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TJ found the stare more unnerving than if Caleb had shouted.
Matt chose the moment to sit down with them. “What’s going on?”
He looked from Caleb to TJ and back again, his eyes widening at their expressions.
“What?” he repeated.
Caleb spoke. “Someone drilled a hole in TJ’s skull and extracted half of his brain.”
“That was colorful,” Matt said.
“She’s the mother of my child,” TJ said to Caleb.
“Who you hadn’t seen for nine years. You don’t know anything about her. This could be… This could be… It could be anything.”
“You think it’s a setup? You think making me a bone marrow donor could be part of some complex Machiavellian plot to steal my money?”
“Ahh,” Matt said. “The prenup. I told you he’d react like this.”
“It’s not up to him to react like anything,” TJ told Matt.
Caleb’s voice rose. “How could you be so boneheadedly cavalier? Did you learn nothing from Matt’s divorce?”
“How did I get thrown in the middle of this?” Matt asked.
“You’re a cautionary tale,” Caleb said flatly.
“Sage is not Diana,” TJ said. Sage was absolutely nothing like Matt’s materialistic ex-wife.
“How do you know that? You barely know her. A prenup is the absolute baseline—”
“Hey!” Jules shouted above them.
TJ suddenly realized how loud their voices had become. He looked up to see Sage and everyone else staring at them. She was holding an untouched slice of cheesecake on a small china plate, and she looked mortified.
TJ came to his feet.
“Sage…” Caleb began, regret ringing in his tone.
“I’m…” She quickly set the cheesecake down on the table. “Thank you all so much. It’s been a big day. And I’m tired.” She whisked her small purse from where she’d hung it on the back of a chair. “I’ll say good-night.”
She started for the door, and TJ went after her.
From the corner of his eye, he saw Caleb get up as well. Then he saw Jules stop him.
TJ didn’t call out Sage’s name as she made her way through the public restaurant. He kept a distance between them as she went down the curved stairs. He waited until she had gone out through the double doors before stepping up to her side.
“Sage, I’m so sorry.”
She shook her head as she walked, chin held high. “You didn’t do anything.”
“I know it was Caleb. But that was absolutely the wrong place for me to argue with him there, like that, at our wedding.”
“I didn’t expect drama,” she said.
“Neither did I.” TJ didn’t know what he’d expected. He sure hadn’t expected their kiss. “I’m parked under the light.” He pointed to his car.
She stopped. There was a note of surprise in her voice. “I guess I’m going home with you.”
“That was the plan.”
“This seemed a lot easier in theory.”
He didn’t know how to respond. Did she regret marrying him? He couldn’t help but wonder how she’d felt about their kiss. Did she remember their last kiss? Had she been reminded, like him, of why Eli had come into being?
She walked to his car.
They both climbed in and buckled up.
“He’s not wrong, you know,” she said.
“Who?”
“Caleb. It hadn’t occurred to me. But you have all this money. You do need a prenup.”
He looked sideways at her. Was that where her head was going? They’d kissed hard enough to rock the world, and she was focused on the prenup?
He jammed into first gear. “You think I want to protect myself against you?”
Abruptly releasing the clutch, he pulled out of the parking lot, heading for the short, steep road that led to his house on the cliffside above. He never imagined himself having this argument.
“It’s only logical, TJ. We don’t know where this is going, what might happen.”
She was right about that. But he was crystal clear on the prenup.
“Eli’s my son, Sage. You’re his mother, and now you’re my wife. You two are my family.”
“Only in the most tangential way.”
“No. In the most fundamental way possible. Whatever happens, whatever the future brings, whatever money I make or don’t make, I do it on behalf of all of us. That’s what it means.” He pointed back and forth between them. “That’s what this means. When I said we were in this together, that’s exactly what I meant.”
She’d turned sideways in her seat, and now she was gazing at him in silence.
He turned into the driveway and cut the engine before facing her, bracing himself for whatever she threw out on the table.
