by Annie O'Neil
Mind you, if his sisters didn’t stop discussing what a heathen he was, the possibility of an actual date might not be an option. He looked across as Kirri’s grin widened and his sisters batted comments back and forth.
“Who raised you? A wolf?”
“Don’t insult Mama. It’s Ty who’s the heathen.”
“Kirri is a treasure. He’s been downright rude, not introducing her to us till now.”
“I bet it wasn’t even his idea. Was Stella the one who knocked some sense into you?”
“I’ll bet it was Winny and Reba.”
He knew protesting would only add fuel to the fire. Growing up with four sisters had taught him as much.
Kirri was openly laughing now. “Winny and Reba? Who are they?” She took another piece of corn on the cob from the diminishing pile.
“They’re Ty’s younger sisters,” Ty’s father explained for him, seeing as his mouth was full of food. “They’re at the local park, watching a couple of our grandkids’ baseball games along with their own children. How about you and your family? Is it as big and boisterous as ours?”
Shards of something Ty couldn’t put his finger on lanced through Kirri’s eyes.
“Nope! It’s just me and my brother. We’re so busy with work I imagine we’d be pretty terrible at the whole traditional family thing.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” Henry said. “One glimpse into the eyes of your own child and it’s instant love. That kind of love runs deep.”
“I’m sure it must.”
Kirri flashed another one of those quick smiles of hers that didn’t quite light up her eyes, then began to rearrange the food on her plate, nodding and listening politely as his father went on to detail all the aunts and uncles who were also involved in the children’s lives. And cousins. There were scores of them.
For heaven’s sake... Why were they unfurling the family tree? It was obvious the woman didn’t have a big family like theirs. And the more his parents went on about it, the more Ty felt as if they were rubbing salt into a raw wound.
Before he had a chance to cut in, his sister Tammy asked, “Is the family you do have as nuts as ours?”
“We definitely don’t have traditions like this,” Kirri said, her voice a bit too bright, her smile slightly frozen. She gave her head a little shake, then swiftly changed the subject. “Did you not have a baseball game today, Lulu?”
His daughter shook her head and beamed up at Ty. “No, ma’am. I never let anything get in the way of barbecue and bowling night.”
Ty smiled and gave her a squeeze. He dreaded the day that would change. But, as he’d seen with his older sisters’ children, change was inevitable. His little firecracker would discover sport, drama club or—God forbid—boys. There would come a day when she went off to college. Led a life of her own. Then he really would be on his own.
“The barbecue is definitely worth leaving the office for,” Kirri said, clearly more at ease now they were off the topic of happy families. “But I’ve never been bowling, so be gentle on me.”
His mother jumped in. “Well, thank goodness my boy’s finally learnt some manners and got you out of that stuffy condo of yours.”
Ty shot Kirri a quick apologetic grimace. She gave him a soft smile in return. And if ever there was a way of saying you’re forgiven that smile was it. Pure gold dust.
His mother was on a roll. “If we’d known you were here over the weekend we would’ve had you over for roast chicken or pie. Fattened you up.” She gave Kirri a quick once-over and clicked her tongue. “Don’t they feed you right over there in Australia? So willowy!” She said it with a splash of good-humored envy rather than as a chastisement.
Kirri laughed. “They do,” she said, then admitted, “But this is probably the first full meal I’ve had in months.” She held up her hands before everyone could pile in and chastise her. “Back home I work late most nights, so it means I’m not that great a cook.”
“What about your mama? Didn’t she teach you the basics?”
Kirri’s eyes flicked to Ty’s. Before her smile and laughter took over he saw what no one else did. His suspicions were right. She hadn’t had a happy childhood. And, no. No one had taught her the basics.
“I get by. Nothing a frozen burrito and a microwave can’t fix.”
“Oh, well, that won’t do.” Marina Sawyer fixed her steely dark eyes on Ty. “Son? You’re to bring this young woman over next time you release her from that clinic of yours and we will have a cooking lesson. Several, if there’s time. One every weekend.”
She wasn’t giving Ty a choice. He shook his head and grinned. If Kirri didn’t watch herself his parents would be signing adoption papers by the time her tenure was over. Which wouldn’t exactly jive with the whole why not have a fling with her? idea—but he was still on the fence about that one, so...
“Very well, then,” Marina said decisively. “I recommend we start with peach pie this Saturday. That way we can have it Sunday after church, when Kirri joins us for family lunch.”
Ty didn’t bother to protest. Not so much because there wasn’t any point but because he loved seeing the spark of joy light up in Kirri’s eyes.
CHAPTER FIVE
KIRRI’S FIRST INSTINCT had been to protest, but one look at Ty’s mother and she’d known Marina wouldn’t hear otherwise.
“Don’t bother,” Ty said to her warmly. “There’s no point in resisting. I’ll pick you up on Saturday morning.”
The look he gave her was entirely different from anything she’d seen from him before. It said, I’ve got your back. It said, I saw your sadness. The insight was humbling. Intimate, almost. As if he knew her better than she knew herself.
The man was like a kaleidoscope. Perfectly wonderful one minute, cool and reserved the next, and then, in the blink of an eye, kinder than she could have ever imagined.
“Right, then. That’s settled. Now, let’s tackle the rest of this food, shall we?” Marina said with a bright smile.
No one dared disagree. They collectively piled in as more baskets and trays appeared at their booth. Biscuits, of course. So fluffy and buttery Kirri could have eaten a dozen. Collared greens. Beans. Coleslaw. And an endless stream of ribs.
It was clear from the familiarity of the waitstaff that Ty hadn’t been lying when he said he came here every week. His daughter even had her picture on the wall, from what must have been her fifth birthday, if the candle count was anything to go by.
Kirri ate and smiled and soaked it all up. She’d done a lot in her life but she had never had a happy, talkative, family meal like this. Ty’s family were exactly the type she’d dreamt of growing up in. Rambunctious, non-judgmental. Loving.
She crushed the thought with terse pragmatism. You didn’t grow up in a family like that. Move on.
Marina’s heritage was, as Kirri had thought of her son, Latin American. She’d passed on her pitch-black hair to all of her children, and as a born-and-bred Georgia girl sounded every bit as southern as Ty did.
Well, Ty’s accent was a lot like warm caramel and it did funny things to her tummy...so perhaps a bit different.
Marina was a third-generation Costa Rican, whose grandparents had come over to study English Literature at college and had ended up being asked to stay on as teachers. It was a tradition that seemed to have trickled down the family in a not altogether linear way. Ty’s mom had taught biology. One of his sisters taught history.
“Gemma did, too, of course,” Ty’s mother said.
“Gemma? Is she another one of your daughters?”
Marina’s voice dropped in volume as she checked that Ty was still busily discussing the finer points of doing his daughter’s hair properly, after a lecture from his sister Patsy. Fishtail, apparently, was best.
“Oh, honey, I thought you knew... Gemma was Ty’s wife.”
Kirri’s tu
mmy lurched. So he did have a wife.
“She passed just over five years ago now.”
Her breath froze in her throat. Ty was a widower. The thought hadn’t even occurred to her. And just like that her heart split wide open for the man.
“Cancer,” Marina whispered. “She put treatment on hold to have Lulu, here, but a year after she was born it got the better of her.”
She popped on a bright smile and offered Kirri a fresh set of napkins, which she took as a sign that Ty was paying attention to them again.
She picked up a rib and began to eat, because it was all she could do not to throw herself across the table, grab Ty’s hands in hers and say, I get why we’re connected now. We both know loss. Heartbreaking, bone-deep, soul-destroying loss.
It made sense. The reason they clicked and sparred. Pain knew pain. Love recognized love. Advance and retreat, then try again. It was how they survived. It was how she hoped to gain the courage to stop herself from retreating and fill that aching void in her heart one day. The void she was so desperately trying to fill with her pioneering inventions.
Could she ever have room in her life for both?
As if reading her mind, Ty gave her a silent nod. He saw her. He saw her more than anyone ever had. And instead of making her feel vulnerable, it filled her heart with peace.
A while later Ty’s father knocked his hand on the checkered-clothed table to get their attention. “C’mon, everybody. Finish up. We’ll have dessert at the ice cream parlor down at the alley.”
Kirri smiled at him. Henry was a tall silver-haired gentleman who had the same lean, athletic physique as his son. He ran a corner shop in exactly the same neighborhood he’d grown up in—Hank’s. Which had been his father’s name before it had been his own. Kirri really liked him. She liked all of them, if she was being honest.
She let her gaze slide once again toward Ty, who was smiling at his daughter as she devoured the remains of her potato salad.
Ty was a widower.
The news had properly rattled her.
She knew people’s deepest traumas shaped them. However much she’d love to avoid the fact that she was trying to develop an artificial womb because she didn’t have one, she couldn’t. She tried on a daily basis, but her research was torture sometimes. The plain truth was that even if she did make that all-important breakthrough it wasn’t as if she’d suddenly have a husband and two-point-four children.
Had Ty’s loss affected his relationship with medicine? Was it the reason he was so forward-thinking in the OR? Her work was meant to help women experience the joy she knew she could never have. Was he trying to do the same?
He obviously hadn’t remarried. So he’d clearly loved Gemma deeply. That or, like her, he’d buried himself in his work. Work that made him face his worst fears every single day. Saving women and the babies they were carrying from possible death. He must regularly operate on women who had discovered they had cancer when they were pregnant. Did it give him joy to know he’d saved lives or was it a daily reminder of the woman he’d never hold in his arms again?
She forced her thoughts away from unraveling a widower’s emotional trauma and focused on Ty’s family as their banter continued to fly about the table as freely as air. They emptied the final dishes, joshed, joked and teased about enormous appetites and expanding waistlines, but all of it was loving.
There was none of the bite that usually accompanied her own family’s dinner table banter. If you could call the conversation the few times they’d all eaten together and actually spoken “banter”. No doubt about it. Her family was definitely...trickier.
She and Lucius were her parents’ only children. Their father was a highly sought-after neurosurgeon and had always been extremely demanding of them in those rare hours he’d spent at home. Demanding of Lucius, anyway.
Her old pops—something she wouldn’t ever dream of calling her father to his face—definitely belonged to another era. In his book men had jobs and women had children. Their mother had been a nurse when she’d met their father, and had given it all up to raise their family, but parenting hadn’t brought her the joy it brought so many women. As such, she disappeared into books for days at a time, diving into other people’s worlds for a bit of escape from her own.
After he’d found out Kirri couldn’t have children, her father had pretty much left her to her own devices. Something she was pretty sure Lucius would’ve loved for himself. There wasn’t a single thing he’d done during their childhood that had gone unnoticed. As such, he still rode himself pretty hard. She wondered what he’d have been like if he’d grown up with easygoing parents like Ty’s. Happy?
Hmm... She wasn’t sure Lucius was the sort who’d ever be happy. Not with his perfectionist drive.
As they prepared to leave the table Marina cleared her throat and nudged her son. “Isn’t there anything you’d like to say to our special guest, honey? Something about not inviting her over earlier?”
Ty’s exasperated smile for his mother was hilarious. The one he threw her made butterflies take flight.
“I apologize for not inviting you over earlier. I humbly beg your pardon.”
Swoon!
“It’s fine.” She waved off his apology and his mother at long last seemed satisfied. “I was jet-lagged and I had a lot of studying to do. I can’t believe how many research projects they’re doing at Piedmont. It’s really impressive. Besides...” She couldn’t seem to get her mouth to stop talking. “He gave me his umbrella.”
A round of confused looks turned her way.
“It was raining when we first met. He hit me and—”
“He hit you?”
“No! No, no—not like that. We were just—We ran into each other, and it was raining, and he gave me his umbrella.”
It had been one of the most spontaneously kind things anyone had ever done for her.
His sisters nodded approvingly as they inched out of the booth with Lulu, to go to the ladies’ room and wash all the barbecue sauce off their hands.
Both of Ty’s parents turned to their son and his father smiled. “He’s a good ’un, our boy. Definitely the brainbox of the family. You must be, too, if they flew you all the way over from Australia. Very special indeed.”
She saw Ty feign interest in an invisible stain on his shirt to cover up this new variety of embarrassment. Being spoken about as if they were at a parents’ meeting or about to go to prom.
It was kind of adorable. A privilege, really, to see this version of him. She felt as if, with his family’s help, she’d unearthed an entirely different human being. Perhaps this was why Stella had urged him into having barbecue with her. A chance to show her the man behind the surgical mask.
“You’ll have to tell us all about what it is you’re researching when we get to the bowling alley,” Henry’s dad went on.
She smiled and nodded. She’d become good at that. Explaining her desire to help expectant women while leaving out the part about how she hoped it would fill the emotional void in her own soul.
She had a little speech. A brief but impassioned number she’d curated to assure people that she wasn’t playing God, that she was simply helping the preemies who struggled to have a proper chance of survival. She often gave it, then ran off to the ladies’ room to have a quick weep, a swift face-wash, before returning with a spark in her eye and a smile on her face that didn’t let anyone know her heart had just broken all over again.
She wondered if there would be a day when it would ever stop breaking.
Lulu skipped out of the restroom with her aunties in tow and waved when she saw Kirri. Poor little thing. Losing her mother before she’d even had a chance to get to know her.
Kirri’s throat grew thick with emotion, then suddenly she realized Ty’s parents were still waiting for an answer. “I’m over the moon to be given this opportunity to carry on with
my research. And I’d be more than happy to tell you all about it.”
Against her better judgement Kirri looked at Ty. Their eyes caught and meshed. That warm, fuzzy feeling that had been working its way through her bloodstream all night flared again.
Ty reached out and with the pad of his thumb wiped something off the corner of her mouth.
“Sauce,” he said, his tongue dipping out to swipe a little left on his own full mouth.
Oh, mercy. This was going to be a long night.
* * *
Ty sensed Stella’s arrival in the staff kitchen before she spoke. He took his time pouring his coffee, giving it a stir, wiping up the ring on the counter. He knew what was lying in wait. An interrogation.
“So!” She pounced the minute he turned round. “How was it?”
“Barbecue at Chuck’s is always good. You know that.” He took a sip of his coffee, feigning pure naiveté.
“Dr. Sawyer, you know damn straight I’m not talking about Chuck’s.”
He laughed. Stella wasn’t normally this forthright, so it must have taken all her reserves of patience to wait until this morning to get a full report.
“It was lovely.”
“Good. Lovely’s good. And did your guest enjoy Chuck’s?” Stella blocked the doorway so Ty couldn’t get out.
“Very much.”
“And did the two of you enjoy your time together?”
“Lulu and I had a ball.”
Lulu had actually really taken to Kirri. She’d been a bit shy at first, as she often was with new folk, but once she’d heard Kirri’s accent she had suddenly overflowed with questions. She’d even thrown her arms round her waist at the end of the bowling for a spontaneous farewell hug. He might have been wrong, but when Kirri had swept Lulu’s hair away from her eyes and wished her goodnight he’d thought her eyes had gone a bit glassy.
He’d never admit it, but his had, too. Up until that moment he’d never imagined his daughter loving another woman as a mother figure. But the way they’d looked at each other... A whole new level of conflict had churned up in him in that instant.
