Damn. His gaze wandered to his phone again. Nothing.
He sighed, and stood to go inside to bed, but he hadn’t taken two steps before he turned, heading out to his truck at the same time he dug his keys out of his pocket. He needed to find Jodi. Figure out what had happened at that dance rehearsal. Because there was no way he was going to be able to sleep worrying about his girls. The thought shot a bolt of discomfort through him. His girls. That wasn’t something he’d ever expected to think. No, Ty had figured he’d devote himself to raising Katie, and when she was grown, maybe he’d have time to find a nice woman, get married, run the ranch together. But now, here he was, a kid, her mother, and so many feelings, he had trouble sorting through them all.
As he drove down the dirt road leading to the PCH, he could only wonder how his father had done it all those years. He’d made it look so easy, balancing the needs of his three rowdy boys and his wife. Now Ty could see it was a lot more complicated than it appeared. As often happened when he remembered his parents, his thoughts turned to the fact they’d missed meeting Katie—their first grandchild. He knew they would have adored her. It was a tremendous loss to Rex and Sophia as well as to Katie. The kind of loss you felt deep in your bones. He’d never thought of the loss of her mother as being the same magnitude as the loss of her grandparents. Maybe because he’d never known Jodi as a mom. But he'd known his own parents, and because of that, he realized exactly what Katie was missing without them.
But, he thought as he made his way through town toward the little string of cottages on the north edge of the town center where Jodi’s rental house was, now he was learning about Jodi as a mother. And if Katie had never had Jodi? Yeah, that would have been fucking tragic too. His daughter deserved her mom. The love that shone in Jodi’s eyes when she looked at Katie, the soft way she spoke to her when they were planning things to do together.
Katie deserved the way Jodi explained animals and biology when they hiked in the canyons around the ranch. She deserved the songs Jodi sang to her when she tucked her in before leaving Ty’s house. She deserved the silly way Jodi had joked with her to take her mind off a scraped knee when she’d fallen in the driveway.
His daughter deserved a mother—her mother. And he had to remember that. Jodi didn’t need to be perfect; no parent was. She just needed to be her, and be present. That was what Katie had yearned for her entire life, and it was what she deserved. It was what they all three deserved.
When he pulled up to Jodi’s house, a light shone from the living room, so he went to the door and knocked, determined that if she wasn’t here, he’d wait as long as it took. He needed to know she was okay—the three of them were okay.
She answered quickly, and his gaze took her in with one swift pass—hair in a messy bun, face devoid of makeup, eyes tired above dark circles.
“Hi,” he said, not moving as if he could sense her fight or flight instincts at the ready. “I texted, but you didn’t respond. Can we talk?”
Jodi nodded, her expression resigned. He stepped past her into the cozy little house, and as happened every time, he was enveloped in warmth, his entire body relaxing, his soul comforted.
“Do you want anything to drink?” she asked, gaze on the floor, her shoulders slumped in defeat.
He took her hand. “No, gorgeous. Come here.” He led her to the sofa, where he sat and pulled her onto his lap. Her head found his shoulder, and they stayed like that, his arms wrapped around her, her head tucked under his chin.
“Tell me what happened at the dance recital,” he instructed gently.
She sighed a long, shuddering breath. “Katie told you?”
He chuckled. “A five-year-old’s not the most reliable source of information. What I got was something about the wrong kind of bun, Samantha’s mom, you, and tears. I figured I’d better get the adult version of the whole thing.”
“It was horrible,” she said softly. “I’m horrible. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I messed it all up. She’s probably so humiliated, having a mother who people whisper about all the time. One who doesn’t know the most basic stuff about her life. I’m so sorry.”
He held her firm and strong, but she was stiff in his arms, her face hidden from his gaze. He could hear her breaths, short, hard, fast.
“She wasn’t humiliated. She was worried—about you. And she was angry—at the other mom. Tell me exactly what all happened.”
Jodi launched into the story, and by the time she was finished, Ty was so mad he thought his head might spin off right there in her living room.
He pushed her away, only so he could see her face, maintaining a hold on her arms as she balanced on his lap. “Listen to me,” he told her, his voice nearly a growl, it was so rough. “Don’t you dare spend one more second of your time or energy on this. Not on that woman, not on the fucking hairstyles, not on any of it.”
She blinked at him.
“I will handle Samantha’s mother and the dance studio. And next Saturday, you will do our daughter’s hair for the recital, and if you want her to have a braided bun, then do it. If you want her to have curls on the sides, then do it. Hairspray? Fine. Hairnet? Great. But you will be the one to decide. You. Are her mother.”
Her upset was unexpected but not unwelcome. He was surprised at how good it felt to be the one who saw her this way—so vulnerable, struggling to put it all together, to become the woman he knew she was growing into.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she sniffed.
His hands, which stayed on her body at all times, brushed aside a stray droplet from her cheeks, and he chuckled and kissed her on her red nose.
“You have nothing to be sorry for. I’m just sorry it all happened. I guess I knew there were mean moms out there, but I’ve never had to think about it for myself. I assumed everyone would follow my lead about you. If I said you could be involved in her dance or her school, then they’d accept that. I never thought about anything but the legal aspects of all this. I never thought about how tough it might be for you to be accepted socially in this new role.”
“It’s not your fault,” Jodi said, giving him a brave smile. “There’s no model for how to integrate a mother into your kid’s life five years in.” She shook her head, and his heart shook with it. “I have to accept I may never really be accepted by everyone else. If I can keep being accepted by her, that’s the only thing that matters.”
He sat for a moment, watching her perfect face, listening to her soft breath. “You will be accepted, gorgeous,” he murmured, stroking silky hair from her face. “My family’s been in Big Sur for three generations. We run one of the largest ranches in the state, and we’ve contributed millions to the improvement and upkeep of this community. We weren’t raised to pull rank, but I won’t hesitate if people are challenging my family. It’s not up to the town mean girls to say if you’re acceptable as Katie’s mother or not, it’s up to Katie and me.” He leaned forward and pressed his lips against hers for a brief moment. “We say you’re in. So you’re in.”
She laughed then, and he knew it was all going to be fine. He also knew he was in this so deep, he might never get out.
16
It didn’t happen as often as it used to before Cade and Vaughn both got married, but Ty loved the lazy weekend mornings when he and his brothers would take rides on the land, checking fence lines, talking about the business, reminiscing about the times they’d done the same thing with their dad when they were growing up.
Today, Vaughn was with his in-laws, helping at their family ranch adjacent to the Jenkins’s property, but Cade had been at the house bright and early, asking Ty to go out with him.
“How’s Nina feeling?” Ty asked as they ambled along a creek that ran through the center of their acreage for several miles before it cut down a canyon and funneled into the ocean below.
“Big. She feels big. At least that’s what she says. Her back hurts, and her ankles are puffy.” Cade shrugged lightly. “I have to admit, she looks a li
ttle like a panda after a good meal, but—”
“Please tell me you haven’t said that to her,” Ty interjected.
Cade chuckled. “I’m married now, asshole. I have more finesse than that.”
“Thank God. I remember when Jodi was pregnant, we were at one of her prenatal appointments, and she was complaining to the doctor about her puffy fingers. I said something about them looking like little sausages, and she burst into tears in front of the doctor and the nurse. Everyone in the room glared at me like I’d committed a felony. I never spoke a word in one of those appointments again.”
Cade’s horse skittered to one side, and both brothers looked down to make sure there wasn’t a snake or other animal. A stick was the culprit, and Cade shushed his horse, falling back alongside Ty.
Ty shook his head, remembering back to when Jodi had been pregnant. He didn’t think about those days often—they’d been scary and painful—but there were a few moments that stood out. The first day she’d told him she was pregnant and he’d held her as she cried as if her very heart had been broken in two. The moment they’d both seen Katie on the ultrasound monitor. Jodi had turned her head and watched Ty’s face instead of the screen. He’d never known how she felt in those moments, but now he was pretty sure she’d been racked with guilt, heavy with the weight of what she had decided to do, and buried under the pain of leaving her child.
“You’ve never mentioned the pregnancy before,” Cade said. “Even when you were going through it, you hardly told us a thing. You’d go to those appointments or meet with the lawyer and Jodi, and when you got home, you’d just go to your room or back to work like nothing had happened.”
Ty shrugged, briefly chewing the inside of one cheek. “I was barely holding on. I didn’t have it in me to talk about it.”
Cade nodded. “But now?”
“Now that she’s back and both Katie and I are getting a chance to know her and hear what she’s been through, it helps make sense of everything that went on then. I can think back on it and it doesn’t…hurt as much.”
“You’re sleeping with her, aren’t you?” Cade asked, his eyes stony as he looked at the land ahead of them. His back was ramrod straight, his hair mussed and sun-streaked like it always was. He had the sandy hair that their father and Vaughn shared. Ty was the one who’d inherited their mother’s dark locks.
“How long have you known?”
“A couple of weeks at least. I saw you kissing her on the boardwalk one night when I was coming back from a meeting in Monterrey.”
Ty pursed his lips. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but he’d wanted to control the moment, work up to it, determine the best words to say. Now he had to react on the fly, not the most ideal arrangement, but unavoidable.
“We’ve been seeing each other, getting reacquainted. We haven’t told Katie, but we’ve spent some time together—the three of us. It’s—” He paused. How could he describe what it felt like to have the three of them together? Like a missing piece of the puzzle that was him and Katie had finally been filled? Like this was how things were always meant to be? It sounded sentimental even to his own ears, but it was the truth of it. He didn’t know how to spin that any other way.
“It makes me happy. It makes Katie happy,” he finally summarized. “Having Jodi with us feels right.”
“For you or Katie?” Cade asked.
“Both,” he answered, glancing at his brother to see him frowning.
“You might find both of you getting happy only to be abandoned or worse,” Cade said.
“Worse?” Ty asked, his blood pressure rising.
“If this is all part of her plan to take your daughter.”
Ty sighed in frustration. “It’s not.”
“You don’t know that. How can you be certain she’s not using sex to complicate things and get her way?”
“Her way?”
“Yes, custody.”
“What if we had joint custody?” Ty suddenly asked, surprising even himself.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Ty nudged his horse forward, and Cade matched him, keeping their mounts shoulder to shoulder.
“Why is that so preposterous? She’s her biological mother. She’s done nothing but be responsible, loving, and cooperative since she came back. What if she really is ready to be a parent now? Am I supposed to keep them limited to once or twice a week supervised visitation forever?”
“What about Lynn?” Cade asked. “For all intents and purposes, she’s Katie’s mother.”
“She’s like a grandmother to her, not a mother, and you know it. Yes, she’s been there for her and helped raise her, but she’s never pretended to be her mother. She’s always deferred to me for the big stuff, never made the decisions about things like schooling or discipline.”
Cade leaned down and patted his horse on the neck before pulling to a stop and facing Ty.
“You can’t give up custody to her. Once you do, you’ll never be in control again. She could try to take Katie to another state. She could ask to have Katie live with her. She could demand child support, because God knows you’ll always have more money than her.”
Ty’s insides clenched, and he breathed through his nose roughly.
“Jesus. Do you always have to be so protectionist? I get it’s been your job to keep us all safe and the business running smoothly, but I grew up a long time ago. I’ve been raising that kid for five long years, and if anyone knows how much she’s missed having a mom, it’s me. I didn’t want to admit it when Jodi showed up—hell I ran her off completely the first time she came back—but even I have the grace to admit when I’ve been wrong. She’s changed. She’s battled her demons, and she’s here for our daughter.”
“That’s your dick talking.”
Ty’s wrath was lightning fast. “Fuck you,” he snapped, pointing a finger in his older brother’s face. “You have no right to say that to me. I’ve been single for five fucking years. I’ve put Katie first in everything, always. I was twenty-three years old when I got her, and I’ve lived like a sixty-year-old monk ever since. I’ve earned the right to have a relationship, and I’m still putting my daughter first. Getting involved with her mother is hardly the act of an irresponsible man.”
“No,” Cade answered, his voice low and threatening. “It’s the act of a stupid one.” Then, before Ty could formulate an answer, or more likely, a punch, Cade clicked to his horse, spun him around, and took off fast. Ty sat and watched his brother’s retreating back, his stomach knotted along with his fists. Damn Cade and his overbearing paranoia. She wasn’t going to bail, and she wasn’t trying to take Katie. Jodi was solid. Just like their blossoming relationship. It was right, the three of them. It was what he’d never known he wanted but had needed all along.
If only Cade’s words would quit humming in the back of his mind.
Jodi’s client roster had gradually grown, and for the first time since she’d opened up shop in Big Sur, she didn’t have any open spaces in her day’s schedule. While she’d intended to start with women and children, her practice had actually developed organically around elderly patients. After Mr. Moore had been referred to her by T.J., the elderly community had begun to refer friends and family, and now she was seeing a slate of patients in their seventies and eighties.
It suited her fine. She’d always loved her rotations in geriatrics when she was in nursing school, and she’d never had such grateful patients as the ones she was treating in Big Sur. Most elderly patients spent vast amounts of time at doctors and hospitals, being poked and prodded, shuffled from one specialist to the next, subjected to test after test and drug after drug.
Jodi quickly realized that the chance to come someplace non-institutional, breathe clean air, have someone listen to them and treat their whole selves—body, mind, and soul—was an opportunity the elderly rarely got and seemed to deeply appreciate.
“I can’t thank you enough for seeing me so last minute,” Nina said as she lumbered in
to Jodi’s office/treatment room.
“It was no problem at all. I don’t have any obligations with Katie this afternoon, so I just added an extra appointment time for you.”
“You’re the best,” Nina answered, grimacing as she hoisted herself onto the padded massage table.
“So it sounds like you’re having some sciatica?” Jodi soothingly ran a hand up and down Nina’s arm.
“If that’s the shooting pain from my waist down my right hip and butt, then yes.”
Jodi shifted to Nina’s side and ran a hand down her back from shoulder to waist. “Tell me where it starts?”
“Lower…right there.” Nina’s face scrunched in pain. “And it goes down to…yeah about right there.”
“Definitely sciatica,” Jodi responded.
Nina sighed. “The doctor gave me a list of over-the-counter painkillers that he says are okay to use at this stage of the pregnancy, but I’d really rather not. They’ll just wear off after a few hours, and I’ll need to keep taking them over and over. My gut tells me that’s not a good choice for the baby, but I still have a month until I’m due, and I might die before then.”
Jodi gave Nina a sympathetic smile. “I promise we won’t let you die, and also that I can help with this.”
“Bless you,” Nina murmured as Jodi motioned for her to lie on her left side and began to gently massage the affected hip and lower back.
“I’m going to give you some targeted massage, then some ointment that you’ll have Cade rub in twice a day. I’ll also give you a list of stretches to do, and some meditation specifically designed for pain reduction.”
“Meditation? Really?” Nina asked as she stiffened slightly when Jodi hit a particularly tender spot.
“Trust me,” Jodi said. “Everyone’s always skeptical at first, but it’s one of my most effective treatments.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Nina answered. “I’ll do whatever you say. It’s got to be better than dosing my kid with drugs all day long.”
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