“An inability to talk, a desire to avoid anything that smacks of intimacy combined with white-hot heat,” Tyce retorted, pushing his hands through his hair. He stood up, willed his junk to subside and walked over to the large windows, staring out at the wet street below him. Night was falling and he and Sage hadn’t progressed one inch.
“We need a new way of dealing with each other,” he muttered, jamming his hands into the pockets of his jeans. In the reflection of the glass he could see her pulling her long hair off her face, raising her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around her legs. “I’d say that we should try to be friends but that’s ridiculous, since we both know that friends don’t generally want to rip each other’s clothes off.”
“I’m not very good at being a friend.”
Tyce, intrigued by that odd statement, turned around to look at her. “What do you mean by that?”
Sage made a production of looking at her watch. She gasped, wrinkled her nose and jumped to her feet. “I’m so late! I have to go to The Den and break the news that I am pregnant to Jo—”
“Jo?”
“Linc’s mom. Connor employed her as a housekeeper when he adopted us and she became our second mom. And my brother’s wives are going to be pissed that my siblings heard the news first.”
Tyce lifted his eyebrows. “You avoided my question.”
Sage handed him a snotty look but her eyes begged him not to pursue the topic. “I really do need to get to The Den and I really am late,” she said, walking to the door.
And you really don’t want to explain why you think that you are a bad friend. Tyce walked across the room to pick up his leather jacket and scarf. Making a quick decision, based purely on the fact that he wasn’t ready to walk away from Sage just yet—something he’d worry about later—he tossed the suggestion out. “What if I go with you and help you drop the news?”
Sage, holding her shoe, stared at him with panic-filled eyes. “You can’t! They aren’t ready for you, for us… I need to tell them on my own.”
Tyce shook his head. “The sooner they get used to the idea that I am going to be hanging around, the easier this situation will become.” And really, irritating her brothers would be an added bonus.
“Tyce…” Sage’s eyes slammed into his. “Please, I need some time. Your revelations today, the pregnancy, my family… You’ve known about your sister for years and…we’ve only just learned about her. We need time to catch up, to process all of this.”
Tyce considered her statement, impatience and a need to move forward warring with her words. She did have a point, he reluctantly conceded. They were playing catch-up and he needed to give her, and her family, time to do that.
Tyce opened her front door and held it open. “Okay, I hear you. But we still have more to discuss, a lot more.”
“I know…we didn’t get very far tonight,” Sage said, pulling on a long navy coat and winding a cashmere scarf around her neck. “But I need some time, Tyce, and some space. I’ll call you.”
He wanted to argue, to have a firm date and time in mind but he also knew that, if he pushed her, she’d retreat back inside her shell. It was, after all, exactly what he would do.
“You’d better. And soon,” Tyce told her, bending to drop a kiss on her temple. He stepped away and touched her stomach with the tips of his fingers. His kid, growing inside her. God, what a concept. “Take care of yourself, Sage. Call me if you need me.”
Sage sent him a puzzled look, her expression stating that she couldn’t imagine a situation in which she might need him. She had three brothers, three new sisters and more money than God. She didn’t need him for anything except, possibly, sex and that wasn’t on the table. Tyce ran his hand through his hair and followed her into the elevator opposite her front door.
He looked at their reflection in the mirror finish of the lift. Sage’s hands were in her hair—where his really wanted to be—and twenty seconds later she’d, somehow, secured all those waves into a messy knot at the back of her neck. She pulled a tube of lipstick from the side pocket of her bag and swiped the color across her lips, turning her mouth from sweet to luscious. The lipstick was returned to the bag and a multicolored scarf appeared in her hand. She twisted it around her neck, tied it into a complicated knot and she was, once again, Sage Ballantyne, heiress, ready to face the world.
Tyce glanced at his outfit, old jeans, hiking boots, a black sweater over a black shirt and a leather bomber jacket that he’d had for too many years to count. Sage was an heiress from a family whose blood ran blue; he was an artist who genuinely thought that the art world would one day wake up from their stupor and realize that he wasn’t half as good as they’d proclaimed him to be and definitely not worth the ridiculous money the collectors paid for his work. He plowed the bulk of the money he earned from his art into buying those Ballantyne International shares so he was, well, not broke but he wasn’t flush with cash either. He didn’t have a college degree and his only asset was a battered warehouse on the edge of an industrial park.