Page 27 of Misadventures Of A Single Mom
I was stunned and angry. Hurt. Now Ty was turning into a lunatic.
Before I could even think, he grabbed my shoulders and pulled me in for a kiss, one with a really good amount of tongue. It was fierce and possessive, wild and untamed, as if the action told me everything he felt when he couldn’t say the words.
I heard some catcalls in the background, probably from his fellow firefighters. And a few policemen. Some bystanders, too.
He pulled back, but held onto me. Good thing, as I wasn’t steady on my feet after a kiss like that. “I can’t keep my hands off of you.” He sounded mad about that. “Fuck. But I can’t do this anymore. I can’t watch someone else I care about get hurt. Or killed.”
Ty walked off and climbed into the back of the fire truck. I watched it pull away, frozen where he’d left me.
8
“What?” Goldie practically shouted when I shared the news about the robbery. We stood on her front porch. She and Paul had bought a small bungalow when Nate and I married. It was one story, over a hundred years old, and just three blocks from the store.
“Everything turned out fine,” I replied, downplaying the entire incident.
“But it might have turned out far worse.” She had a hand to her neck and some color drained from her face underneath her bronzer.
I gave her a quick hug when the boys stampeded out onto the front porch. I figured the conversation was over…for now.
“Mom, guess what?” Bobby asked.
“What?”
“We got to go in the hot tub in our underwear!”
Goldie and Paul had a hot tub in their backyard. They used it all year round, but it was fabulous for the winter. It held eight people and had special colored lights under the water. Zach and Bobby considered it their own mini swimming pool. And they didn’t have to wear swim trunks.
“GG got us tickets to the demolission dervy!”
I eyed Goldie, also known as GG. It stood for Grandma Goldie. Goldie, of course, refused to be called Grandma so we compromised on GG. “Tomorrow night at the county fair. We’ll go early and do the rides,” she said.
The ‘we’ in that statement didn’t include me. I was never psyched about spending time in the hot sun at the county fairgrounds waiting in line for deathtrap rides that were ludicrously overpriced. Top that with overheated, cranky kids and it made for a day in Hell. Obviously, I had very negative feelings about the county fair. I didn’t mind walking around and seeing the animals and watching the auctions, but the rides, ugh.
“Demolition derby? I love a good demolition derby!” I told Bobby. I really was excited about a demolition derby. Who could deny an interest in cars smashing and ramming each other? And the mud! Now I just had to get out of the fair part.
“We’ll talk more about the other stuff later,” Goldie said as she gave Bobby a squeeze.
“You can just watch it on the news.”
When I got home,I stood under the shower until the water ran cold, the boys parked in front of the TV watching the original Star Wars. I used the bath salts Goldie had given me for Christmas last year but never opened, hoping it would scrub off the layer of sleaze that had built up at Dex’s ranch. I let my hair air dry while I carried a laundry basket around the house picking up dirty clothes that had been scattered on the boys’ bedroom floors and in their bathroom.
I had to admit my feelings were a little hurt. Okay, a whole lot of hurt. I felt a funny pang of regret, a loss of somethingthat hadn’t quite started. Ty didn’t want anything to do with me because I was a threat to myself. Ha! Nothing, I meant nothing, exciting happened to me—until less than a week ago when I’d purchased two gnomes at a garage sale. Getting myself hurt was a silly idea because I did nothing crazy. Nothing over the top. Ever. No rock climbing, no sky diving, no crazy adventures of any kind.
Sure, there was a definite spark and connection on a sexual level with Ty. Make that raging inferno, but Ty didn’t really know me. Just as he didn’t know much about me, I didn’t know anything about him. I knew he had parents and grew up in Pony on a ranch. I knew he’d been in the service. I didn’t know what he’d done in the service. I didn’t know how his deployments had affected him. He must have had friends and fellow soldiers who’d been hurt or even killed. And it had impacted him to such a level that he’d rather push me away before he could care about me, just in case something happened. He’d said as much.
Was it up to me to change his mind? Or was that too much for one man to handle? Was it even fair to try? Did I even want to? I’d already had one lying cheating husband die on me. Did I want to go through that again? Did I want to get in any deeper with a guy who might walk away? Ty wasn’t the only one with scars.
But then I smiled to myself as I poured laundry detergent into the machine. I realized he cared about me enough to push me away, and that had to be a lot. And that warmed a place in my heart I thought long frozen over like a Montana winter.
Kelly called oncethe laundry was in the dryer.
“I saw the robbery on the news. Are you all right?” she asked, her voice laced with worry.
The local TV station was small-time. As in teensy tiny. Not that they weren’t good. They, thankfully, didn’t have a lot of news to cover. Not much bad stuff happened in Bozeman, one of the reasons I liked living here. It hit on the current news around town, which, most of the time involved crop rotation, deep freezes and triplet calves. The excitement of the day had been a toss-up between the Best in Class awards for poultry at the county fair and the convenience store robbery.
“I’m fine. Scary.” I was in the kitchen getting a snack. Cheese and crackers. I had the phone tucked between my ear and my shoulder while I sliced some Monterey Jack and laid it out on a plate with a bunch of Ritz.
“It said the man was on meth.”