Home in Carolina

by Sherryl Woods

  Ty was icing down his shoulder after his workout at The Corner Spa, when his cell phone rang. It was nearly ten at night. At this hour, a call was never good. He glanced at caller ID and saw it was his attorney, Jay Wrigley. That was even worse.

  “Hey, Jay, what’s up?” he asked.

  “We’ve got a problem, Ty,” he said.

  Since his tone was ominous and Jay never overreacted, Ty braced himself. “Is it my contract? Is the team balking at paying my salary because of my being on injured reserve?”

  “No, those terms in the contract are airtight. It’s nothing like that.”

  “What, then?”

  “I had a call tonight from Dee-Dee.”

  Ty sank down on a bench at the mention of Trevor’s mother. “What the hell did she want?”

  It was the first time Dee-Dee had made contact since they’d finalized the custody agreement nearly two years ago. Even then, she’d sent the notarized papers by courier. She’d claimed that seeing Ty or Trevor would shake her resolve to do the right thing and let Ty raise their son.

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure,” Jay said. “But I thought you ought to know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know what she wanted? She didn’t call just to chat, I’m sure of that.”

  “I’m telling you, she never said. She rambled on about thinking about Trevor and missing him, but she didn’t ask about locating you. Look, I wouldn’t even have bothered you about this, but it was just so out of the blue after all this time, I thought you should know.”

  “Was she drunk?”

  “I don’t know her well enough to say. Actually, she sounded kind of sad, like a mom who was missing her little boy.”

  Ty closed his eyes against the tide of fear washing over him. “Is there something we need to do?”

  “She didn’t ask for anything. She didn’t make any threats or demands. There’s nothing to do. You might want to give Tom Bristol a heads-up about the call,” he said, referring to the family court lawyer who’d handled the custody case for Ty. “What do you want me to do if she asks to get in touch with you or to see Trevor?”

  “Tell her no way,” Ty said fiercely, knowing he probably sounded hardhearted, but he was protecting his son. Trevor rarely asked about his mother. So far, when he had, he’d seemed satisfied with Ty’s explanation that she was living in another state. If Dee-Dee suddenly appeared, who knew what the emotional impact would be? He wasn’t ready to find out, especially if this was just some whim on her part.

  To be sure Jay knew he’d meant what he said, he added, “After the way she abandoned him, I don’t want Dee-Dee anywhere near Trevor, not unless there’s proof that she’s changed. I can’t have her waltzing back into his life, playing mommy while it suits her and then taking off again. If the time comes that it seems like it’s in Trevor’s best interests for them to have a relationship, I’ll consider it. In the meantime, though, everybody needs to keep in mind that she abandoned that little baby on my doorstep, Jay. Maybe it was an act of kindness or one of desperation, I don’t know. But I do know I don’t want anybody to ever forget that she was capable of something so reckless.”

  “Got it,” Jay said. “I’ll keep you posted if I hear from her again.”

  “Yeah, do that,” Ty said. He clicked the phone shut and barely resisted the urge to throw it across the room, which was a good thing because it might well have hit Annie, who’d just walked in the door. She caught sight of him and stopped in her tracks, her expression immediately wary, either because of his expression or merely his presence.

  “I thought you’d be gone by now,” she murmured, already backing toward the door. “I saw the lights on and thought you and Elliott had just forgotten to turn them off.”

  “I was getting ready to leave when I got a call I had to take.”

  She started to turn to leave. “Good night, then. You can cut off the lights on your way out.”

  Jay’s call had left Ty feeling restless and out of sorts. He didn’t want to be left alone with his thoughts in turmoil. “Annie, don’t go,” he pleaded.

  She regarded him with a torn expression. Though she was obviously still poised to flee, she’d clearly heard something in his voice that had stopped her.

  “The call, was it bad news?” she asked hesitantly. Years ago she would have pestered him till he told her the problem, but now it was clear she wasn’t sure if she wanted to get involved.

  Ty knew better than to tell her about Dee-Dee’s sudden, unexplained reappearance. “My attorney just wanted to alert me to a potential problem.”

  “Then why did you want me to stay?”

  He quickly came up with an excuse that would ring true. “Because most of my conversations these days are either about which superhero T-shirt Trevor wants to put on or how badly I’ve screwed things up with you. Since I doubt you’ll want to discuss either of those topics, I was hoping we could talk about…oh, anything else.” He met her gaze. “Maybe the weather,” he suggested hopefully.

  “It’s South Carolina in the spring. It’s already hot and humid,” she said wryly. “Can I go now?”

  “You can, but I hope you won’t.”

  She hesitated for what felt like an eternity, then sat down on the bench of a weight machine halfway across the room. “How does it feel being home again?” she asked eventually.

  “Weird,” he admitted. “How about you?”

  “Definitely weird. My parents don’t quite know how to treat me. I’m too old for rules and curfews, yet I’m under their roof. I can hardly wait to save enough to buy my own place.”

  He took heart from the fact that she’d willingly strung more than a couple of sentences together. “Then you’re planning to stay here?”

  “Of course. Why else would I move back?”

  He shrugged. “I wasn’t sure.”

  “It certainly wasn’t because you’re here,” she said, bristling.

  Ty grinned. “I know that, Annie,” he said with exaggerated patience. “You got here months before I did, so unless you had some premonition that I was going to injure my shoulder, the two of us being here at the same time is coincidence.” Okay, maybe on his part it had been calculated to take advantage of a situation, but she didn’t need to know that. He held her gaze, then added, “By the way, if you did have a premonition, I wish you’d warned me about it. This hurts like hell.” He removed the ice pack and rubbed his shoulder.

  “Try the hot tub,” she said grudgingly.

  “Only if you’ll join me,” he taunted, just to see if he could put a blush of pink in her cheeks. It worked.

  She stood up at once, her face flushed. “Only after hell’s frozen over,” she said. “I have to go.”

  “Plans for the rest of the evening?” he inquired innocently. Annie had never been a late-night person, and it was now going on eleven o’clock. There was no place she needed to be except away from him.

  “Yes,” she said, looking directly into his eyes and lying through her teeth. “Big plans, as a matter of fact.”

  Ty laughed. “Sleep well, Annie.”

  “I’m not going home to sleep,” she insisted indignantly. “I’m—”

  Before she could utter a blatant lie, Ty crossed the room and touched a finger to her lips. “Don’t,” he said quietly. “Whatever happens between us from here on out, let’s keep things honest and real.”

  She swallowed hard, proving to him that she was affected by his nearness, but then that stubborn chin of hers jutted up.

  “That would be a refreshing change,” she said, then whirled on her heel and left him standing there.

  Even though Annie had just put him squarely in his place, Ty laughed. From where he stood, it seemed as if she was working her way back to the feisty, indomitable woman he’d loved and lost. Getting her back again was going to be an absolutely fascinating challenge.

  Of all the nerve! How dare Tyler Townsend stand right there in her workplace and taunt her like that? How dare he touch h
er, even if it had been nothing more than a faint brush of a finger across her lips?

  A little voice in her head suggested she was lucky he hadn’t kissed her instead, and made a liar out of all of her declarations that he meant nothing to her.

  It was hours later, after a sleepless night, and she was still seething as she slammed pots and pans around in the kitchen at Sullivan’s. At all the noise, her mother came dashing in.

  “What on earth are you doing in here? You’re not trying to cook, are you?”

  Annie scowled at her. “I can cook.”

  “Not in the restaurant kitchen, you can’t. If you want to burn things or ruin pots and pans, do it at home.”

  “If I’d done that, Dad would have wanted to know why I was making such a racket.”

  “Believe me, I want to know why you’re making such a racket,” Dana Sue said, studying her expectantly.

  Warned away from the expensive and satisfyingly noisy pots and pans, Annie grabbed a stool and sat on it. “Ty,” she said succinctly.

  Her mom froze in midstride on her way to the walk-in pantry. “What did Ty do?”

  Annie thought back to the incident in the spa and sighed. “Nothing, really. His mere existence is a thorn in my side.”

  Her mother chuckled. “I see.”

  “Do not laugh at me. None of this is even remotely amusing.”

  Dana Sue sobered at once. “I know that.” She went into the pantry and emerged with various ingredients that looked promising. Annie’s mouth watered at the prospect of her mother’s justifiably famous French toast.

  “You could take some time off, maybe get away for a while, if having Ty around is going to be too hard for you,” her mom continued. “Maddie wouldn’t object.”

  Indignant and alarmed, Annie stared at her mother. “And you know that how? Have the two of you been discussing how to be supportive of poor little Annie?”

  “Absolutely not,” Dana Sue claimed, breaking eggs in a bowl and adding cinnamon, nutmeg, barely a whiff of almond extract and a dash of cream before slipping thick slices of French bread into it to soak. “I just know that she would understand if you need a break. She’s sensitive to the situation.”

  “Which means you did discuss it,” Annie said in disgust. “Margarita night must have been a real blast.”

  “To be honest, I don’t remember that much about it,” her mom admitted, looking chagrined. “Helen apparently overdid it with the tequila. She was a little stressed out.”

  “Helen was stressed out? Why?” Annie regarded her mother with dismay, distracted for the moment from her own turmoil. “She and Erik aren’t in trouble, are they?”

  Dana Sue forked the bread slices into a skillet in which butter sizzled. “No way. This was about her mom. Flo broke her hip. Helen’s in Florida now. I had a call from Erik last night that she’s driving her mother back up here today.”

  “Flo’s coming home with Helen?” Annie asked, stunned. “Oh, brother, how’d that happen?”

  “Flo asked, then Erik encouraged it. I gather she wants to move home. For now, that means into Helen’s place.”

  “Yikes!”

  “That was pretty much my reaction,” Dana Sue said, setting two plates with golden slices of French toast in front of them, along with a pot of strawberry jam and a small pitcher of warm maple syrup. “Something tells me if things don’t go well, Erik is going to spend the next few weeks hiding out right here.”

  “He’d be better off in another state.”

  “Enough of that. Let’s get back to Ty,” Dana Sue said.

  “I’d rather not,” Annie said. She concentrated on her favorite comfort food, hoping if she didn’t make eye contact, her mother would drop the subject.

  Dana Sue persisted. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “Not unless you know how to deaden the pain in my heart every time I see him,” Annie said wistfully.

  “Afraid not, kiddo. There’s never been a cure invented for that particular kind of pain.”

  “What about margaritas?”

  “Based on recent experience, I can tell you for certain that whatever temporary escape they might provide is nothing compared to the pain they leave behind.”

  “Too bad,” Annie said. “Maybe you should put the Sweet Magnolias to work on a cure for the lovesick blues. You guys could make a fortune.”

  “I’ll mention it next time we get together. We are pretty inventive.”

  They ate in silence for a few minutes. Eventually Annie faced her mother. “I still love him,” she admitted. “I don’t want to, but I do.”

  “I know, sweetie.”

  “Am I supposed to forgive him and give him another chance after what he did?”

  “Only you can decide that,” Dana Sue said.

  “How did you decide it was time to take Dad back?”

  “He convinced me I could trust him again.”

  “Just by coming back when I was in the hospital, and then not giving up even after you kept pushing him away?”

  Dana Sue’s expression turned thoughtful. “That was part of it, but mostly I took a leap of faith. I think that’s all any of us can do once we’ve been betrayed. It’s a question of looking at the evidence that someone’s changed, evaluating whether you’re happier with them than without them, then taking that leap.”

  “Sounds scary.”

  “It is.”

  Annie sighed. “I don’t think I’m there yet.”

  “You don’t need to be. You’ll get there when it feels right.”

  “What if Ty’s healed and gone by then? What if he’s given up on me?”

  “If you believe with everything in you that you’re meant to be, then you go after him.”

  Annie stared at her. “Pride be damned?”

  Dana Sue nodded. “Pride be damned. Look at your dad. Once he came back to town, remember how hard he fought to get back into my life, back into both our lives? I kept pushing him away, but he never gave up. You’ve got our stubborn genes. You’re strong enough to get whatever you really want.”

  She covered Annie’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Meantime, make sure Ty does his fair share of groveling. You’ll feel better for that, no matter what.”

  Annie chuckled. “You know, I think I will.”

  6

  When Ty got up on Saturday morning, he pulled on a pair of cutoff jeans and wandered toward the kitchen in search of his son. Usually by now Trevor had crawled into bed with him to wake him for the trip to Wharton’s for breakfast. Ty made it as far as the living room before stopping in his tracks.

  There, lined up on the sofa, were his fourteen-year-old sister, Katie, and four of her friends. Judging from their rapt, slack-jawed gazes and sudden silence when they saw him, they’d been waiting for him.

  “Good morning, girls,” he said, regretting that he hadn’t grabbed a T-shirt and maybe a decent pair of pants. “Katie, I didn’t know you had company.”

  “Mom said I could invite some friends over,” she said with a touch of defiance.

  “Any particular occasion?”

  The girls giggled, their cheeks turning bright pink. Katie frowned at them. “You’re acting crazy,” she scolded them. “I told you it was okay to come over, but only if you didn’t act all weird. He’s just my brother.”

  “He’s Ty Townsend!” one girl corrected in an awestruck voice. “And he’s right here, and he’s not wearing a shirt!”

  Ty bit back a groan. “Katie, I think maybe you should offer your friends something to drink. They seem a little overheated. Where’s Trevor, by the way?”

  “Cal took him, Jessica Lynn and Cole for a walk. He said for you to meet them at Wharton’s.”

  “Okay, then. Nice meeting you, girls,” he said. He left to a chorus of more giggles as he went back to his room to shower and dress.

  When he emerged, the girls were gone, except for Katie, who hurriedly stuffed something behind her. He regarded her suspiciously. “What was that?”

&
nbsp; “What?” she asked, all innocence.

  “You put something behind the cushion,” he said, crossing the room in a few quick strides and yanking away the cushion before she could stop him. Five-dollar bills scattered. Ty stared at the money in shock. “You charged them to meet me?” he asked incredulously. “What? Five dollars apiece?”

  Katie’s face flamed. “Ten, because you weren’t wearing a shirt. We’d agreed they’d pay extra if you weren’t.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t let them peek in my room while I was sleeping. They might have gotten quite an eyeful.”

  “That would have been rude and an invasion of your privacy,” Katie said indignantly. “I would never do that.”

  Ty wanted to be furious with her, but she sounded so solemn about the boundaries she’d set, he couldn’t seem to muster the energy to yell. “You do know that even this was wrong?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m your brother, not a sideshow at the circus. And what if one of those girls had snapped a picture with a cell phone and sold it to a tabloid or something?”

  Katie rolled her eyes. “They don’t know people who work at tabloids.”

  “I think you’re missing the point. You don’t let people into the house to ogle your brother. It’s inappropriate.”

  “People pay to see you pitch,” she argued.

  “This is hardly the same thing.”

  “You’re famous. I’m your sister. I should be able to cash in on that.”

  “If you’re that desperate for money, I’ll find some chores you can do. You can mail pictures to my fans for me.”

  “That’s no fun. This makes me kinda famous, too. The kids like me better ’cause I’m your sister.”

  She sounded so woebegone that Ty sank down beside her on the sofa. “I can’t believe you don’t have plenty of friends without doing something like this. You’re pretty and smart and funny.”

  “I have braces and I’m too smart,” she countered.

  “The braces will only be on a few more months, and there’s no such thing as too smart,” Ty told her.

  “There is if you like Dougie Johnson. He calls me Brainiac—and he doesn’t mean it in a good way.”