LITMIR.BIZ

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They’d have to talk sometime soon...

      When their baby was old enough for college?

      Sage pulled a face at her silliness. She’d spent two weeks with her head in the sand; she couldn’t keep it there much longer. When this meeting was over she’d invite Tyce to her apartment for a chat. No, not her apartment, that was too intimate a space, too revealing. And her bed was up a short flight of stairs, above her sitting area. She’d spend the entire time looking at his mouth and hoping that he’d put her out of her misery and kiss her. His mouth had always been her downfall; their lips would touch and she’d immediately feel he was stripping her soul of all its barriers.

      The fantasy was both wildly exciting and intensely dangerous and that was why she should keep the man out of her private spaces—her apartment, her body, her heart—and meet him in a public venue.

      After they’d thrashed out where they stood, what they wanted, what their expectations were, she’d tell her brothers and the rest of the family about the pregnancy.

      It was a plan with a hundred holes in it but it was, at least, a plan.

      Amy looked at the massive clock on the wall behind Sage. “You need to move or else you’re going to be late for your meeting.”

      “What’s this meeting about, by the way?”

      “I don’t know.” Amy frowned, looking displeased. She loathed being outside the loop. “I know nothing except that the meeting is in Connor’s boardroom.”

      Sage turned around slowly, her eyes wide. Connor’s boardroom was a little-known boardroom on the top floor of the Ballantyne building. It was only accessible by an elevator within the iconic jewelry store, Ballantyne’s on Fifth, on the ground floor of this building or by a nondescript steel door at the back of the building. The room was used for very high-profile clients who demanded anonymity, buyers and sellers of gems who demanded that their movements not be brought to public attention. Or any attention at all.

      Sage frowned, realizing that she had to head downstairs, enter the store and then use the elevator. It was a pain in her ass and she was guaranteed to be late.

      “Dammit.”

      Waving a quick goodbye at Amy, Sage headed back to the private elevator that would take her directly into the back rooms of Ballantyne’s on Fifth. As she stepped into the hallway, Sage tossed a look over her shoulder and saw Amy standing behind her desk, still looking worried. Worried and hurt. It was an expression she’d seen on many faces over the years and she felt the familiar stab of guilt-slicked pain.

      Amy hated that Sage kept her arm’s length but it wasn’t personal, she kept everyone there, except, possibly, Linc. At the age of six she’d experienced a double whammy, the deaths of both her parents. So, really, was it any surprise that her biggest fear was that she’d lose anyone she loved, that she would be left alone? Her rationale at six still made sense to her: the more distance she kept between her and the ones she loved, the less it would hurt when they went away.

      Sage fully accepted that life was a series of changes, that people came and went and that life required a series of emotional shifts. Loved ones, sadly, died. Friends moved away. Relationships broke up. They all came with their own measure of pain but Sage was very sure that she never wanted to be left behind again and it was easier to walk away than stand still and endure the emotional fallout.

      Sage hauled in a deep breath. Her childhood had shaped who she was today. She looked after, as much as she could, the relationships she couldn’t walk away from—her brothers, their partners and Amy—but she didn’t actively seek new people to add to the small circle of people she loved to distraction. She dated casually, not allowing herself to fall in love. If she did find herself someone she liked, really, really liked, she never allowed the relationship to dip beneath the surface because she could never be sure of who would stay or who would go so she made it easy and pushed them all away. Somewhere between her sixth and seventh birthday she’d realized that it was easier to retreat from people and situations than to give them a chance.

      Pushing people away, creating distance, it was her thing.

      Tyce was the easiest and most difficult person she’d ever walked away from. Easy because she knew that he didn’t want anything serious from her, difficult because she’d been so very close to throwing her innate caution and self-preservation to the wind. He’d tempted her to try, to see what the hype about relationships and commitment was all about, to take a risk. Already teetering, if Tyce had given her the smallest sliver of encouragement, she might have toppled into love. But he hadn’t and she did what she did best; she’d walked away.

      And he’d let her.

      Sage shook her head, annoyed with her thoughts. She was focusing on the past and she wasn’t going in that direction. Tyce might be the father of her child and she might be crazy, fiercely attracted to him but, baby or not, she intended to keep him on the periphery of her life.

      She did, however, have to find another way to interact with him because—she glanced down at the screen of her cell phone showing the number of calls she’d missed from Tyce—he wasn’t going away.

      Sage stepped out of the elevator into the back room of the original Ballantyne jewelry store and smiled at an employee who was on her way to the break room. Stepping across the hallway, she punched in the code to access the private elevator that would take her up to the secret room on the top floor of the building, adjacent to rooms holding the safes and hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of precious gems.

      Sage bit her bottom lip, resigning herself to the inevitable. When this secretive meeting was over, she’d call Tyce and set up a time to meet, to discuss how involved he wanted to be in the baby’s life, how they were going to deal with each other when the baby arrived. She would be cool, calm and collected. She wouldn’t lose her temper or slap or kiss him.

      Sage stepped into the small boardroom. Her stomach immediately rebelled at the smell of coffee rolling toward her and she frantically looked around for a trash can or a receptacle in case her morning sickness turned nasty.

      A hand on her back steadied her. Sage slowly lifted her eyes to look into that familiar face, the high cheekbones, the stubble covering his strong jaw. Hard, black eyes. “You okay?” Tyce asked her, holding her biceps in a firm grip. He’d catch her if she fell, Sage thought, relieved. If her knees gave way she wouldn’t hit the floor.

      “What are you doing here?” she whispered, wondering if she’d dropped down Alice’s rabbit hole.

      An indefinable emotion flashed in Tyce’s eyes. “Now that’s a long story. Take a seat and we’ll get into it.”

       Four

      Tyce guided Sage to a chair and stepped away from the table, deliberately walking over to the far side of the room and leaning his shoulder into the wall, crossing his feet at the ankle. It was an insolent pose, a deliberate maneuver to keep the Ballantyne men off-balance. Tyce had deliberately dressed down for this meeting; he wore faded, paint-splattered jeans over flat-heeled boots and a clean black button-down shirt over a black T-shirt, cuffs rolled back. Linc and Beck were dressed in designer suits; Jaeger was a little less formal in suit pants and a pale cream sweater.

      Sage, well, Sage looked stunning in the clashing colors of pink and red, most of her hair in a messy knot on top of her head, tendrils framing her face and falling down the back of her neck. She was innately stylish, yet people assumed it took her hours to look so perfectly put-together, but he’d seen Sage on the move; she could shove her hair up in thirty seconds, could dress in another minute. Sage wasn’t one for spending hours in front of a mirror.

      Tyce looked at her face and frowned at the blue stripes under her eyes, at the pallor in her skin. She looked like she’d dropped weight and it was weight she could ill afford. She kept sucking her bottom lip between her teeth, darting anxious looks at his face. Tyce, deliberately, kept his expression blank, his face a mask. She could’ve

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