Home In Carolina. Sherryl Woods

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 her, 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