Page 74 of Second Chance Fate

“I mean, he’s Hot Pastor,” Owen joked.

Hot Pastor. Right. She needed to tell him about the marriage so he wouldn’t have visions of his new dad being the next Bachelor, which there were rumors about.

“Um, so, when I was in the hospital, the day after I got out of the ICU, um…” She licked her lips and brushed her hair behind her ear. “Caleb, your dad, came in to see me, and he brought up…he suggested…he had looked into putting his name on your birth certificate, which we want to do if you are okay with it.”

“I mean, yeah, he’s my dad, so yeah.” Owen nodded, but his eyes were narrowing slightly in suspicion. He knew there was something more she needed to say.

“At the time, everything felt very, um, uncertain, and he felt, well, we felt like the best way forward was a legal arrangement because of medical insurance, and also there was the question of next of kin and?—”

“Mom, your hives.” Owen picked up the cloth and handed it to her again.

She pressed it just below her neck.

“Just say it,” he prompted. “Whatever it is, it’s fine.”

“He thought we should get married, legally married, and I said yes.”

Owen’s eyes lit with excitement as his jaw dropped. Literally, his mouth was agape. “You guys are getting married.”

“We got married. That day. It wasn’t a wedding. It was just paperwork we signed. I didn’t even get out of bed.”

“Oh.”

“It wasn’t about romance or love; it was about security.”

A crease appeared between Owen’s brows. “But you love him.”

She wasn’t going to deny it. “Yes, I do.”

“And he loves you.”

“No, but that’s not a bad thing,” she quickly defended him.

“Mom, he does.” Owen pulled his phone out of his pocket and opened the photo app. “Look.”

He started scrolling through photo after photo of Caleb sitting beside her bed in the hospital. There were dozens, and in all of them he was either holding her hand, touching her arm, or brushing a hair off of her face. In some of the photos, he was kissing the back of her hand. Others, he was kissing herforehead, which she knew he did now, but she had no memory of him doing so in the hospital. There were photos of him holding her hand to his face with his eyes closed; it looked like he was praying for her, but she didn’t know if that was the case.

Then Owen pulled up short videos of Caleb. In one he was talking to her while she was out of it. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but the look in his eye honestly stole her breath away. There were a couple of videos of him speaking to doctors; his tone and posture were definitely of a man with “my wife” energy. She’d learned that term from the romance novels she read during Owen’s hospital stays.

“Oh, and then also, I found this.” Owen took his phone back and scrolled further down in his photos. When he turned the phone back around, she saw it was a snap of the second photo strip they’d taken at Daytona Beach, the one that Caleb had.

“Where did you find that?”

“It’s in his first Bible, in the box that he keeps the jersey he wore when his high school football team won the national championship and the MVP trophy he won in baseball. That’s it, just those four things.” Owen smiled.

She wondered if Owen was right. Did Caleb actually love her, not just as the mother of his child but as more? Or maybe he’d just used the photo strip as a bookmark.

“And no, it wasn’t just a bookmark.”

“How did you know I thought that?” She pushed the phone away from her. Sometimes Owen actually freaked Taylor out, and she worried he could read her mind.

“Because I know you, and you are really clueless sometimes.”

“I am not.”

“So you know Dr. Davies changed his rotation while you were in the hospital just so he could have the excuse to come and see you every day?”

She knew that Dr. Davies was covering for someone while she was there, but when that happened, Mario did the same thing.

---