exit.
“Shh! Not yet,” Ty answered. “Not here. Let’s go.”
He stood up and grabbed tighter onto the hand Sierra was trying to snatch away. Then he gave a quick tilt of his head to Gina to say they were leaving, and began to weave his way confidently between the tables toward the café’s kitchen door. At least a dozen pairs of female eyes tracked their progress, and as she followed him Sierra heard several whispered comments.
“That’s him!”
“Lordy, what a body!”
“I have a private two-hour sail-boat cruise with him tomorrow…”
“Not here?” Sierra echoed, as the swing door closed behind them, shutting off the whisperings and the looks. The sounds and sights of a busy kitchen took their place. “Okay, Ty, we’ve tried your office, we’ve tried your café. What’s next down the list?”
“Have to be my place, I guess,” he said.
Well, I walked right into that one, didn’t I?
She didn’t know why it bothered her to think of continuing this confrontation with Ty on what was indisputably his own personal turf, but somehow it did. Maybe because she was too curious. She wanted to know what kind of a home he had set up for himself.
Sierra had gone back to live with Dad and her brother and sisters after the split and, because of their various needs, she was still there. In contrast, with no family ties and no budget constraints, Ty had only his own taste and lifestyle to consult. Did he inhabit a sterile bachelor pad? A designer decorated mansion? A permanent hotel suite?
She didn’t want to feel so curious about him, when they’d just agreed on a divorce. Still less did she want to think that there might be any threat to her emotional health in being alone with him. She was over all that. She had to be, for her own well-being.
So why this sense of nerves jumping in her stomach, and pulses jumping everywhere else? Purely because this morning had been so much more complicated than she’d initially hoped?
The best solution would be to discuss everything they needed to discuss in private at Ty’s, then get back to her motel, check out and leave town.
Still following in his wake, Sierra exited through the café’s service doors and found herself in the access lane that backed the waterfront buildings. Since the lane largely serviced the various Garrett Marine businesses, she wasn’t surprised to find it comparatively clean and well ordered.
The only item out of place was an ancient mud-brown sedan, parked crookedly so that it almost grazed the back wall of the next building and just left room for the delivery truck nosing its way past. The vehicle seemed to be one small step above a junk-heap shell, with dented panels, rusted bumpers and a silhouette that was thirty years out of style.
She nearly gasped out loud in disbelief when Ty aimed a key right for its passenger side lock.
“Decoy and get-away car,” he explained, so apparently she actually had gasped out loud.
“This is—”
“The car I was driving when I left Ohio, yes.”
“It looks—”
“Even worse. First three years here, it was the only car I could afford. I was plowing every cent that I could into the business, back then.”
He opened the door for her and nudged her into the front seat with a gentlemanly gesture. She would have resisted, except that a glance at the interior told her it was neat and clean and—good grief!—upholstered with glove-soft taupe leather seats.
“Appearances can be deceiving, I guess,” she drawled.
“Yeah, well, the original upholstery cracked and tore, and it seemed like I might as well replace it with something decent.”
“I don’t know why you kept this car at all.”
Loyalty? Sentimentality? Was Ty like that?
“Told you, as a decoy,” he said, as he arrived in the driver’s seat. “Don’t always want the whole town to know my movements. Which tend to be fairly obvious when I’m driving the Porsche.”
“I wish you’d been as concerned for your privacy when A-list approached you about the article.”
“Damn straight!” he drawled. “One issue we agree on, at least. Hindsight is a beautiful thing.”
“So why that ridiculous announcement to the journalist, just now? If you want privacy in your personal life, why tell the world that you have a wife, especially when we’re not going to be married a day longer than we have to be?”
“You saw what it was like, back there. And I’m sure your ears are as good as mine, so you heard, too. I’ve had it up to here, seriously, and notifying a very vocal journalist of the truthful fact that you and I are married seemed like a handy tool for dealing with it. You’ll notice she didn’t hang around.”
“She’s pretty.”
“She’s not my style. Neither was the sailor suit gal this morning. And none of the others were, either. And it’s not how I’d choose to start a relationship, in any case, even if there had been a woman who’d made my heart stop beating and my breathing get stuck from the moment I first looked at her.”
What would it be like, Sierra wondered, her own heart syncopating suddenly, to have Ty feel that way about her? Once upon a time he had. But he’d moved on since then, a lot farther than she had. His words hadn’t been intended as a reminder, she knew. It was purely her problem that she’d taken them that way.
She said quickly, “The hordes might flood back again when they find out we’re getting a divorce.”
“Who’s going to tell them?”
“People tend to notice when there’s no visible evidence of a wife in a man’s life, no?”
Ty swivelled in the driver’s seat to face her. The car still sat crookedly in the lane, challenging the driving skills of another delivery man hard on the tail of the first, but he ignored the guy’s problems and fixed her with a very serious, narrow-eyed gaze. It took him around four seconds to think the problem through.
“Then can I beg you on my bended knees to stick around for a bit, Sierra?” he said. “Help me out with this?”
“Stick around? Help? You mean act like we’re still really married? Are you joking?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Work it out, and get back to me.”
She put her hand on the door, intending to climb out, but he leaned across and stopped her, laying one arm across both of hers. She froze. His bare arm brushed her stomach, and would brush her breasts if she leaned just a little bit.
At one time they’d been way more intimate with each other than this, so she shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about it. Problem was, his touch opened up too many memories, and too many lost possibilities.
“I’m
