The Bride Said, 'Surprise!'

Luke had been afraid he might be met with this type of reaction. If so, it explained a lot about what Meg had been going through. “This boy needs a father,” Luke said firmly.

“I understand that,” Kip said readily enough, leaning forward in his chair. “I even sympathize. And if he were mine, I wouldn’t hesitate to do right by him. But he isn’t mine, Luke.”

So Meg hadn’t told Kip she was pregnant with Jeremy, just as Luke had thought. “Going by the birth date, you were still dating Meg when Jeremy was conceived.”

“Which makes it all the worse.” Kip frowned.

Luke’s glance narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Do you know why Meg and I broke up?” Kip rubbed the back of his neck, looking increasingly uncomfortable.

Luke shrugged. “All she would ever say on the subject was you two wanted different things out of life.”

“Sounds like Meg.” Kip shifted in his chair and shook his head. “Discreet to the max.”

Luke waited.

Finally Kip rubbed his jaw and continued, “It boiled down to a couple of things. One, I was jealous of her increasingly intimate friendship with you. And two, she wouldn’t sleep with me. Wouldn’t even come close, which in turn led to a whole host of other problems between us. So you see,” Kip concluded heavily, “whoever Jeremy’s father is, it sure as hell isn’t me.”

TWO HOURS LATER, Luke was back in Laramie and still reeling from what he had discovered. He called Patricia Weatherby on his cell phone—learned all was fine with the girls—and asked for a little more time.

He drove over to John and Lilah McCabe’s ranch. He knew as soon as they ushered him in that he was interrupting something important. They had paperwork scattered across the kitchen table and a laptop computer plugged into the phone line. “I should have called first,” Luke apologized.

“Nonsense. We’re just doing the paperwork for our trip to Central America in a few weeks. We’re doing medical relief there.”

Luke hadn’t known. “That’s wonderful,” he said as he pulled up a chair alongside them.

“What’s up?” John asked, as ready to help as ever.

Luke drew a breath and worked to ease the tenseness of his muscles. “There’s no way to broach this subject gracefully, so I’m just going to be blunt. I need to ask you a few questions in complete confidence, and they’re really important, or believe me, I wouldn’t be here right now, inquiring.”

Lilah and John exchanged concerned glances. “Go ahead,” John said as Lilah got up to pour them all some coffee.

“Was Meg Lockhart’s son, Jeremy, born here in Laramie?”

“Yes.” A quizzical expression on her face—clearly she didn’t understand why Luke was asking—Lilah set a stoneware mug down in front of Luke and filled it to the brim. Then she topped off John’s mug as well as her own.

“Was he born prematurely?” Luke forged on. “Say by about a month?”

Again Lilah and John exchanged looks that indicated they didn’t want to be in the middle of this “situation” between Luke and Meg any more than Luke wanted them there. “I don’t think that’s a question you should be asking us,” Lilah said finally, as she returned the glass carafe to the warmer and returned to her seat at the table. “Medical records are confidential.”

“I know that. I also know I could get the answer easily enough by asking around town. And I don’t want to do that. I figure enough eyebrows have been raised regarding Jeremy’s paternity as it is.”

Abruptly John McCabe looked as protective as any parent. “Have you asked Meg these questions?”

Luke nodded grimly. “I talked to her about Jeremy’s paternity yesterday. She was evasive, to say the least.”

John rubbed his jaw and continued to regard Luke thoughtfully. “And yet you still think this is your business?”

Luke took a sip of Lilah’s hot, delicious coffee. “If Jeremy was born prematurely, it is.”

John and Lilah exchanged troubled glances. “You’re saying you two…that Jeremy might be…?”

Luke sighed and shoved a hand through his hair. “Meg and I got to be very good friends when she was doing graduate work in Chicago. It was a strictly platonic relationship because we were both romantically involved with other people—except for the night her parents were killed. That night pretty much ended our friendship, at least as far as Meg was concerned.”

John and Lilah looked at each other again, sighed and linked hands. “This explains a lot,” Lilah said eventually. “Like why Meg was so upset when she learned John had met you at a medical conference and recruited you to take over for him. And why she’s been ducking you ever since.”

“I wouldn’t be asking you this if it weren’t very important to Jeremy, Meg and me.” Luke went on to explain about Jeremy’s running away the previous evening. “Despite Meg’s denials to the contrary, I assumed by Jeremy’s birth date that his father was Meg’s former boyfriend, Kip Brewster. I know Kip. I know Kip can be a little arrogant or over-the-top at times when it comes to getting what he wants, but I also knew he would want to take responsibility for his son, if he knew about him. But I just got back from talking to Kip. He says it’s not him—he never slept with her. If it wasn’t him…” He paused before stating, “I know Meg.”

She was not, had never been, promiscuous. She wouldn’t have slept with someone on the spur of the moment under normal circumstances. The only reason they had been together that way was that she had just found out her parents had died, and she was out of her mind with grief. Helpless to do anything about the circumstances that had robbed Meg and her sisters of their parents, helpless to get Meg back to Texas any sooner than the first flight out the following morning, Luke had been desperate to just get her through the night and comfort Meg in any way she wanted or needed. It had only been later, after they’d experienced such mind-blowing passion, that Luke had discovered that hot, ardent lovemaking hadn’t been what Meg wanted or needed, at least not on any rational level. Rather than lessen her despair, he had added to it.

“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.