He was her former lover, the father of her child…the man who’d given her the bare bones of a very complicated story involving both their families, too scared to open up and make even the smallest emotional connection. He was also the man who wanted her more than he wanted to keep breathing, existing. His raging need to strip her naked and sink inside was part of the problem, he reluctantly admitted, but it went deeper than that.
Sage was, had always been, in a class of her own. She was funny and smart and generous and, surprisingly, she was the most down-to-earth girl he knew. She had no idea that her smile could stop traffic, that her legs could make grown men weep, that her eyes could be weaponized. She had the ability to cut him off at the knees and that was the primary reason why he needed to keep her at a distance. He could fall into something deeper with Sage. She was the one woman who could tempt him into opening up, to explore a world that went beyond some bed-based fun.
Tyce banged the back of his head on the wall of the elevator, feeling his throat constrict. His mind was all over the place, as unsettled as a raging river. She’d always had the ability to mess with his thoughts, to disturb his equilibrium.
He’d explained about the shares, about Lachlyn, and it would be at least two weeks until the DNA tests came back. Sage said that she needed space and, yeah, judging by his crawling skin and accelerated breathing, maybe he did too. He’d take some time, put some distance between them, get his head on straight, to figure out how to deal with Sage on a long-term basis.
A basis that didn’t, sadly, involve getting her naked.
CHAPTER SIX
Sage glanced at her laptop screen and frowned at the brief message from Linc that had popped into her inbox five minutes ago.
DNA testing confirms that Lachlyn Latimore is Connor’s biological daughter. Family meeting?
Family meeting? What did that mean anymore? Did that mean just her and her brothers, her brothers plus their partners, Lachlyn, Tyce?
They were all now connected through DNA. She was connected to Lachlyn because their fathers were brothers, she was connected to Tyce through the DNA their baby shared. It was all crazy, too much to handle. She had a cousin. A sister, sort of. Who was also her baby’s aunt.
The news that Lachlyn was Connor’s daughter wasn’t a surprise: from the moment she saw Lachlyn’s photo she’d known who’d fathered her. How to interact with Lachlyn, what to do, how to approach her had played on an endless loop in her head over the past ten days. They were frequently joined by How involved does Tyce want to be with the baby? and What would he do if I jumped him?
The question of Tyce’s role as a father was constructive thinking; the thoughts and memories of Tyce’s muscled body and his skilled mouth, and rediscovering what lay under his clothes, were not.
Throwing her pencil onto her workbench, she picked up the sketch she’d been working on—resetting an eight-carat cabochon-cut diamond—scrunched it into a ball and tossed the piece of paper over her shoulder. Her concentration was shot; she couldn’t draw a stick figure if someone put a gun to her head.
Sage pushed her chair back and walked across her loft to the windows to look at her city. Linc’s email sealed the deal—Lachlyn was Connor’s daughter and was a Ballantyne. That meant changes and Sage wasn’t fond of change. In her experience change meant sadness and grief. Every time change slapped her it hurt like hell: her parent’s deaths, Connor’s death. Change always meant tears and she was quite convinced she’d shed enough of those.
Lachlyn’s connection to her family meant that Sage had to make an effort to know her, to pull her into the family circle. It was such a big ask. God, she was still getting used to her siblings’ women and she was still finding her way with them. She adored Piper, Cady and Tate but she didn’t understand them. How could they be so open, so unafraid? They lived bold lives, believing, erroneously in her opinion, that their lives would only and forever be wonderful. Her parents had lived like that: fearlessly, daringly, without worrying about the future, without worrying that life could smack them in a hundred and ten different ways. She’d experienced that intense grief when her parents died, again with Connor’s death.
Nobody understood that fear kept her sane, that standing apart from people gave her some measure of control, a tiny barrier to deflect the hard wallop of people dying, leaving, moving away…changing.
Sage heard the first bars of her ringtone and looked at the screen of her phone and hesitated. She should answer Tyce’s call but fear and frustration kept her hands firmly in the pockets of her jeans. She ran her hands over her face as a wave of guilt crashed over her. She’d promised to call him but she was still digesting him and their situation, desperately hoping that her fairy godmother would creep into her loft and wave a wand and make sense of her life. It would be easier if she knew what she wanted from Tyce, how she wanted to raise this child, how to start a conversation with him.