Home In Carolina

“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 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.