LITMIR.BIZ

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contacted Linc and convinced him that a meeting would be beneficial to all parties.

      Tyce watched as Linc stepped forward and placed both his hands on Sage’s shoulders, his gentle squeeze conveying his support. Jaeger and Beck flanked Sage on either side, arms folded and jaws tense. Her brothers were very protective of their sister and he hoped that this conversation wouldn’t turn physical but who the hell knew? When you were dealing with family and money and business, anything could happen.

      “Since you asked for this meeting, Latimore, would you like to get the party started?” Linc asked, his voice as cold as a subzero fridge.

      Tyce nodded, straightened and walked to the table, pulling out a chair at the head, another deliberate gesture. It was a silent screw you to their pecking order, telling Linc and his brothers that he wasn’t going to neatly slot into their order of command.

      Tyce rested his forearms on the table. He turned his head to look at Sage and wished that they were alone, that he could kiss her luscious mouth, trace the fine line of her jaw, kiss his way down her long neck to her shoulders. Peel her clothes from her body...

      Tyce sighed. He was imagining Sage naked because, yeah, that was helpful. He ran his hand across his face and caught Sage’s eye.

      “This could’ve gone differently, Sage. If you had taken my calls, answered my emails, had a goddamn conversation with me, I wouldn’t have had to do it like this.”

      Ignoring her frown, Tyce reached across the table and pulled his folder toward him. He flipped open the cover and withdrew a sheaf of papers and tossed them in Linc’s general direction. “Share certificates showing that Lach-Ty owns around fifteen percent of Ballantyne’s.”

      Four backs straightened, four jaws tensed. Linc picked up the share certificates, examined them and carefully placed them facedown on the table. “Would you care to explain,” he asked in a dangerous-as-hell voice, “why you own fifteen percent of our company?”

      Sure, that was why he was here, after all. “Technically, I don’t own the shares. I just paid for them.”

      Linc gripped the table, his hands and knuckles white. “Then who does own the shares and why the hell did you pay for them?”

      “My sister owns those shares because I thought it was right that she owned a percentage of the company her father left to you.” Tyce hesitated and thought that he might as well get it all out there so that they could move forward from a basis of truth. “I thought that, since your sister is carrying my baby, it was time to lay my cards on the table.”

      And that, Tyce thought, his eyes moving from one shocked Ballantyne to another, was how you dropped a bombshell.

      Shock, horror, surprise, anger...all the emotions he expected were in their faces, coating their questions, their shouted demands for more information. Tyce ignored them and kept his gaze focused on Sage, who stared at him with hellfire in her eyes.

      She half stood, slapped her palms on the table and leaned toward him. “How dare you tell them without my permission?”

      Tyce held her gaze and lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Because if I left it up to you, then you’d be ready to go into labor and you’d still be hemming and hawing about how to tell them, what to tell and whether you should.”

      “You had no right—”

      Tyce pointed at her stomach. “That’s my child in there too and, might I remind you, if you’d agreed to meet with me instead of ignoring me, then we could’ve resolved this and more.”

      “More? What are you talking about?” Sage demanded, her voice vibrating with fear and concern.

      Linc placed a hand on Sage’s shoulder and urged her back into the chair. “He’s talking about the shares and alluding to Connor having a daughter.”

      “What? Connor never had any children,” Sage emphatically stated. “That’s crazy!”

      “You’re pregnant?” Jaeger yelled.

      “Everyone shut up!” Linc ordered and looked at Sage. “Let’s finish with Latimore first. Then he can get out of our hair and we can talk about your baby,” Linc added in his CEO-everyone-must-listen-to-me voice. Yeah, well, Tyce didn’t have to.

      “Your optimism is amusing, Linc,” Tyce drawled. “It’s my baby too and, sorry to disappoint you, but I’m going to be around for a hell of a long time.”

      “No, you’re not,” Sage stated.

      “Oh, honey, I so am. But we’ll discuss that later,” Tyce said, his voice quiet but holding no trace of doubt.

      “Why would you think that your sister is Connor’s daughter?” Linc asked, his jaw rock tight with annoyance.

      “I don’t think she is Connor’s daughter, I know she is,” Tyce replied. Tyce saw that they were going to argue and lifted his hand. “Look, let me start at the beginning and I’ll talk you through it.”

      Where to start? As he said, at the beginning. Well, at Lachlyn’s beginning, not his. They didn’t need to know about his childhood, about those dark and dismal years before, and after, Lachlyn came along. As quickly and concisely as he could, Tyce recounted the facts. His mom had worked as a night cleaner at Ballantyne International, in this very building—something he had no reason to feel ashamed of; it was honest work and if the Ballantynes were too snobby to understand that, to hell with them—and, because Connor worked long hours, they struck up a friendship. His mom and stepdad separated, she and Connor started an affair and she became pregnant.

      “My mom knew that she had no future with Connor so she went back to my stepfather hoping that he’d raise Lachlyn as his.”

      His stepdad, originally from Jamaica, took one look at Lachlyn, a blond-haired, blue-eyed baby, and lost his temper. Tyce took his disappearance that same day as a firm no on the raising-and-supporting-Lachlyn question. Those months following his stepfather’s disappearance had been, by far, the worst of his life. His mom sunk into what he now knew to be postpartum depression, made a hundred times worse by her normal, run-of-the-mill depression. Looking after the baby had been a struggle for her. She hadn’t had any energy left over for a confused eight-year-old boy.

      “Did your mother ever tell Connor that he had a daughter?” Beck asked, his voice laced with skepticism.

      “No,” Tyce snapped back, frustrated. “Since Lachlyn’s birth certificate states that my stepdad is her father, she didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. She assumed that Connor would dismiss her claims.”

      “Which is exactly what we are going to do,” Linc told him, his blue eyes hard.

      Linc reacted exactly as he expected him to so Tyce wasn’t particularly surprised. “You can, but it won’t make any difference to my plans.”

      Tyce ran his hand around his neck, hoping to rub away the headache at the base of his skull. He darted a look at Sage and saw that her face was even whiter than before and her big, endlessly blue eyes were dark with pain and confusion. She looked like he’d punched her in the gut. The fight immediately went out of Tyce and he moved his hand across the table to cover hers. He desperately wanted to scoop her up, soothe away her pain, assure her that everything would be okay.

      But Tyce, more than most, knew that life had a nebulous concept of fairness and had a shoddy record at doling out good luck.

      Sage snatched her hand out from under his, as if he were contagious with some flesh-eating disease. She folded her arms against her chest and glared at him. He couldn’t help his smile.

      “You should know that your prissy, ‘I’m a princess and you’re a peasant’ look turns me on.”

      His comment also had the added bonus of pissing her brothers off. Score.

      Sage lifted her hand, her lips thinning. “This is business so let’s keep it to that, okay? You and I have nothing to say to each other.”

      Oh,

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