by Julia Harlow
Chapter 8
As Isabel placed her foot on the first step to the loft, she spotted a tall familiar figure in her peripheral vision. What the hell was he doing here? Why couldn’t he just get the bleeping message and leave her alone? Frustration boiled over, and she couldn’t manage a greeting of any kind.
Ty, on the other hand, had no problem speaking. “What’s going on, Isabel? Why won’t you take my calls? Is something wrong?”
He waited, and when she didn’t respond, he continued, “If you don’t want to see me anymore, at least have the common decency to tell me up front, instead of sneaking around like a coward.” Although his voice was low, it crackled with splinters of frustration. His arms were locked across his chest. Minus his suit jacket, he wore charcoal slacks and a white shirt with a woven herringbone pattern, his tie loosened at the neck. His hair was a dark blond mess as if his fingers had just plowed through it.
Her hands clenched into fists and anger made her face flush. She volleyed right back, “‘Sneaking around like a coward?’ That’s priceless, coming from you, of all people.”
If she’d spit those words at him, it couldn’t have had more impact. She regarded him as if he were a wad of chewed gum stuck on her shoe. But she knew he wasn’t atop the venture capitalist pyramid by reacting meekly. He had his own bombardment ready to launch.
“Me? What are you talking about?” Instead of backing away from her white-hot indignation, he strode toward her, closing the gap between them to only an arm’s length.
“I saw you at lunch yesterday. You were with your wife and baby. Don’t even try to deny it. So pay attention, Ty. Here’s exactly what you just asked for: I don’t want to see you anymore. Is that decent enough for you?” She turned to stomp up the steps without so much as a backward glance.
If she’d expected him to skulk away in shame, she was clearly mistaken. “Wait a minute, dammit!” When she turned to glare at him, his expression seemed more bewildered than anything else. Was he trying to figure out how she’d seen them? With Bella only a few blocks away from Baycrest Enterprises, it was hardly improbable.
But then his countenance altered. His brows knitted together and his eyes narrowed. In a flat tone, he announced, “I don’t have a wife or a baby. I’m neither married nor a father. I did, in fucking point of fact, have lunch at Bella yesterday with my sister and my nephew. Not that it’s any of your business.”
The enormity of her blunder hit Isabel like a swift kick in the gut. All the breath rushed out of her. She couldn’t have felt smaller if she were an ant scrabbling in the dirt at Ty’s feet. With tears welling in her eyes, she somehow managed to utter, “I’m sorry, Ty. I didn’t know. I just assumed . . .”
As if the metal security gates on a storefront were closing, Ty closed himself off from her. His voice was so icy she expected to see frost vapor curling from his mouth at any moment, even though the late May evening was balmy. He stared off in the distance. “You must think I’m a lowlife of unheard of proportions.”
Isabel descended the two steps and reached her hand out to touch his arm. The strangled words she spoke sounded as if they’d been forced out through gravel. “I’ve made a terrible mistake, Ty. Please forgive me.” Unlike in his office on Tuesday, the tears now spilling down her cheeks seemed to have no effect on him.
If she thought falling to her knees to beg his forgiveness would work, she’d have done it in a split second. But this iron-willed warrior with his sense of pride was lost to her forever. Even more than the what-might-have-been, the fact that she’d hurt him tormented her. If only she could just jab the undo button on her computer and have this mistake disappear . . .
With her arms clutching her middle, she struggled to whisper, “I understand. Now it’s you who doesn’t want to see me anymore.” This time, there was no point in stopping as she ascended, and she began to trudge up the stairs.
“Wait.” She didn’t detect even a shred of reprieve in the directive. Instead, she thought she noticed a distinct hint of disgust. “My sister wants to meet you, and even though there’s no point now that we’re no longer friends, I’m not going to disappoint her. She’s been through a rough time recently and is expecting us for brunch on Saturday.
“You’re precisely correct in your assessment that I don’t ever want to see you again. But I’ll make an exception for my sister’s sake on Saturday. Have the common courtesy to be ready at eleven when I come to pick you up.”
He stalked off, disappearing into the shadowy night as quickly and quietly as he had appeared.
~~~
“You did what?” Ellen shouted.
Heartsick and appalled at how dreadfully she’d misjudged Ty, Isabel simply couldn’t deal with the anguish alone. As soon as she went inside after the encounter with him, she spilled her guts to Ellen. Afterward, the two ate spinach lasagna and shared a bottle of wine. Well, at least Ellen ate. Isabel pushed her lasagna around the white Crate and Barrel plate with her fork, and sipped more wine, welcoming the blurry edges it provided to this hellacious day.
“What am I going to do?”
“For starters, you’re going to go meet his sister on Saturday. There may be no way to salvage your relationship with Ty, but he’s asked you, and it’s the least you can do after your gargantuan fuck-up.”
“You’re such a comfort to me.”
“You asked, Bells. So, go and meet his sister and take it from there. Maybe that will be the end of it. Can’t say you don’t deserve it. Why in the hell didn’t you tell me about seeing him at Bella? We might have avoided this.”
“You didn’t like him from the very beginning. Why would I blab to you that I saw him with a woman and baby I thought were his wife and child?”
“Because you tend to jump to conclusions and I don’t. I could’ve talked you down off the ledge.”
Isabel knew Ellen was right. Of the two of them, Ellen always had the cooler head and could analyze a situation that didn’t involve her with an uncanny clarity, even though she was a massive screw-up in her own right.
Now that she took a moment to think about it, Isabel realized she could have done a simple Google search to find out if Ty was married. So much for the clarity of hindsight.
The weight of a hundred-pound iron collar of guilt around her neck had eased with her confession to Ellen. The comfort she felt was palpable, as if she were suddenly cocooned in a fluffy warm blanket. Maybe she hadn’t given Ellen the credit she deserved as a loyal, caring stepsister. Maybe she still held a deep-seated resentment toward her for countless past injuries.
That thought suddenly vaulted her back to the time she’d first met Ellen and her family. Once in her bedroom, Isabel pulled a camisole and sleep shorts out of her dresser drawer. While she changed, she mulled over her life at that time. She’d always been large for her age. She was among the tallest in her class and big-boned. By the time her mother married Willard Daniels, Isabel’s breasts had developed to the point of needing a bra. She felt like an Amazon in the land of Pixy Stix girls with their tiny bird bones and graceful swan necks.
The boys in school stared at her breasts and made crude remarks about her round hips and full rear-end so often that she began to dread going to school. Clarissa constantly tried to assure her that she was beautiful. She told her that the boys were only flirting with her because they liked her, until she was blue in the face, but Isabel didn’t believe it for a minute. Clarissa was her mother; she had to say that.
Isabel hated everything about herself: her nose was too big, her body too big and fat, period, her hair too unruly, thick, and dark. She stuck out like a neon peacock on steroids among the tiny, fair-haired girls everywhere around her.
Then her life turned way, way worse.
After her mother married Willard Daniels and they’d moved in with him and the Evil Three, her life became her worst nightmare. Willard’s three daughters, Susan, Ellen and Bitsy, had the kind of hipless, butt-less bodies that looked amazing in jeans and bikinis.
Whenever Isabel ventured into buying jeans, it became an exercise in sheer torture. With her tiny waist and full hips, she hated how she looked and ended up wearing oversized, untucked shirts to cover up as much of herself as possible. Never mind bikinis, bathing suits of any kind were out of the question as far as she was concerned.
So she found herself living with three blond miniatures, up close and personal. And they despised her from the very start. She’d tried to be friendly and share her books and games, but they turned up their pert, perfect noses and called her a big fat baby.
They read the New York Times online edition and pored over huge tomes of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, while Isabel read the complete Little House on the Prairie series. They scoffed at her choice of reading material and called it plebian. Isabel wasn’t even sure what “plebian” meant.
They couldn’t wait to run outside and exercise while Isabel hated to work up a sweat for any reason. She much preferred to do jigsaw puzzles or play word games or, most of all, go to the movies with her mother.
Before her mother married Willard, if Isabel finished all her homework and school projects on Sunday, she and Clarissa would go to a movie after dinner. It was Isabel’s absolute favorite thing to do: escape into an imaginary world for two hours where she didn’t have to think about being big and fat and ugly.
Now they never did that anymore. Her mom spent all her time with Willard or fussing over the Evil Three. Isabel noticed how the girls talked about Clarissa behind her back and made faces when she wasn’t looking. It really hurt that anyone could be nasty to the most loving person in the world. Clarissa never had a bad word to say about anyone—not even the Evil Three.
The eldest, Susan, was the worst, with Ellen a close second. Bitsy mostly mimicked whatever her older sisters said or did, but Isabel wasn’t sure her heart was really in it.
They always beat her home from school because they ran home like a herd of gazelles. When Isabel finally made it through the door, she braced herself for the snide taunts hurled at her: “What took you so long, Hells Bells? Your big fat butt slow you down?” Or sometimes it was, “Your big honker need time to catch up with the rest of your face?”
Isabel had often wished for a way to get to the tiny sewing room that had been turned into her makeshift bedroom from the outside of the house so she could avoid the daily barrage of ugly epithets that stung like so many wasps attacking her flesh. She’d even thought about putting a ladder up to the window of the sewing room, but she worried that it might make Willard mad.
God forbid. Willard never spanked or slapped his daughters. No, he preferred a far more harrowing form of discipline: The Lecture. More than once, Isabel had seen the expressions on each of the Evil Three’s faces when they’d emerged from the master’s den after a twenty-minute session of non-stop belittling: ashen, shell-shocked, and desolate. Willard, on the other hand, seemed in the best of moods when he emerged, as if he’d just gotten some really great news.
Over the next three years, life at the Daniels’ became so insufferable for Isabel that she begged her mother to divorce Willard and take her away almost every night when Clarissa tucked her in bed. Clarissa always excused the behavior of the Evil Three by explaining that it was because they’d never received enough love. She made Isabel feel ashamed because she’d received so much unconditional love from both parents before her father died and still received it by the bucket load from her mother.
~~~
The Baywood Neighborhood of San Mateo hadn’t always been comprised of upscale Mediterranean, Tudor, and Colonial homes situated on generous parcels of land. In 1860, Baywood was the name of John Parrott’s 377-acre country estate. He named the land after the Baywood trees that dotted his property.
The land had been subdivided into single-family-home plots in 1927. Baywood fit snugly into a corner formed by Crystal Springs Road, El Camino Real, and Alameda de las Pulgas. Mature trees and gently curving wide streets made this neighborhood with its excellent schools, inherent style, and grace, much sought after by well-heeled homeowners.
By Saturday, Isabel had resigned herself to the fact that she had no hope of repairing the damage she’d done. She knew that her relationship with Ty was completely over. The thirty-minute drive along Highway 101 from San Francisco to San Mateo felt as prickly as sitting smack in the middle of a patch of stinging nettles. Although polite, Ty exhibited none of the warmth or affability he had before Isabel’s major debacle.
The few questions Isabel introduced on the drive were met with brief answers, and each was followed by another long, tense silence in the Bentley.
Try as she might, she couldn’t help but steal surreptitious glimpses of Ty. In his weekday financial district garb, he was beyond handsome, a stunner, in fact. Today he wore jeans and a black T-shirt. She’d almost hyperventilated when he’d come to the door to pick her up. He had a body worthy of a professional athlete under those tight jeans. His long muscled thighs and a spectacular butt—what was it about men’s butts, anyway, she wondered—were outlined to perfection.
His T-shirt stretched over a defined chest, incomparable pecs, and drool-worthy biceps. As her eyes traveled down to narrow hips and lingered on a washboard-flat abdomen, she forgot to breathe. His arms, one of which dangled casually over the steering wheel, were tanned, ruggedly veined, and the most virile sight she’d ever seen. Compared to the venture capitalist, this dressed-down Ty was so hot he scorched her retinas.
Unsure of what to wear herself, she’d allowed Ellen to select her outfit: a teal skirt and blouse with strappy bone-colored leather sandals and belt. Ellen had insisted on styling Isabel’s hair in a simple, loose style that complemented her outfit.
As the car turned onto Crystal Springs Road, Isabel exhaled with relief that the nerve-racking ride was nearly at an end. She wasn’t sure how much more her nerves could stand. Ty pulled into the driveway of a charming cream-colored Tudor with chocolate-brown half timbers shaded by mature trees. Freshly mulched beds of lavender hydrangeas and pink impatiens bordered the front of the house.
The woman who answered the door was lovelier up close than Isabel could have imagined. The fact that she had at least an inch in height on Isabel endeared her to Isabel immediately.
No question this was Ty’s sister. She had the same blue eyes, except hers sparkled as she took in Isabel and her brother. Her jaw was defined but softer than Ty’s, and she had a perfectly shaped chin. She had the same sensuous mouth that now curled in a gleaming-toothed smile as she welcomed them. With a creamy complexion, thick dark lashes, and jaw-length shiny blond hair, she was every bit as heart stopping as her brother. Dressed in linen slacks and an ivory silk blouse, the woman exuded classy elegance from every pore, except for the shadows under her eyes that Isabel attributed to sleepless nights with a new baby in the house.
“Victoria, this is Isabel Beachwood. Isabel, my sister, Victoria.” Whether Ty intended it or not, the introduction sounded stiff and forced. But with what appeared to be natural graciousness, Victoria glossed over it and embraced Isabel.
“Ty has told me so much about you. I feel like we’re already friends. Come in. Come in.” She held the door open, and Ty stood aside as Isabel passed in front of him.
“Jamie is still taking his morning nap. He should be up any time.” Excitement bubbled in her voice, and the sparkle in her blue eyes went up a notch at the mention of her son.
Victoria took Isabel’s arm and leaned into her. “It’s such a gorgeous morning. I thought we’d have brunch on the patio.” As Ty followed behind, she led Isabel through the foyer and into the kind of kitchen that Isabel had only ever seen in Architectural Digest. Sunlight streamed through the windows into a comfortable room with mellowed hardwood floors, white paneled cabinets, pale pumpkin walls, and granite countertops. A hanging rack loaded with copper pots, stainless-steel whisks, and various utensils, along with an industrial-grade eight-burner range, left no doubt that this was a serious cook’s kitchen. Delectable aroma
s of something cheese-filled and delicious coming from the oven seemed to indicate that Victoria was the cook.
“I love your kitchen, Victoria. It’s absolutely perfect. All the details, like the lamp on the end of the counter giving off the warm glow of lower light and the whimsical framed apple crate labels, are touches I’ve always dreamed of having in my home one day.” That is, if and when I have a home again, she thought. Despite Ty’s dark mood, Isabel couldn’t help but bond with Victoria.
The broad smile Victoria gave her made her spirits bloom. “I designed it. The whole house, actually.”
Ty put his arm around his sister, and his tone softened considerably. “Vicky is a highly talented interior designer, who had her own business up until the time she got married. She still keeps her hand in it.” His genuine smile as he gazed down at her spoke volumes about their relationship.
Her cheeks pink with pride at her brother’s praise, Victoria continued in seamless hostess mode, “I have Mimosas and Bloody Marys ready. Isabel, which would you prefer?”
“Oh, a Mimosa sounds wonderful.”
“Ty?”
“Bloody Mary for me. Why don’t you take Isabel outside and let me fix the drinks?”
“Sure. I’ll have a mimosa, please.” Victoria winked at Isabel, linking arms with her. “Isn’t he the perfect brother?”
Once outside, Isabel was torn as to what to focus on first with so much exquisite beauty surrounding her. The view of the bay from the patio was spectacular. Above them, a white-painted arbor laden with shiny green leaves and fragrant white Mandevilla blossoms beckoned. Banks of vibrant pink peonies edged the patio.
