by Kent, Alison
“Listen, pumpkin. I know you love your Grammy, and Grammy loves you, but it’s okay if you just eat one cookie and save the rest for after your dinner.”
“If I eat my dinner I’ll be too full to eat them.”
“Yeah. That’s the point.”
“What is a point? Like a pencil?”
“Nothing, sweetheart. Never mind.” Then he puts his hand on my forehead again. “Does your throat hurt when you swallow?”
“I don’t have anything to swallow. If I had a piece of ooey gooey cake I could swallow it.” I really, really want a piece of ooey gooey cake.
“You can swallow your spit.”
“Daddy, you are just yucky.”
“Here. Drink some water.”
I do, and it hurts a little bit, but I don’t want him to know because then he won’t help me make an ooey gooey cake.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, when I open my eyes after the hurt stops.
“Are you going to make me stay home from school tomorrow?”
“I am. Because it’s Saturday.”
“Does that mean I don’t get to see Ms. Harvey?”
“Saturday is the weekend, pumpkin. It’s Ms. Harvey’s day off.”
“Is it my day off, too?”
“It is.”
“And Grammy’s? She’s going to take me to look for an Easter dress.”
Daddy shakes his head and tugs at my hair. “You’re not going anywhere if you’re still sneezing.”
“I won’t be. I promise. Can you come with us, too?”
“I would love to come, but I have to work. This week I don’t get a day off till Sunday.”
“How come you have to wait till Sunday?” I don’t like it when Daddy works so much.
“Because people who don’t have to work on Saturday like to come buy chocolates. I have to be there to sell them.”
“But Lena sells them. You just make them.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It’s just candy, Daddy. Candy IS easy. It’s not hard like ooey gooey cake.”
He moves my hair away from my face and touches the end of my nose. Then I scoot down so he can pull up my covers and tuck me in like a cozy bug in a rug before he reads me a Pete the Cat story. “If you’re running a fever in the morning, you’re staying home.”
“That’s okay, Daddy. I don’t mind.”
But I would mind if I had to miss school and not see Ms. Harvey.
FOURTEEN
Rather than sitting on Addy’s bed and leaning against the brick wall at the head as he usually did for story time, Callum perched on the edge of the mattress, figuring as bad as she felt with her allergies, and with the medicine due to kick in, he wouldn’t be here long. He was right. He didn’t even make it through half the book before she fell asleep.
Leaving her with a brush of his lips to her brow, then lingering at her doorway with a prayer that he not screw up this parenting thing, that he help her become a well-rounded, decent, and productive member of the human community, he headed for the kitchen and the small offset pantry where he stored his chocolate-making supplies.
Since opening Bliss, he rarely made candy at home. He didn’t keep any but the most basic of ingredients in the loft, and his best molds were at the shop. But there was just something about going back to his roots that settled him. And tonight he was feeling the need to be settled. Plus, he’d be seeing Brooklyn tomorrow. He’d been terse on the phone with her earlier, concerned about Addy, and he made his best apologies with chocolate.
Okay. Brooklyn didn’t date men whose kids she taught. He got it, and he could respect it, though it made for a bit of a hurdle; by the time Addy was no longer one of her students, Brooklyn would be on her way out of town. She might return, she might not, meaning he had to make sure she knew his interest went beyond last weekend’s kiss. A kiss that had thrown him far enough off-kilter he’d been afraid to touch base all week: afraid he’d gone too far and she wouldn’t want to see him again, afraid seeing her again would have them going even further when sex at this stage of the game wouldn’t be smart. She wasn’t ready, and, he feared, she was too hung up on the past.
No, the best thing to do would be get her to change her mind about leaving for good—though that wouldn’t be fair to either of them. She had to do what she had to do; he knew without a doubt she’d regret staying, and he’d regret persuading her. Her loyalty to her husband and the man’s family was admirable, and he couldn’t compete. He didn’t want to compete.
What he wanted was for her to choose him because he was the one she now wanted. At least he didn’t have to worry about physical attraction, though he’d been pretty sure all along that wouldn’t be an issue. The issue was a lot more complicated than that: his rival, though he hated thinking of a dead man that way, was a ghost, and Brooklyn still haunted.
The fruit bowl in his kitchen yielded but one lone banana. He and Addy had split the last orange this morning. He’d sent an apple for her lunch, and brought the remaining one to Bliss for her to have after school. Hmm. She must’ve left it there, too full after eating his mother’s cookies. Whatever else he did this weekend, Sunday he had to buy groceries.
The freezer contained frozen raspberries, blueberries, and cherries, the refrigerator two plump lemons. He’d already given Brooklyn the lemongrass candy, and he’d be making truffles with crème de framboise, crème de myrtille, and crème de griotte next week, so . . . Bananas, er, Banana Foster it was.
Digging a skillet from the cabinet, he set it on the stove, then grabbed a cutting board and a knife. Leaving those on the counter, he reached above the fridge for a bottle of dark rum and one of banana liqueur. From the pantry, he snagged the Vietnamese cinnamon he kept on hand for French toast and a box of brown sugar. The few molds he had were on the same shelf as his retired tempering machine. Retired from Bliss anyway.
The only cocoa butter he had turned out to be a jeweled ivory. Close enough to the yellow he usually used. More interested in the flavor than the color or the shape, he went with one that was a sort of trapezoidal prism. The edges and angles were great for showing off the shimmer of the shell.
He’d watched Brooklyn down the Queen Cayenne and witnessed her appreciation for the chocolate as much as the pepper’s bite. The Bananas Foster recipe yielded an equally taste-intensive experience: the caramelized brown sugar and banana, the tickle of the cinnamon, the headiness of the rum, and the extravagance of the butter and cream.
Unlike the last two candies he’d made her, this was one he kept in the shop during the summer. The ingredients brought to mind the tropics and clear skies and blue waters. He thought it appropriately symbolic of her trip to the Italian Riviera, and figured making it would show his support, when her going to Italy was the last thing he wanted.
Measuring out just enough chocolate for the half tray’s worth of filling he’d get out of his single banana, he tossed the discs into his tabletop tempering machine, then checked the bottle of cocoa butter warming in a bowl of hot water. The outer ring had melted, so shaking the seed of the solid center brought the liquid to a tempered state.
On the phone this afternoon, she’d called his daughter Addy, he mused, swirling the barest glaze of cocoa butter into the molds with his fingertip. Addy, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Obviously she’d heard him use the nickname, but she’d continued to call her Adrianne, putting up, he supposed, some sort of wall since Addy was in her class.
He wanted to change that, but didn’t want to make things hard on Brooklyn. As far as he knew, her stance on dating was her own, not a school regulation; she obviously had her reasons. He was going to have to find a way to get her to ditch them without causing her any grief.
After yesterday’s phone conversation with Callum, Brooklyn wasn’t sure what mood she’d find him in when she arrived with her boxes. In order to get to Artie’s books, she’d needed to move her keepers out of the way. T
hose would be staying with her, not traded in or donated, and she liked the idea of storing them at Callum’s. She was trusting him with something important, something valuable, even though he wouldn’t know.
She’d almost backed out. Almost called this morning to gauge his frame of mind; if she found him short-tempered again—Was that what he’d been yesterday? Had she caught him at a bad time? Had he not wanted to hear from her? Was he regretting the kiss and the candy? Or had he indeed simply been worried about Addy?—she would cancel. But she hadn’t called. And she hadn’t canceled. She’d come here as if yesterday hadn’t happened at all because she wanted to see him.
It was as simple as that.
Instead of pulling to the front of his house in the circular drive, she’d stuck to the driveway’s extension that led to the storage barn at the back of the lot. It sat next to a second barn that was used to keep lawn and pool equipment, and from the outside didn’t look any different. But this one, Callum had told her, was insulated, temperature-controlled, hardwood-floored, and appeared to have been used in the past as an office or a study. Even as small as Hope Springs was, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever known who lived here before.
She imagined it as a library, walls of shelves with the very books she’d brought over, and the hundreds more she had left to pack. The idea of having all of her books in one place, organized, any title she wanted at her fingertips . . . heaven. When she pulled to a stop, she glanced in the rearview mirror to see if the smile on her face looked as big as it felt.
The door to the storage barn opened, and Callum stepped out just as she shut off her car’s engine. As always, he wore jeans and boots, and this time, instead of a ragged T-shirt, an oxford shirt left untucked, with his hair pulled back in a knot. Stuffing his keys into his pocket, he stepped out of the building and walked toward her, his expression worrisome.
Her smile faltering, she opened the door and climbed out. “Thanks for this,” she said, and waved an arm. “How’s Addy feeling?”
“She’s fine.” He wrapped his hand over the top of her door. “Sorry for being short yesterday. When you called. I was afraid I was going to end up at the clinic with her today.”
“No need to apologize,” she said, the pressure in her chest easing. “Is she with your mother?”
“She felt better today. A good night’s sleep. A dose of meds. So yeah. Easter-dress shopping as planned.” He ground out the words, nearly pulverizing them.
“You don’t sound too happy about that.” Talk about an understatement.
He lifted his gaze, staring into the distance. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing except you wanted to be the one to buy her a dress.”
Responding with a humored huff, he said, “And here I thought I had a handle on that being so transparent thing.”
She liked that he was human, vulnerable. A dad with feelings. “The fact that you don’t makes it a whole lot easier to read your mind.”
He brought his gaze back to hers, beginning to grin. “You been doing a lot of that?”
She shrugged, reaching into the car to pop the trunk and unlock the back door. “I try. I don’t always succeed. And you can buy her a dress, too, you know.”
“I hadn’t thought about that.” He glanced into the backseat as she opened the door, then followed her around to the trunk and stared at the boxes there. “You know today’s the last day of February, right? That tomorrow it’ll be March?”
“I stayed late yesterday afternoon to hang shamrocks and leprechauns above the classroom cubbies. So, yes. I’m well aware of the date.” But she knew what he was asking. Knew, too, that he probably saw through her ruse of needing to get boxes out of her way. She wasn’t particularly thrilled at the deception, but was even less thrilled that she hadn’t pulled it off.
He looked at her, back at the trunk, then at her again, and arched a brow. “Since you’re leaving in a little over three months, and this is all you’ve brought over, I wasn’t sure if you’d lost track of time.”
Not likely. She was leaving on June 5, five days before the second anniversary of Artie’s death. Two years. He’d told her no more than two years. He’d made her promise not to become Queen Victoria. “No. I know how much time I’ve got to get everything done. This will help. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said, reaching for the first box, labeled “A.” Not “A-C,” or even “A-B.” Just “A.” “Let me guess. Margaret Atwood. Isaac Asimov. Jeffrey Archer. Aristotle.”
“Try Jane Austen,” she said with a laugh, adding, “And more Jane Austen. Louisa May Alcott. Lara Adrian. Cherry Adair. Michele Albert. Judith Arnold. Shana Abé.”
“Got it,” he said. “I guess you’ve got at least twenty-six of these then.”
No. She had a whole lot more. She followed with a second, smaller box, also labeled “A.” He took it from her before she could step into the building, realizing when she did that he’d already turned on the air conditioner.
“We haven’t talked money—”
“No money,” he said, straightening from where he’d stacked her box on top of his. “I’m not using the space, so it’s no inconvenience.”
Not the point. “You’re paying for the electricity and you’re not even living here yet. I’m going to reimburse you for that at least.”
But he shook his head. “I’m not going to figure out the square footage and kilowatt-hours just so I can take your money.”
“Then I’ll pay you what a comparable storage unit would cost me.”
“You say that like you could find another place with the same amenities. Trees, a swimming pool, a killer kitchen.”
She waited for him to add me, but he didn’t, which was probably for the best, so she said, “A killer kitchen would have food. And dishes for eating. Chairs for sitting. A corkscrew.”
He chuckled and came toward the door where she stood. “I was thinking of doing some shopping for this house this weekend. Tomorrow, actually. Addy’s going to a craft show or carnival thing in Gruene with my mother. Face painting, cotton candy, animal balloon races or some crap.”
“You don’t sound too excited about that.”
“It’s just the usual,” he said, hopping back to the ground and offering her his hand. She took it and stepped down, then reluctantly pulled away. “All these plans get made while I’m working, then when I decide I want to do something, Addy’s already excited about what my mother has going on.”
“Have you asked your mother to check with you first?” Surely he had. It seemed so obvious.
“Only once every week at least. I don’t get it. She gets in my face about my responsibility, then she schedules things for the two of them to do, knowing I won’t want to disappoint Addy.”
“Your daughter will forgive you, you know. Eventually.”
“Yeah. Then there’s the part where balloon animals sound like a whole lot more fun than furniture shopping, even to me.”
“So go with them.” Because that seemed obvious, too.
“I really need to get this done. I just don’t want to do it alone.”
“Misery loves company?”
He frowned as he asked her, “Do I make you miserable?”
“You? No. You dragging me to store after store after store . . .”
He laughed, then he groaned. “You mean we have to go to more than one?”
“Do you want to get it over with?” she asked him as she headed back to her car, ignoring his use of the word we. “Or do you want to do it right?”
“Depends if you’re talking about shopping,” he said, following her, reaching her, leaning close as she reached for a box in her trunk. Nearly brushing his mouth to her ear when he said, “Or sex.”
That damn kiss. The way she’d climbed all over him. The way she’d let him see how hungry she was for what she knew without a doubt he could give her. Even thinking about it now . . . his arms, his legs, his chest pressed to hers, the ha
ir on his very flat belly . . .
She cleared her throat, wishing for a big glass of water. Or a big glass of wine. “I’m beginning to wonder if shopping’s really what you’ve got on your mind.”
“Unfortunately, it is,” he said, taking the box from her. “But sex is there, too. Trust me on that.”
Now she was going to spend the day wondering about the things he was thinking. “If you say so.”
“Curious?”
She stacked a third box in his arms, her hands trembling, heat pooling between her legs until her skin flushed. “Or about what it would be like to have sex with you?”
He laughed. “Brooklyn Harvey. I think you just surprised me.”
And now she needed to change the subject. Talking about sex with Callum Drake was probably the worst idea in the world. “Well, it’s not like I can surprise you with a chocolate that tastes like me kissing you . . .”
“I wondered if you’d figure it out,” he said as he turned for the barn.
“Not at first,” she said, following. “But then I caught the scent of my shampoo. Thank you. It was lovely. And such a great combination of flavors. Surprising, really.”
“I’m glad you enjoyed it. I had another one to give you today,” he said, from inside the building before returning to the door, “but I was in a rush this morning and forgot to bring it.”
“You need to stop with the candy,” she said, lifting the box she held for him to take inside with the rest. “Really. I sit at a desk too much to make your chocolates a regular thing.”
“They’ve got about fifty calories each. I think you can afford it.”
She laughed. “Well, sure. But there’s afford, and then there’s afford.”
“Anytime you’re in the mood for one, swing by the shop.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, turning back for the car. “Right now I’m in the mood to get these boxes unloaded.”
“And tomorrow?” he asked, hefting the largest box out of the trunk. “You think you’ll be in the mood to go shopping?”
She did not need to be spending so much time with him. She did not need to be looking to him for her fun. “Sure. I’d love to.”