“So,” he said as she stayed still and silent in front of him, those amazing eyes glowing purple up at him in the half-light. “That all good with you, sugar?”
“Yes,” she whispered and he saw tears sparkling on her eyelashes like snowflakes in moonlight. “I mean – it’s a first, but yes, that’s good with me.”
“Awesome.” He gave her a gentle little kiss on the tip of her nose. “So… honey cake bakin’ lessons at my place one night this week?”
“You mean at The Cakewalk?” she asked, wiping away the tears. “You want to bake there?”
“Nah, darlin’ My place. My kitchen in my home. That good?”
“Yes,” she said again, smiling widely this time, all trace of tears and confusion completely gone now. “Yes, that’s good, honey cake.”
Chapter 10
Five days later; Thursday
“OK, so.” Keegan cut the warm dough into eight equal-size pieces. “Sprinkle a bit of flour on each of these for me, so the dough won’t stick to the rollin’ pin.”
“Yes, sir,” Trish said smartly, with a little salute that he liked just fine. “Flour sprinkling coming right up.”
“You’re such a great assistant,” Keegan said as he rolled the first piece of dough flat, then put a nine-inch springform mold on it, traced around the mold with a pizza cutter. “And you can wear an apron like nobody’s business, baby.”
“You think?” She did a little twirl, twitched her bum teasingly. “Must admit, this is a new experience for me.” She reached for the pieces of dough that Keegan had cut off. “What should I do with these?”
“Just put ‘em over there.” Keegan gestured to a plate on the other side of the island. “We’ll bake the scraps separately and then grind ‘em up in the food processor and crumble ‘em on top of the frosting.”
“Ohhhh. Yum.”
“Told you this was a killer recipe, baby. I don’t joke about cake.”
“I can see that,” Trish said seriously. “Cake is not a joking matter. Not that I’ve ever made one before.”
“Damn straight it ain’t a joke.” He cut out the second circle of dough, then put them both on a baking tray. “We stick these in the oven for four minutes now, so just do that for me and then keep an eye on the timer.”
“OK.” Trish did as she was told, and then watched as Keegan rolled two more pieces of dough flat and used the form and pizza cutter again. “How many of these circles are you going to need?”
“Eight.”
“How do we put the whole thing together?”
“We assemble it in layers. We put a circle of cake down, spread some cream frostin’ on it, then stack another piece on top, frost it, and so on. Then we use all the leftover frostin’ to cover the whole cake.”
“Like building a cake house held together with cream and sugar.”
“Exactly, darlin’.”
She looked at the oven, saw that the timer was about to go off. She put on a pair of oven mitts, then stood by the door peering in. “Nice and golden.”
“That’s what a whole cup of honey will do.” He put two more dough circles on another tray. “Switch these out, all right?”
“OK.” Trish took the hot tray out of the oven, put the raw dough circles in, shut the door. “Where do I put these?”
“Over there, next to the window. Let ‘em cool down a bit before we put on the frostin’. If they’re too hot, everythin’ will melt and we gotta start all over again.”
“And then we have to wait even longer to eat honey cake.”
“Tragedy, huh?”
“Total, honey cake.”
He flashed her a grin that almost knocked her over backwards. “That’s growin’ on me, I gotta admit. Likin’ it more and more.”
“And I’m starting to like baking more and more.” She added more dough scraps to the plate. “Though I have to say, you’re doing all the heavy lifting.”
“Not for long. Guess who’s gonna be doin’ all the icin’?”
“You sure you can trust me with a spreading knife?”
“Aw, baby, you know I got special skills. I can take down a cute chick in an apron and comin’ at me with frostin’, no goddamn problem.”
She giggled a bit. “I have no doubt about that.”
They carried on with cutting and baking the cake circles, chatting easily and amiably the whole time. Trish couldn’t believe how much fun she was having with a man in a kitchen – and fully-clothed. She never thought she’d live to see the day when a gorgeous, growling ex-military guy would have her sprinkling flour and icing a made-from-scratch cake. She’d truly thought that hell would have to freeze over first.
For a few seconds, she thought about how great it must have been for Keegan to have had this experience for the whole of his childhood. Trish had never considered how close Keegan and his Mom must have gotten as they stood side-by-side doing exactly this kind of thing, but she was starting to see it, to understand it. Baking something wonderful for a family to share – it was special and amazing. She knew that now.
She took the last tray of cake circles out of the oven, then slid the tray of scraps in. They’d crisp and brown up quickly, Keegan had told her, and then they’d crush them up. They’d be a tasty and crunchy topping, a nice contrast to the texture of the soft cake and creamy icing.
“OK, so.” She wiped her hands on the apron, then touched a few of the cake circles to make sure that they were cooling well. “Now what?”
He pointed at the huge bowl of icing on the island. “Hop to it, sugar. You know what to do.”
“Ooooh.” She darted to the icing and swirled it with the knife. “I’m weirdly excited about doing this for the very first time.”
“Are you now?”
“Yep. Dunno why.”
“A cute little ice-caking virgin. I’m so proud my honey cake is your first.”
“Cut it out with the dirty talk, handsome. It’s distracting.” She carefully spread the icing on a round piece of cake. “How much?”
“Nice and thick,” he said. “We want the icin’ to get into the layers above and below, make the cake even softer.”
“Ohhhh-kaaaay.” Trish slathered icing on with abandon and enthusiasm, paused and cocked her head at the result doubtfully. “Ummm. Too much?”
“Yep, for damn sure. You got carried away, huh?”
“Seems so. I’m obviously enthusiastic but unskilled.” She scraped some off and put it back in the bowl, then smoothed it out again. “Better?”
“Much.” Keegan lifted one of the cake circles, set it on top of the iced one in front of Trish. “Keep goin’, baby. Only six more layers, then you get to do the whole cake. Make it white and even, make it pretty.”
“I’ll try,” she said cheerfully spreading more cream icing on the cake. “Though it may look like a mangy cotton ball exploded all over it.”
“Hell, it’ll all taste the same.” Keegan went to the sink and started stacking the trays and bowls. “I ain’t a big perfectionist on appearance when I bake for myself. Lopsided and fallin’ down is totally cool, so long as I got the recipe right.”
“Really?” She carefully set the next cake on top of the first two layers and picked up the knife. “You relax your standards?”
“Yeah. I worry at work about everythin’ bein’ perfect for the customers and the clients, so when it’s just me, or me and Janie, I kinda loosen up.”
“You bake with Janie?”
“Every chance I get. Like I told you, Kel ain’t big into cookin’ or bakin’, so I do it with the kiddo. It’s uncle-niece bondin’ time, you know?” He peered into the oven, opened the door and took the tray of scraps out, put them on the counter next to the crazy-high-tech food processor. “And at Christmas, we all go to my parents’ place just outside Denver and me and Janie and Mom do all the food for the family. We even bake gingerbread cookies that we decorate as Christmas tree ornaments.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It is. I love spen
din’ time with my family. Nothin’ better, huh?”
She was quiet now as she concentrated really hard on applying the frosting evenly, and suddenly Keegan looked at her.
“Shit. Sorry, baby. I forgot. Fuckin’ stupid of me.”
“That’s OK.” Trish shrugged, and the casual little gesture broke his heart a bit. “I know that not every family can be like yours.”
“No, I guess not.”
“And the truth is… well. The truth is that the way that I was brought up isn’t anything unusual or unheard-of. I saw lots of kids like me, so I’m really nothing special.”
“Kids like you? You mean your brothers and sisters? Or at school?’
“I’m an only child and I didn’t mean at school.” She set the next cake layer down, squinted at it, adjusted it slightly. “I meant in the system.”
“The – the system?” Keegan’s voice was hushed. “The – foster care system?’
“Mmmm-hmmm.” Trish gave the cake her whole focus now, because if she had to look at him while she was talking about this, she might cry. Even all these years later, even after all the time that had passed, it still hurt to say any of this out loud – which is why she never did. But she wanted Keegan to know something real and hard and true about her; she wanted to start to open up to him. “I was taken into care when I was seven.”
The very first thing that came to Keegan’s mind was: Janie is seven. “Can I ask – do you want to tell me why?”
“Because my parents loved drugs and didn’t love me.” Trish tried to keep her voice dull and disinterested. “Didn’t love each other either much too, I’d say, because when Mom died of an overdose on the living room floor, Dad just injected her share of the heroin and passed out. Left her there. For four days.”
“What the actual fuck?” Keegan stared at her in horror, imagining Janie witnessing this, imagining Janie walking around Kelly’s dead body for almost a whole school week. “He – what?”
“It would have been longer except I went to the neighbor to beg for food. I did that a lot, I remember, because my parents never fed me. They didn’t beat me up or anything like that, but they were high all the time so they kept forgetting that I even existed and losing track of time, sometimes for days on end. Money and attention went to heroin and nothing else and when they’d go too many days forgetting about me and ignoring me, I’d go ask Mrs. Kowalski next door for something to eat. She was a mean, scary old woman who shouted at the neighborhood kids when they played outside, but she’d always give me a little something and tell me that she was praying for me.”
“So – wait.” Keegan was trying to catch up, to put some pieces together. “So you went to the neighbor for food and told her about your Mom?”
“Kind of. I told her that Mom hadn’t moved in a long time, which wasn’t actually unusual but this did seem really excessively long. Mrs. Kowalski kind of sniffed at that because of course everyone knew that Trevor and Tasha Montgomery were druggies and dealers, and she told me that she was sure my mother was just sleeping. So I told her that Mom had been on the floor for at least four days and hadn’t moved at all even though her eyes were open and she was turning gray. That caught her attention and she hauled ass over to my house, saw Mom dead on the floor and freaked out. Grabbed me and dragged me back to her place, slammed the door and called the cops.”
“And you were taken away then?”
“Yeah.” Trish put the top layer on the cake gingerly, a bit worried that the whole thing was going to just collapse to one side. “Mom was put in the ground, Dad was put in jail for six years, and I was put in the system.”
“Jesus.” Keegan didn’t know what to say, didn’t have a clue where to even begin. “Trish. I’m so goddamn sorry, baby.”
“Yeah. Me too.” She exhaled hard, admired how pretty the layers looked all stacked like this, like golden stripes in pure white snow, then started to spread icing over the whole cake. “It wasn’t an ideal start to life.”
“Did life get better?” Keegan asked, holding his breath. “In foster care?”
“Nope. Not really. I seemed to get stuck over and over with people who were clearly just doing it for the money. They took no interest in me, didn’t help me with school or any problems that I was having adjusting, didn’t take me for any kind of therapy or treatment. I kind of bounced around from place to place, city to city, ended up back in my hometown when I was fifteen. That was when Dad decided that he wanted me back.”
“The fucker did what?” Keegan asked, a dangerous edge to his voice. “How the fuck dare he?”
“Takes some balls, huh?” Trish looked up at him briefly and he ached as he saw that those extraordinary eyes were cloudy and sad. She turned her attention back to the side of the cake that she was covering in pure white covering – hiding all of its imperfections and smoothing all the sticking-out edges. “But yeah. He came out of jail a reformed man, he said. Wanted to atone for his sins and that started with making things right with his daughter.”
“Sugar, if you tell me that he found God –”
Now she gave a real laugh. “It’s all so predictable, you can almost write the damn thing, can’t you?”
“So he did find God in prison.”
“Apparently it happens a lot.” She sighed, absent-mindedly wiped a bit of icing off on her apron. “Anyway, the foster care system is so overloaded, the caseworkers are always looking for ways to get kids back with their parents or relatives. I mean, I get it: that’s the ideal situation, reuniting families.”
“It is when the family is ready.”
“That’s the tricky part, right? How do caseworkers know when a parent is really better and when they’re just talking a good game? I don’t know how they ever know for real, but I do think that they’re so eager to just get another damn file off their desk, sometimes they jump the gun.”
“Someone gave you back to your Dad just because he said he was different?”
“Not that fast. It took him about eighteen months to get through all the processes and court stuff. It was endless interviews and checks and he just kept clearing every hurdle. They gave me back to him when I was almost seventeen.”
“Wait. Didn’t you say that you left Maine when you were seventeen?”
“Good memory.”
“For some things I sure do and lemme tell you – when it comes to you, I remember everythin’, baby.”
She looked up at him in surprise and met his gaze. His eyes were blazing hot silver in his face, and Trish knew that he meant every single goddamn word.
A bit shaken at his intensity, she dropped her eyes to the mostly-finished cake, resumed her story:
“Well… so yeah. So they gave me back. I kept telling myself that it was going to be fine, that they’d never put me back with him if it wasn’t all OK and safe. Besides, I figured that if it was really bad, I was just a year away from being eighteen and a legal adult. I decided to ride it out, then just leave as soon as I turned eighteen.”
“But you left a year sooner.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t – it wasn’t possible to stay with him, not even for thirteen months.”
“He’d snowed ‘em? Lied about bein’ all reformed and better just to get you back?”
“No, actually,” she said, surprising Keegan. “No, I think that he’d changed for the better and for real after Mom died. I don’t know about the whole religion thing, but I do believe that he’d worked hard to get off the drugs and find a job and pay the bills. I think that he thought that by fighting to get me back, he was… I don’t know. Closing a circle, or making it up to Mom, or saving me from foster care, finally doing right by me. I think – I think that he did it with the best of intentions and he was more surprised than anyone when it all went wrong. He never saw it coming.”
“Saw what comin’?”
“How much I reminded him of Mom,” she said simply. “I look just like her apparently, and it shook him from the second he laid eyes on me again for the first tim
e in almost eight years. I guess he thought he could handle it, though, maybe he even welcomed it in a way, thought it would be a bit like having her back. I don’t know. What I do know is that about a month after I moved into his apartment, he was already back-sliding. He knew it too, doubled-down on his Narcotics Anonymous meetings – but it was like a freight train barreling down the tracks at him. No avoiding it and no turning it back. When all the guilt and anger hit him, it took him out completely.”
“He started usin’ again.”
“Yeah. Full-on, too, no easing-in period or slow-and-steady build-up over weeks and weeks. Just went out one night, bought a syringe of heroin, disappeared for three days. Got fired, started selling drugs to have any money. He hid it from me for a while, but a part of me had been expecting it, even waiting for it, so I was looking for it to happen. I knew what it all was long before I saw him passed out in front of the TV with a needle sticking out of his arm.”
“Did he hurt you?” Keegan’s voice was a low, dangerous growl. “Did he fuckin’ lay a finger on you?”
“Never. Not even once. It was never about that with my parents.”
“But you left.”
“I left for both of us, for me and him. We were no good for each other, we did each other no good. Having me around looking like Mom drove him back to drugs, living with a drug addict sure as hell wasn’t good for me. He had people in and out of the apartment day and night, there were weapons and fights and guys trying to break down my bedroom door every night. I was barely going to school by then because I couldn’t concentrate, I had nothing holding me to Maine at all anymore. I just decided that I didn’t need to put up with my pathetic little life for one more day and I packed a bag, got on a bus.” She put the last bit of icing on the edge, gave a little swipe to smooth it out. “Went to L.A. and never looked back.”
“You ain’t talked to your Dad since?”
“No. I don’t know – I have no idea if he’s alive or dead, in jail or clean again. I just know that having me in his life and having him in mine is a recipe for disaster. I’ve made my way since I was seventeen and I can’t say it’s been easy or that I’m proud of most of the things I’ve done, but I can say that I got by. I survived and made it through, and seeing as I spent years sure that I wouldn’t live to see twenty, I think that’s a little miracle.”
Keegan (Wounded Hero Book 1) Page 14