were brothers.

He could see that Ashton was not happy about this delay in his departure, and he had a purely masculine need to change that, to know if she felt even a little bit of the same sizzle he was feeling.

“I teach grades ten, eleven, and twelve boys P.E.,” he said. “And I coach football. Our senior team has been division champs three years in a row.”