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“Are you going to die?” Maddie asked, her brows furrowed.
“Are you leaving?” Rachel asked.
He shook his head at both of their questions. “I want to be your dad.”
Well, that was one way to say it. He supposed that was what he got for wanting to have this talk before he thought about what he was going to say.
“You mean like live with us?” Maddie asked, tilting her head and slanting her gaze at her mom.
“Maybe eventually,” he said, smiling at the horrified look on Dakota’s face. That wasn’t the direction she wanted this to go, but he’d known all along that was the direction he wanted.
“Why not now?” Rachel asked.
“Well, a man isn’t supposed to live with a woman when they’re not married. At least that’s what the Bible says. And I wouldn’t want to do that to your mom.”
“Then get married,” Maddie said easily. Like it was that simple.
“Maybe we will. But in the meantime, I... Your mom and I were together a long time ago, before your mom met the man she married. The man who became your dad.”
This was harder than he thought it was going to be.
“And because you’re older,” he looked at Maddie, “your mom was pregnant with you before she got married to Gregory, Rachel’s dad.”
Maddie sat still, but her face scribbled up, and her eyes narrowed. “She was pregnant before she was married to Dad?”
It irritated him to hear her call someone else her father. But he pushed that irritation aside. “Yeah. That means that I’m your dad.”
He wasn’t sure he needed to explain it in any greater detail, and he wasn’t going to if Maddie would accept that.
“So Dad isn’t my dad, but you are?”
“Yeah.”
“What about me?” Rachel piped up, jumping up and putting her hand on his shoulder. “I want you to be my dad too.”
“And that’s fine with me. I want you to be my daughter. I... I don’t know if I can adopt you eventually, but I’d like to.”
“Adopt? Like... Like Rich and Kayla were adopted?” Maddie leaned around her sister and looked at her mom.
Her mom nodded. “Just like that.”
It wasn’t quite like that, since Maddie was actually his daughter, but he didn’t think that she was at the age where he could exactly explain everything else.
He supposed through the years, there’d be more questions, and this was almost an anticlimax, because it had been so... He didn’t want to say easy, but nondramatic.
He hadn’t thought to ask Dakota whose name was on the birth certificate, but if Gregory didn’t know, he was assuming that it was Gregory’s name. But it was possible that Gregory would give up his parental rights, and Ryan actually could adopt both girls. That would be perfect, especially if Dakota allowed him to be more to her than just a friend.
He didn’t want to get the cart ahead of the horses.
“Is that all you want?” Maddie asked, looking at kites.
“Yeah. That was it. I just was hoping that I could be your dad.”
“Okay,” Maddie said, shrugging her shoulder like it didn’t matter.
“I want you to be my dad too,” Rachel said, and he laughed, shaking his head. “But I think you got to marry Mom.”
“All right.” He lifted a brow at Dakota, then figured that it couldn’t hurt to get all of the ammunition he could on his side. “We’ll talk her into it. Because I’m willing.”
