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“Like I said before, it’s going to be okay. I’ll call you later.” She grabbed her keys and left.
I stared at the movie fuming and waited for Ty.
“You need more shampoo,” he said when he came out of the bathroom. He wore a pair of gray cargo shorts and a ratty, but clean, farmer’s market T-shirt. I hadn’t noticed a bag of clothes when he’d come in, but he must have had one. His hair was damp from the shower, his face clean shaven.
I gave him the evil eye. “You’ve probably got plenty at your house!”
“I got so mad thinking about Dexter I squeezed the hell out of the bottle and shampoo shot everywhere.” Obviously, he ignored my barb. “I want to kill him so badly I’m going to need anger management classes to get over it. But the fucker’s already dead.”
He moved to the far end of the couch where Kelly had been, lifted my feet, sat down and dropped them on his lap. Closed his eyes and sighed. “I’m so fucking tired.”
This, I had not expected.
“What are youdoinghere?” Had he been wandering the streets looking like Smokey the Bear’s sidekick?
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “What do you mean?” He looked completely confused by my anger. And that made me even angrier.
“You walked out on me!” I yelled.
“I didn’t walk out onyou.” He gave my feet a squeeze. His hands warmed my skin. “I walked out of thehospital. I had to get the hell out of there. This day has been insane.”
Duh.
“One minute I’m fighting a forest fire, the next minute a lunatic comes barreling out of the woods with a gas can in his hand. When he told us who paid him to start the fire, because clearly he couldn’t come up with the idea on his own, I had a bad feeling. Got any beer?”
I nodded, completely baffled by Ty’s disappearance, reappearance, shower. Everything.
He got up, got the beer from the fridge and returned to his spot.
After a few swallows he continued, “I play poker with one of the 911 dispatchers. He recognized your name from your call and thought I might want to know. I was tracked down on the fire and patched through the details. Driving back to town was the longest two hours of my life. He said you were fine but I had to see for myself.”
Any interest in crying was gone, replaced by the happiness I’d felt early in the morning when Ty leaned over me in my bed and said he’d fallen for me. This day had been insane.
“I…I thought you walked away from me. From us.”
Ty’s eyes flared in understanding. He shook his head. “No. Never.”
I bit my lip. “What about my dinner with Dex?”
Ty lifted an eyebrow. “I told you that night, you went with him for a reason. I know you’re not a cheater.”
I was still confused. “Then why were you so angry in the ER?”
He squeezed my foot again. “You just looked so fragile, so breakable, lying there. While you cried in my arms, I thought about what he could have done to you. What he had done to you. I was so angry, I had to get out of there. I was afraid in my angerI might hurt you, more than what Dexter had done. I’m sorry you didn’t understand that.”
As apologies go, it was a darn good one. I picked up George, cracks and all, his ceramic body cool beneath my fingers. “Who would have imagined my entire life would be turned upside down by two garden gnomes?”
“Never in a million years,” Ty grumbled. He took George from me and put him back on the coffee table along with his beer. He lifted my feet off his lap and worked his way across the couch, lying on top of me, propped up on one elbow. I could feel every hard inch of him, some places much harder than others. His body heat seeped into me. He smelled like my soap and beer. I felt safe and sheltered, protected with him over me.
“Am I too heavy?” he asked, worried. He started to pull away, but I yanked him back on top of me.
“No, just right.” I ran my fingers over the letters on his T-shirt, afraid to look him in the eye. “So, um, about what you said to me this morning in bed.”
“Oh, you were awake.” One tip of his mouth curved up.
“Only for the good parts.”
“Good parts?” He tucked a curl behind my ear, studied my face, settled on my lips.
