by Annie Jones
Then Conner placed his hand on Adam’s sleeve, balled the fabric in his fist then pulled both Adam and Nathan into a tight embrace. “My prayers are answered. You’ve come home.”
Adam stiffened.
Come home? Is that what he had done? He sought Josie. When their eyes met, he tried in one look to convey his confusion, his uncertainty, his panic.
She smiled. A wonderful smile that spoke of long longed-for reunions, at the joy of homecoming, of hope.
Conner took a deep breath and exhaled in short huffs as if he were…sobbing?
Adam tried to swallow. He had no idea how to respond to this. Anger, bitterness, rejection, even hatred—he had steeled himself well for any of those. But this?
“I, uh, I don’t—” He started to pat the old man’s back but couldn’t bring himself to do it. Again he fixed his eyes on Josie’s.
“You know what, Mr. Burdett? Why don’t you come into the kitchen and have a seat while I dish you up a big old slice of that pie I promised?”
Adam had charged out ready to come to Josie’s defense no matter what it took and here she had ended up rescuing him. And with nothing more substantial or less significant than pie.
“Hmm?” Conner pulled away at last.
“Pie?” She laid her delicate hand on the curve of his shoulder to draw his attention toward her. “It’s cherry. And if you’ll have a seat, I’d be honored to serve you up a piece.”
“Thank you, my dear.” He gave her a nod. “But first, give me a moment. I want to…” He raised his hand.
Without thinking, Adam shied away, caught himself and forced his body to go perfectly still.
Conner’s dry, trembling palm brushed along the side of Adam’s face.
“I just…” Conner touched Adam’s cheek, his jaw, then dropped his hand to his shoulder. “I just want to look at my boy.”
My boy? Even commanding up every ounce of anger and disappointment he had ever felt toward this man, Adam could not make those words sound pejorative or hard-hearted. There was just so much yearning in them, so much peace and pride.
Don’t you mean your stray? Adam wanted to say. Yes, wanted to say it with all his being. Not because it seemed appropriate but because he wanted to push the old man away.
He wanted to throw a barrier up between them. One that had existed there for so long. Adam had based his every decision the last eighteen months on the belief that that barrier justified his contemptible plan. And now…
And now Conner Burdett was standing before him, a shell of his former self, wiping a tear from under his eye with one gnarled knuckle. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, Adam. Not before…well, not before we met again in heaven.”
“Oh.” The softest, saddest sound ever escaped Josie’s lips.
Adam looked at her, knowing she was thinking not just about him and his father but also about what she would have given to have heard such conciliatory words from her own mother or even her sister. The sweetness of her sorrow penetrated Adam’s life-hardened exterior and opened something up in him that had been closed off for far too long.
“And this little fellow.” Conner gave Nathan’s plump leg a shake. “Hey! I know who you are. Do you know who I am?”
“Ya-ya-ya.”
“Um, uh…” Adam had no idea what to say.
Conner didn’t wait for him to come up with something. He lifted Nathan’s small body from the crook of Adam’s arm. “You know who I am, little man? I am your daddy’s daddy.”
“Since when?” Adam muttered, needing to put things back in perspective. He stepped forward to take the child away.
“Since the first time I held you in my arms. You were about the same age as this young fellow.” Conner patted the small boy’s belly. “Looked a lot like him, except you were a skinny thing, with big, sad eyes, and your hands always in tight little fists.”
Adam froze.
Josie’s gaze dropped from his face to his side.
He shook his hand to release the tension as he unfisted his fingers.
“And I felt about your daddy the way I bet he feels about you,” Conner said to the baby.
Adam straightened, ready to deny that.
“That even though you two just met and the way things are in life, you may never really feel as though you are much more than strangers with a shared history, he would walk through fire for you.” Conner did not look at Adam.
Which was a relief because Adam could not have looked at Conner then if his life depended on it.
Had he heard right? His father acknowledged that they were virtual strangers and yet he would walk through fire for him?
Walk through fire but not walk into a bar or cheap hotel in Mt. Knott in those days when Adam needed him to come and ask him to return to the fold. To say one-tenth of the handful of healing words he’d just uttered and pave the way for Stray Dawg to find his way home while it still meant something.
He couldn’t accept that. Would not accept it. It was just talk, after all, from a man who made his living negotiating to get the better end of every deal.
Adam pushed his shoulders back. Conner wanted something. Adam could not be fool enough to let that slip from sight because the suddenly frail man had tugged at a few heartstrings.
“Why don’t we sit down and have that pie?” Adam pulled Nathan from Conner’s grasp, then went into the kitchen, settled the child in the high chair and pointed out a seat at the small oak table for Conner.
Josie frowned. Clearly she had expected more from Adam. Expected compassion, gratitude and mercy. Well, if that’s what she thought she’d find in him, she had better get used to being disappointed.
But if, as Conner had put it, she expected nothing less of him than that he would walk through fire for her and their son, then he would never let her down. “Once you taste Josie’s pie and spend a few minutes around Nathan you’ll find yourself as proud as I am that she is the one raising my son.”
Josie stilled with a knife posed over the pie. She blinked a few times and sniffled.
He tipped his head to her, affirming that was, indeed, how he felt. He hoped she knew, too, that he had just laid down the gauntlet. He had asserted his position and confirmed hers. He would brook no interference, no custody battle, no questioning of his decision from his powerful father or family.
She smiled and lifted her chin, making her soft, lovely ponytail bounce against her back. Then with a sidelong glance at Conner to make sure he wasn’t watching, she served Adam the larger slice of the two pieces of pie.
He winked to show his thanks, then as soon as she set the plates down before the two men, he pulled the old switcheroo. Slid the larger slice right under Conner’s nose and accepted the smaller portion for himself.
“You’re going to want to have as much of this pie as you can hold,” he told the old man, then leaned back and muttered to Josie, “and if his mouth is full it will give us more time to do the talking.”
“Can I get you anything else? Some milk to drink? If you’d like some coffee you’ll have to wait a minute while I brew up a fresh pot.”
Adam thought of how she had told him to make his own instant the night he had come to claim his son and so he took her offer to make a pot for them as a compliment. Pie. Coffee. Kid. That should mollify the old guy just fine.
They’d show him what a fine home environment Nathan had. They’d get his assurance, for what it was worth, that he would not try to override their judgments about what was best for Nathan. They would send him on his way.
Then Adam’s real work would begin.
Josie pulled a foil bag of coffee beans from a canister on the counter. The whir of her grinding them in a small electric appliance made it impossible to carry on a conversation for a minute or so. That, coupled with the time Conner was devoting to savoring his first bite of pie, gave Adam time to think things through.
He’d have to act fast. Make his move before the rest of the family found out how long he’d been in town witho
ut telling anyone. That fact would arouse suspicions. He loved his brothers but he would never make the mistake of underestimating them. Conner might have loved them more, but he certainly had not gone easier on them.
Burke, older than Adam by four years and known by all as Top Dawg, would be the first one to start putting the clues together. A few phone calls to contacts in the business would tell him plenty—contacts, not friends. Top Dawg had many things in life, money, looks, power, brains and the fawning adoration of most of the town of Mt. Knott, but the one thing he did not have was friends. Jason and Cody would neither know nor care about what Adam had in mind. They had long ago given up looking upon the lowly Carolina Crumble Pattie as their livelihood. According to Adam’s sources, they each still held their small percentage of the company stock but did little else except show up for meetings and rubber stamp whatever Burke and Conner asked for. They would be no problem.
That left Conner.
The aroma of freshly ground coffee beans filled the air and Adam fixed his attention on the man sitting to his right. “Great pie, isn’t it?”
“Very good.” Conner jabbed his fork toward the half-eaten slab of golden crust and red, juicy cherries dripping in a thick syrup. “You know we could use something like this down at the Crumble. Your brothers keep telling me we need to try new things. Expand the line. Innovate. Burke says we have to do something or—”
“I’m glad you like it, sir.” Josie finished loading the coffeemaker and pressed a button to start the brewing. It gurgled and grumbled and she turned her back on it to let it do its work. “But I don’t think it would do you much good as a new product because I used—”
“Because she used to work for you already and you fired her. She has moved on.” Adam lifted a bite of pie up as if offering a toast before he poked it in his mouth.
Josie gulped in some air. Her eyes got big. The room grew so quiet they could hear the coffee drip, drip, drip into the carafe. She shook her head. “Mr. Burdett, that’s Adam talking, not me. I never said—”
“I’m sorry about your job, Ms. Redmond. We did what we had to do. Greater good and all. Been a regular struggle to keep the doors open these past few years, even though I haven’t taken a cent out of the company myself, sunk everything right back in hopes of…not that it’s made a difference.”
Adam frowned. Had his father just apologized? And admitted weakness? And said he hadn’t taken any money out of the company for how long?
“I absolutely do understand, Mr. Burdett. I am trying to keep my business afloat, as well.” She poured a cup of coffee for Conner. Only Conner.
“Our layoffs can’t have made that easier.”
“No, sir.” She pushed the sugar shaker and a bowl of creamer packets toward him. Still offering nothing to Adam.
“But that’s going to change.” Conner dumped two teaspoons of sugar into the rich dark liquid in his cup.
“It is?” Josie stood up, still not making a move to get anything for Adam to drink.
Frustrated, Adam considered getting up to fetch his own coffee, then decided to wait it out, and defiantly broke off a big piece of pie crust and ate it.
“Of course,” Conner took a sip then beamed a huge smile. “Adam is back. Things are going to turn around now.”
Adam coughed and covered his mouth to keep pie crust crumbs from spewing everywhere.
Conner forged ahead without the slightest response to Adam’s reaction. “And to celebrate we’re going to host a barbecue and invite the whole town.”
“Oh, Mr. Burdett, I think that’s exactly what Mt. Knott needs.” Josie knelt down by Conner’s chair, her whole face transformed with delight.
“Good. Then you can make the pies and, uh, side dishes, at your usual prices, of course.”
Adam struggled to force down the dry bits of crust but it wouldn’t cooperate. His fist came down on the table but not hard enough to bring a halt to the conversation. And this conversation needed to halt. His father had it all wrong. Adam had his own plans and he wouldn’t let anyone or anything interfere with them.
“Mr. Burdett, you may have just provided me with a way to keep my doors open at least a little while longer!”
Adam gulped. He wouldn’t let anyone or anything interfere with his plans, except Josie.
He had thought just moments ago that if she wanted him to walk through fire for her, he would never let her down.
He was about to prove that. Obviously he was about to walk through fire for her—and that fire would be in the form of a barbecue with his family.
Chapter Seven
Conner Burdett had gobbled up the last of his pie after he had offered Nathan a small taste, which the child smeared on his ear, his chin, his eyebrow, everywhere but his mouth. When Josie had come back from cleaning the child up, Conner had gone.
“He wanted me to give you this.” Adam offered her a business card held between two fingers, the way she’d seen boys fling playing cards into hats.
She took if from him and, reading the words imprinted on it, understood why the stray Burdett brother might have wanted to send the card sailing as far away as possible.
“Burke Burdett,” she read the name softly, scanned his official title and then studied the number handwritten beneath it. His private line. Not the kind of thing the average citizen of Mt. Knott was privy to. Josie turned the card over in her hand. On the back were the words, “Timetable. Menu. Payment” in shaky handwriting.
“I guess I’m supposed to call your brother about these things?”
Adam only nodded before he slipped Nathan from Josie’s hold and turned the child so they could look each other in the eye. Of course, Nathan did not cooperate fully with that eye-to-eye plan, which made the picture of the father and son all the more endearing.
Adam sniffed the air. “One of us doesn’t smell so good, buddy. Now, I’m always fresh as a mountain meadow myself, so I suspect it’s you.”
Nathan giggled.
“I’ll handle diaper duty, Adam.”
“No. I can do it. I’ve gotten pretty good at it over the course of the day.” He actually sounded pleased with his newly acquired skill. “Let’s go, kid.”
He draped the baby over one arm. The position made it look like Nathan was flying through the air, and loving it from the pleasant sounds he was making.
Good for Adam to get a little taste of what his own parents must have gone through with a headstrong, handful of energy in an adorable package. Looking at the two of them together now, she couldn’t deny that Adam not only was Nathan’s father but that he belonged in her son’s life.
Her two fellas disappeared into the back room. Adam entertained the baby, alternating between making funny sounds and acting properly disgusted with the task at hand.
Josie leaned against the doorway and slid the card into her T-shirt pocket, knowing she’d forget where she’d put it if she put it in her jeans, and it would probably get washed with her aprons and other work clothes this evening. Then she stood back and waited for Adam to finish with Nathan. That first night she hadn’t even wanted him to see the boy, now he was doing the dad thing as if he’d done it all along.
She couldn’t help thinking of her own family. Not of the family made up of her mother and Ophelia, but the one she had always dreamed she would make for herself.
When she was a young girl, being hauled from town to town as her mother chased everything from dreams to men, that family meant a mom and dad, Ophelia and Josie. Also a baby brother or sister, or maybe a calico cat with a bell on its collar.
During her early years of living in Mt. Knott, when her grandmother was alive, she had been content to think of the two of them as their own special little family. Lately, though, being a single mother and running a business on her own sometimes had her daydreaming about what it would be like to have a husband as a helpmate. Not just to shoulder the chores and responsibilities but also to hold her hand in church and take her in his arms while they sat on the porch on w
arm summer evenings.
“Well, you may want to call in the toxic-waste disposal team to take care of that diaper, but I can sound the all’s clear for the kid.” He moved Nathan on his arm down the hallway again making a siren-type waaa-ooo, waaa-ooo before he reached the kitchen and said, “The kitchen is now safe for noses everywhere!”
She gazed at Adam holding Nathan. It was too soon to allow herself to wonder about Adam as potential husband material. In fact, his history with Ophelia made that prospect a bit…strained. Then again, when had anything with her sister been anything but strained?
That thought only made Josie feel more isolated. More adrift in the world. More wistful for her own home, family and husband, one who shared her values and would not disappear on a whim.
“Okay, you little rug rat. I’ve enjoyed spending the day with you but I’ve got to go now. You be good for your mom and no more wasting any of her delicious pie as face paint.”
He covered the boy’s rounded belly with one large, tanned hand.
Nathan kicked and laughed.
That made Adam do likewise. Laugh, not kick.
They had the same laugh, Josie noted. Soft and deep at first with a sort of raspy quality as it played itself out, growing quieter and quieter even though their faces remained bright and their bodies still shook. Finally it ended with a satisfied sigh.
“You don’t have to run off on my account. If you want to spend more time with Nathan, that’s all right with me. I have to get back to the café and set up for the dinner rush.”
“Rush?” He cocked an eyebrow.
“Okay, trickle,” she confessed. It was true that she did most of her business before one o’clock, but she did get a small flurry of activity around six when commuters stopped in to pick up take-home orders they had called in earlier in the day. Later another cluster of people would come in after their suppers to have pie for dessert. On really hot days she kept even busier because many thought it was worth the extra expense of eating out to avoid heating up their own homes.
Josie knew the people of this community. She knew their habits and their tastes, and it had paid off as much as it could. “But I can’t afford to miss even a dribble of business these days.”