The Wedding Plan. Abby Gaines
a smelly girl?” Dwight teased. Mia shrieked with delight, apparently undisturbed by the stench emanating from her diaper.
“Dad, can we talk?” Lucas tried again to drag his father’s attention to more serious matters. Such as Lucas’s down-the-toilet military career.
“Of course we can.” Dwight untaped the diaper.
Lucas took a hasty step backward. “Man, she stinks.”
“Don’t talk about your sister like that.” Dwight wielded a wet wipe with surprising efficiency. It went without saying that he hadn’t done any diaper changing when Lucas and his older brother, Garrett, were babies. Their father’s metamorphosis to doting dad was very new. For Mia’s sake, Lucas was pleased.
He just wished it was possible to have a conversation with his father that wasn’t about feeding or potty time.
As Dwight tossed the diaper in the trash, Mia wriggled, a flurry of pudgy arms and legs. Lucas surged forward to block the side of the changing table.
Dwight held her in place with a hand on her chest. “I wouldn’t let her fall,” he growled.
Lucas hadn’t come back to New London, Connecticut, to argue with his dad. He stepped away.
“Pass me a new diaper,” his father ordered. The return to something approaching military style was so welcome that Lucas obeyed.
When Mia was dressed again, Dwight picked her up. “Would you like to hold her?” he asked Lucas.
“Uh, no. I’m good, thanks.”
Mia nestled against Dwight’s shoulder, eyelids at half-mast.
“She’ll nod off soon,” he predicted. “Let’s talk downstairs in my study.”
As they reached the bottom of the staircase, the glass-paned front door opened. Stephanie, Lucas’s stepmom, came in and set her purse on the hall console. She gave a squeal of pleasure. “Lucas! When did you get here? Come give me a hug, you adorable boy.”
He squeezed her tightly. “I don’t need to ask how you are. You look great.”
She smacked his shoulder. “Liar. Do you know how hard it is for a woman in her mid-forties to lose baby weight? But I love you for saying it.” She pulled away to address Dwight. “Darling, you know very well Mia should be in bed.”
“She kept calling to me over the baby monitor,” he protested.
Lucas noted with some discomfort that his father sounded sheepish. Great. The country had benefited for decades from Admiral Calder’s unrelenting sense of mission, but the one time Lucas needed his dad operating at full aggression… What had happened to Admiral Cold-ass, as he’d been irreverently known to his crew?
Stephanie took the baby from Dwight. “I’ll put her to bed. Sorry, sweetie,” she crooned to Mia, “but Mean Mommy’s back.”
Mia babbled something that may or may not have been an attempt at words. Her parents cooed as if she’d just recited Shakespeare.
Lucas couldn’t help noticing that Dwight caressed his wife’s bottom as she passed. Things really had changed.
Was his dad even capable of focusing on Lucas’s problem?
Lucas reminded himself that Dwight had been a navy man far longer than he’d been a family man. If he could just recall his “pre-enlightened” state, he would understand why Lucas needed his help.
“It’s good to have you home,” Dwight said as he settled into the burgundy leather chair behind his oak desk. The desk had once graced the captain’s stateroom on a nineteenth-century sailing ship. “How’s the hand?”
“Fine,” Lucas said. “Great. Fully recovered.” Sixteen months ago, his minesweeping chopper had been shot down in the Persian Gulf. Lucas had been medevaced to the U.S.A. for treatment—on the day Mia was born, as it turned out. Getting over the concussion, broken ribs and ankle and punctured lung had proved easy. Or so he’d thought at the time.
The surgery on his shattered hand had been more complex, the rehabilitation endless. Partly because Lucas had insisted on doing it all in one long stretch, relocating to Baltimore to be closer to the rehab center.
“Shame about your eyes.” Someone must have reported the details of Lucas’s latest physical to Dwight. Shouldn’t happen, of course, but Admiral Calder had so many friends in high places, there was always someone keen to fill him in about his son. Even though Dwight would have been too honorable to ask.
“The only problem was my depth perception,” Lucas said. “Everything else was fine.” He’d had no idea that, after working so hard to restore his hand, he would fail his back-to-duty physical because of his eyesight. The doctor had attributed the change in his vision to the deep concussion he’d sustained in the crash.
The skeptical pursing of Dwight’s lips said his father wasn’t fooled by the words the only problem.
It was an insurmountable problem.
Nothing is insurmountable.
“You’ve heard they’re discharging me, as of December 31,” Lucas guessed. “I’m on leave until then.”
Dwight nodded. “I understand you turned down a desk job.”
“I want to fly.” They’d told him that couldn’t happen. He should have known better than to issue an ultimatum to the U.S. Navy. But no way did he want to sit at a desk while, out there, men risked their lives to protect others.
Thanks to his ultimatum—send me back or discharge me—he’d be out at the end of the year. A man without a mission. He couldn’t get his head around the idea.
Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to.
“You failed the physical, you can’t fly,” Dwight said.
Usually, Lucas considered having his father so high up in the navy to be a disadvantage. Today, he hoped that for the first time in his life, it would help.
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” he said. “I need to see a different doctor, get a retest and a second opinion. I figured you’d know someone.”
Someone who would understand his need to get back out there.
“We don’t do retests,” Dwight said. “Besides, if you failed it once, you’ll fail again.”
“There are exercises I can do to improve my depth perception,” Lucas replied. He hoped what he’d read on the internet was true, not some urban myth. “If I’d known I had a problem, I would have done them already. As it is, I want to spend a month strengthening my vision, then sit the test again.”
Another pilot had been assigned to Lucas’s chopper on a temporary basis, on the assumption that he’d be back. Now that he was out, his C.O. wanted to appoint the other guy permanently. At Lucas’s request, he’d agreed to hold off for a few more weeks. Seemed he had more faith in Lucas’s ability to swing a retest than his dad did.
“I’m not sure I like the idea of you going back after what you went through,” Dwight said. “You’re lucky to be alive. You’ve done your duty to your country, and then some.”
“It’s not about duty,” Lucas said. “It’s about…” No one in my unit is better than I am at undersea mine detection and destruction. No one is better at protecting our ships and their crews. They need me. He wasn’t about to argue with his father about the numbers of lives and ships that were at stake every day over there. “This is who I am, Dad.”
“Maybe this is a time to reevaluate who you are.” Dwight’s emphasis recognized the irony of a man like himself talking such postmodern jargon. “The navy isn’t everything—I almost lost what really mattered before I figured that out.”
He and Stephanie had split up briefly before Mia’s