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She hesitated then, because it was getting close to dinnertime. “I can take it back to the car before the concert.” She handed Stanley her card and took the tiny cast iron pan that had been bagged for her.
As they left the booth, Ty leaned down and murmured, “I only make those pancakes once a year.”
Sage’s next step landed a little woodenly. “For your daddy’s birthday.” They hadn’t gone to Charleston to see his parents. He said it was too hard in the summer, but that he usually went in late October or November, when everything slowed down and cooled off.
“Right.”
“Then they’ll be absolutely amazing next year,” she said. “And I can season the pan for you in the meantime.”
“So it’ll go back and forth between your house and mine?” he asked.
It almost sounded like he was asking something else, and Sage heard precisely what. Would he continue to go back and forth between her house and his? Would she? Would they ever live together?
She hadn’t given him the key to her house on his birthday. It still sat in the wrapped box, and she’d hidden it away in her nightstand drawer. Ty had no reason to be in her bedroom, digging through her personal things. They hadn’t merged their lives like that yet.
When Sage realized she’d thought the wordyet, her steps slowed. Ty paused with her. “You see something, baby?”
She looked athim, and she sawhim.
She saw herself with him. “Ty, I—”
“Ty,” someone in the crowd crowed. He turned away from Sage, laughter spilling from his mouth only a moment later. He released Sage’s hand to step into the man who’d interrupted her from spilling the contents of her heart in the park at the Heritage Festival.
Sage should be grateful to Harold Burl, and she was as she shook his hand. “He’s an old friend of mine from the early days of the agency,” Ty said, positively beaming. “What are you doing on the island? Last I heard, you were in…Miami?”
“Miami, yep.” Harold wandered along with them for several minutes while he caught up with Ty, and then he peeled off to go find his family.
“Too bad about his dad,” Sage said, because Harold had come back for his father’s funeral.
“Yeah,” Ty said, frowning. “I hadn’t even heard that.”
“Summer’s busy for you,” she said. “I’m gonna take this pan to the car, and then we can get dinner, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
She left him standing in the shade, his phone already out when she walked away. She didn’t mind how much time he spent on the phone. She knew he conducted a large part of his business from his device—and she did too.
Sage also knew she practically ran away from him, and she was jogging by the time she reached his SUV. She started it remotely, then got in the driver’s seat and put the cast iron baby skillet behind her seat with the rest of her stuff.
The AC blew, calming her. Drying the tears that had started to manifest themselves. Everything inside her felt shaky and strange, and Sage struggled to figure out why.
All at once, she knew why.
She was in love with Tyler Parker.
31
Lauren sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to make her back as straight as possible. She’d finished her work for the day, for the weekend too. With her baby due on Tuesday next week, Lauren had been trying to tie up all loose ends for her marketing clients for the past couple of weeks.
She would still be able to do a few things, as she worked out of a home office, but she didn’t have any meetings scheduled, no major campaigns launching, and no new clients getting onboarded. Everything was humming along, and now Lauren needed to find her center.
She liked the way the fan blew through her office, because it drowned out other sounds that might have distracted her. She continually pulled her concentration back to her breathing whenever her mind started to wander.
After she did her meditation, Lauren would move to her desk to do her journaling. She knew her thoughts about becoming a mother were irrational and unfounded. It didn’t stop them from coming, and when they piled up, Lauren felt like drowning.
She’d been seeing a cognitive behavior counselor, and she’d learned about negative thought patterns and how to get herself out of them. Sometimes she could get herself back to a place of better sanity in only a few minutes, and sometimes she wrote for pages and pages.
With her baby girl due in only three days, the nursery sat ready for a new human being. She and Blake had arranged their careers so they could devote themselves to each other and their baby. Everything she’d been able to prepare, she’d prepared.
