Little Secrets--Unexpectedly Pregnant

by Joss Wood

  But she knew that if she didn’t speak them, if she let them die, if she let him walk out that door without expressing them, she’d lose the moment forever.

  Tyce took a step back and, operating on instinct, Sage grabbed the open sides of his leather bomber jacket to hold him in place. He started to pry her hands off but she tightened her grip and shook her head.

  “All I’m asking you to do is to stand here and listen to me, just for a minute, maybe two. I know you are angry but you need to hear this. You need to hear me.”

  “You’ve got two minutes and that’s it,” Tyce growled.

  “Okay, I’ll keep it short.”

  Sage pulled in a deep breath and looked for her courage. This was too vital to mess up but her tongue was battling to form the words. Voice croaky, she got the first sentence out. “I love you. I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you and I’ve loved nobody else, ever. I want you, I want us. You, me, our baby, a family.”

  Tyce didn’t react and just stood statue still.

  “Be my family, Tyce, within this family. Yeah, my brothers are annoying but you can handle them.”

  Still no response. Sage blew out a breath, dropped her hands and stared down at the floor. “If my love isn’t enough, then walk out that door and we’ll communicate about the baby through lawyers.”

  It was an ultimatum but she had to know, she couldn’t live with maybes or possibilities. He either loved her or he didn’t, he either wanted a life with her or didn’t. It was actually a fairly simple choice.

  Tyce shook his head. His words, when he finally spoke, felt like splashes of acid on her soul. “It won’t work, Sage. I’m sorry.”

  “Now it’s your turn to push me away.”

  Tyce nodded. “It’s easier to be alone... We both know this.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Tate’s hand shoot out to grab Linc’s arm as he stepped forward. Really? Did Linc think that he could force Tyce to stay? Feeling shocked and saddened, Sage watched as Tyce opened the front door with a vicious yank. In the open doorway, he stopped abruptly and Sage couldn’t help the surge of relief, the rush of hope.

  Maybe he’d changed his mind; maybe he was prepared to give them a chance.

  Instead of moving toward her, Tyce looked at Linc instead. “You should know that, somehow, certain members of the press have information about Lachlyn, about Lach-Ty and about her connection to Connor. Handle it any way you see fit.”

  “Tyce—” Linc stepped forward and Tyce shook his head and stepped into the cold, dark night.

  Sage stared at the door for a long time before turning back to her family. She tried to smile but she could feel her chin wobbling, the tears sliding down her cheeks. “So,” she said, trying for jaunty but failing miserably, “anyone have any idea what I can do about this gaping, bloody hole where my heart used to reside?”

  * * *

  Tyce, standing in his studio, released a violent curse and threw his custom-made palette knife across the room so that it bounced off a wall. Annoyed and frustrated, he punched his fist through the big blue abstract canvas before shoving his hands into his hair.

  He had to get out of his studio, get out of the warehouse. He couldn’t think in here, couldn’t create, couldn’t paint. The portraits of Sage were all facing the wall but he knew that they were there and he was constantly tempted to turn them around, to waste minutes and hours looking at her glorious face, remembering how they loved each other.

  Your choice, moron.

  It had been two weeks since he’d seen her and he’d spent every minute of each day missing her. The news was out that Lachlyn was a Ballantyne and the press had gone nuts, as he’d expected. Surprisingly, Sage’s pregnancy wasn’t reported on and, for big mercies, he was grateful.

  He’d called Lachlyn to find out if she was okay, if she needed his help to deal with the press, but she’d moved into The Den and he heard that Linc had hired a bodyguard to accompany her wherever she went until the furor died down. The press had camped outside his warehouse for half a day but wet, snow-tinged rain had sent them scurrying back into their holes.

  He had to get out of this place, get some fresh air. Tyce walked out of his studio and onto the catwalk and heard voices below him.

  “You guys do know that this is breaking and entering, don’t you? We could be arrested for this.” Tyce immediately recognized Beckett’s voice so he rested his forearms on the catwalk and waited to see what they were doing.

  A voice he’d never heard before replied in a laconic drawl. “I’ll be arrested and my PI license will be revoked since I picked the lock.”

  Linc walked further into the warehouse, followed by Jaeger and Beckett and lastly, a guy he didn’t recognize. Unlike Sage’s brothers, Mr. Ex-Military’s eyes were darting around the warehouse looking for threats. His eyes shot upward and immediately clocked Tyce standing on the catwalk.

  Super soldier—because the guy was a fighter, anyone could see that—gave him a quick nod.

  “Whose stupid-ass idea was this anyway?” Jaeger muttered.

  “Mine,” Linc said, his voice rock hard. “I’m done with the situation and we’re going to sort it out. I don’t care if he has six black belts and a lightsaber, the imbecile is going to listen to us. If that takes one of us getting the crap kicked out of us, then so be it.”

  Tyce lifted his eyebrows at the desperation he heard in Linc’s voice but he still remained quiet.

  “Speak for yourself,” Jaeger said.

  “Reame can handle him,” Beck said.

  “You never told me that he had a couple of black belts,” Reame said, looking amused. He looked up at Tyce. “Do you?”

  Tyce almost smiled when three heads shot up to look at him. “A couple. In Tae Kwon Do and Krav Maga.”

  Reame swore and held up his hands. “He’s all yours,” he told the Ballantyne brothers, but Tyce knew whose side he’d be on if blows were traded. It wasn’t his. As always, he was alone.

  “What the hell do you want?” he demanded. “And what’s so important that you broke into my place to tell me?”

  “No breaking, only entering. I’m Reame Jepson, by the way.”

  He’d heard of Linc’s oldest friend, the man the Ballantyne siblings had known since they were children. Not only were they great friends but the ex-soldier’s company also handled the security for Ballantyne International and, from what he understood, many other Fortune 500 companies. Tyce gave Reame a brief nod but kept his eyes on Linc. “Say what you have to say, then get the hell out of my warehouse.”

  Linc nodded. “Okay. So this is what you need to know... Sage loves you.”

  She’d said that and maybe she believed it to be true but it wasn’t enough. Love, sex, attraction wasn’t enough. It was easier, better, safer to be on his own. “So?”

  “We’re here because my sister is miserable and looks like a corpse.”

  “Again, so? What do you want me to do?”

  “I thought you said he was intelligent,” Reame said to Jaeger, still sounding amused.

  “I was wrong,” Jaeger replied. “He’s as dumb as a post.”

  Linc tossed him a curse and threw up his hands. “Can you all please concentrate?” He gripped the bridge of his nose with his fingers. Back in control, he looked up at Tyce again. “What I, we, want you to do is to tell her that you love her and then tell the world that you are thrilled to be the father of her child. I want to be able to tell the world that our family is expanding and we’re excited that you and Lachlyn are part of our family. But really, I—we—just want Sage to be happy.”

  Tyce felt like he’d been hit by a piece of Canadian maple. He just stared at Linc, trying to assimilate his words. He knew that Linc was happy to have Lachlyn as part of the family but he never thought that Sage’s brothers might feel the same about him.

  Jaeger cleared
his throat and Tyce’s eyes bounced from his to Sage’s second-eldest brother. “Did you ever consider that maybe your quest for Lachlyn to be part of a family was something you, subconsciously, needed? Maybe you were projecting your need for a family onto her.”

  “That’s deep,” Reame mocked, his mouth quirking.

  “Shut up, half-wit,” Jaeger muttered.

  Tyce ignored their insults, thinking about Jaeger’s comment. Was there any truth in his statement, any at all? Tyce gripped the banister as he considered his question and faced the obvious truth. Yes, he’d also wanted to be part of a family, wanted people he could lean on, people who would stand in his corner, who would fight for and with him.

  He was used to walking alone, fighting his own battles. It was what he knew, what he felt comfortable doing and when Sage offered him something bigger, something he didn’t know how to handle, he shot her down in flames. He thought he’d, one day, be okay with it. After all, he knew how to be an army of one.

  He wasn’t okay with it and walking away from her had frickin’ ripped his heart and soul in two. Not to be melodramatic or anything.

  “Do you know how much courage it took for Sage to open herself up to you, to ask for something more?” Linc demanded.

  “She pushes people away!” Tyce protested, trying to grasp a straw that wasn’t there.

  “Sure, until she asked you to step in the ring with her. And you still haven’t realized that when Sage pushes the hardest is when she most wants someone to push her back and not take no for an answer.”

  Jaeger sent him a cocky smile. “She might be our sister but she’s a hell of a catch, Latimore. And you walked away from her? Moron.”

  Linc’s fist slammed into Jaeger’s biceps. “You are not helping!”

  Tyce was barely aware of the hissed argument going on below him. He felt like Linc had handed him a new pair of glasses and a fuzzy world had just become clear. Linc’s words resonated deep inside him and he knew them to be pure truth.

  Sage had stepped way out of her comfort zone to ask him to love her and, God, he now, finally, could appreciate it. With this new knowledge, the last pieces of the puzzle that made up the full picture of his lover, his only love, fell into place.

  She was his it, that indefinable, amazing, better part of his soul. He needed to go to her, to sort this out, but...

  Hell. There was a damn good chance that he’d blown his opportunity with her, that she’d refuse to allow him back into her life. Tyce pushed his shoulders back, determination coursing through him. To hell with that. He did love her and Sage did need someone to push her back, to not take no for an answer. And he was the man to do it. He’d bucked the system all his life but, at the most important time, he’d walked away from the most vital thing in his life.

  Jaeger, this one time, was right. Tyce was a moron.

  He walked across the catwalk and jogged down the stairs to the concrete floor below. He looked at Linc. “I hear you.”

  “Hearing is one thing but are you going to do something about it?”

  Tyce nodded. “I am.”

  Beck cleared his throat and sent him a smile that shriveled his sack. “Good to know. Now, there’s just one more thing we need to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  Jaeger cocked his head. “You made Sage cry,” he said, sounding like he was ordering a cup of coffee.

  Oh, crap. They said they’d rip him apart if he made Sage cry and judging by their hard expressions, she’d been crying a lot. Well, he was a fighter; he could tolerate three punches. Once it was done, they could all move on.

  “Jesus,” he muttered as he stood in front of the three Ballantyne brothers, bracing himself for what was to come. “Okay, take your hit.”

  Jaeger and Beck exchanged looks and Reame just grinned. Jaeger lifted a dark eyebrow, his eyes dark and cold. “You’re going to make it right with Sage?”

  Tyce nodded. “I already said that, didn’t I? Yeah, I’m going to make it right.” Damn, waiting for a punch was worse than the punch itself.

  “If you hurt her again, we’ll set Reame on you and he’s a sneaky son of a bitch with mad skills. He’d do some damage,” Beck told him, echoing Jaeger’s icy demeanor.

  “Understood.” Tyce nodded. He looked at Linc, relieved that he’d avoided being hit by Sage’s hotheaded brothers. They were more gracious than he might have been if some guy messed Lachlyn around. Linc looked like he always did, calm and controlled.

  Okay then, dodged a bullet. Phew.

  Tyce pulled in a breath, started to take his hands out of his pockets, thinking that he’d invite them upstairs. The big fist came out of nowhere, slammed into his jaw and he dropped backward, his butt connecting with the cold and very hard concrete. Crap, that hurt. Tyce looked up at Linc, who had a self-satisfied smile on his face.

  Right, he hadn’t seen that coming, Tyce thought, holding his jaw. “God, it hurts like a mother,” he moaned.

  “Good.” Linc held out his hand to Tyce to pull him up. “You got coffee? We still have business to discuss before you go groveling back to Sage. And you will grovel.”

  “I will grovel,” Tyce agreed, allowing Linc to pull him up. Holding his jaw, he lifted his eyebrows. “What business?”

  Linc gestured to an amused Jaeger and Beck. “We’re going to repay you the money you spent buying Lach-Ty shares. We inherited Connor’s money so we’ll spend it to reimburse you for Lachlyn’s share of the company. We’ll also add her as a co-owner of the assets we own jointly, like the art collection, the properties and the gem collection.”

  Holy crap, now he was really seeing stars. Tyce wiggled his jaw and started to lead them to the stairs. As his foot hit the bottom stair, an idea popped into his head. “If I ask you to, do you think you could get Sage somewhere for me?”

  “Possibly,” Linc replied.

  “And instead of reimbursing me for what I paid for the shares, could we do a swap?”

  “What swap?” Jaeger asked, his eyes still amused. Yeah, it would be a while before he lived that punch down.

  “There’s a red diamond ring in your family collection that Sage loves. I’d rather have the stone than the money because I’d like to put it on your sister’s finger.”

  Linc looked at him, then looked at his brothers. Some sort of silent communication happened between them and Linc finally nodded. “I think we can work that out.”

  Reame was the last one up the stairs and Tyce heard his chuckle. “I have to say that life is never boring with you Ballantynes.”

  Now there was a statement Tyce fully agreed with.

  Thirteen

  Sage didn’t want to go to an art exhibition and she deeply resented her bossy future sisters-in-law—sadly, her brothers were rubbing off on them—turning up at her apartment and bundling her into the shower. Amy had always been bossy so that wasn’t anything new. Art exhibition, cocktails and clubbing, they told her. Just the five of them setting Manhattan alight.

  Ugh. The last thing in the world she felt like doing was having a girls’ night out: the point of which was to drink copious amounts of alcohol to make you forget about your lousy man and to give you the courage to dance with, possibly kiss, some random guy. She was pregnant and the thought of kissing anyone else but Tyce made her want to throw up. What she most wanted to do was to go over to Tyce’s warehouse to beg him, again, to reconsider her offer, to plead with him to love her.

  Stupid heart, wanting what it couldn’t have. So, not having an excuse to stay in—being pregnant and miserable wasn’t a good enough excuse for the women in her life—she was out and about and wearing this silly dress with her bigger-than-normal boobs on display. It was a baby doll dress in a multicolored print and it effectively hid her blossoming baby bump.

  “Take me home,” Sage begged as they piled out of a taxi in front of the gallery where she an
d Tyce met again several months ago. She frowned at Piper. “Why are we here? They don’t have an exhibition scheduled. And why are all the lights off?”

  “It’s an exhibition by a Norwegian installation artist, something to do with bioluminescence,” Piper replied, tucking her hand into Sage’s arm. “It’s got to be dark to see the effect of the art.”

  “Don’t want to go,” Sage said, digging her heels in and looking at the cab. “I’m tired and my ankles are swollen and I have a backache.”

  Okay, she was whining but she couldn’t do art, any type of art, right now. Was she asking too much to be allowed to nurse her weeping, bleeding heart in peace? Her mind was too full of Tyce as it was; memories of what they did and said to each other replayed on the megascreen of her mind, and coming back to this place, the place where they met, was simply too much for her.

  She missed him so much she felt like she was walking around with a fraction of her heart.

  “You’re not far along enough to be complaining about a backache and swollen ankles,” Cady told her, placing a hand in the middle of her back and pushing her toward the door.

  “And you’re not carrying twin boys so I have no sympathy for you,” Piper added.

  Tate rubbed Piper’s big bump and smiled. “Fifteen minutes, Sage, and then we will take you wherever you want to go.”

  Sage perked up at that suggestion. “Home?”

  “If that’s what you want,” Tate replied as they walked up the flight of stairs to the front door. Tate pulled the door open and ushered her into the dark gallery. Sage rolled her eyes at the complete darkness. Honestly some of these exhibitions were just ridiculous and in trying to do something weird and wonderful they forgot to be practical. How was she supposed to see the art if she couldn’t see two inches in front of her face? Anyone could trip, she could bump into people...