Not even the handsome, charming, sexy Lang Camden or the very cute Carter who both sprang to mind suddenly for no reason Heddy understood.
“Getting involved with someone is just not on the menu for me,” she concluded firmly. “So there’s no risk of that part of your history repeating itself. And I think I can protect myself from the rest of it happening again.”
“I still don’t like it,” Kitty said. “None of it. Your involvement with the Camdens and your refusal to go on living your life.”
“I’m living just fine,” Heddy said with a laugh at her mother’s dramatics.
“You’re not, Heddy. You’re not...”
“I’m going to be a big cheesecake mogul, Mom. That’s living, phase two—successful career woman.”
Her mother was standing beside her, near enough to pull her head to the side and kiss the top of it. “It’s not enough,” her mother whispered.
But Heddy insisted that it was.
And again shooed away the mental image of Lang Camden that almost seemed to make her mother’s case.
* * *
“What exactly is a start-up guy?” Heddy asked Lang that evening, hoping to find out more about what he did for Camden Incorporated.
He and Carter had arrived on time for the tasting but Carter had again been overly tired and cranky. Lang hadn’t come equipped with any diversions for the child, so Heddy stepped in and gave him pots and pans and wooden spoons to play with. But it had quickly become clear that the little boy was just too tired to be appeased.
So, at Heddy’s suggestion, they’d moved the tasting from the shop to her living area in the back where she’d persuaded Carter to lie on her comfy couch with a pillow and a fluffy blanket. She’d found a children’s station on television for him to watch, and he’d promptly fallen asleep.
She and Lang sat alone at her round pedestal kitchen table while he methodically sampled the array of cheesecake flavors she’d set out for him. Without the distraction of Carter, Heddy felt the need to make conversation. Lang’s comments about which of the cheesecakes he thought they should start with and which should be featured later weren’t enough.
Plus she was curious about him.
She hated that she was. But she was.
“The brandy mousse—wonderful but tastes seasonal. Let’s hold off and do that as a Christmas or New Year’s flavor,” he said, waiting for Heddy to make a note before he answered her question. “What do I do as the start-up guy? Well, when the decision gets made to open a new store or to branch out, the first thing I do is the research. If it’s a new store, I start by doing the demographics and scouting for the best location. From there I do all the groundwork, bid on the land, deal with zoning, apply for the permits, find contractors.... Things that set the wheels into motion.”
“And if it’s a new endeavor?”
“I do what I’ll be doing with you. If we want to add a department or to start selling something we haven’t sold before, I look for the best way to do that. Is it better to buy from someone else who produces what we want to sell? If so, under what terms, and can they supply to the extent we need? Or, is it better if we set up production ourselves? If it is, I look for facilities and for the best people to man the operation, and I get it going.”
“My situation is a combination of those. You’re doing what you’d ordinarily do to set up your own production, except that you’re doing it for me.”
“Yeah,” he confirmed.
“And if you decide along the way that you’d be better off producing your own cheesecakes?” Heddy asked.
Things were more casual tonight. She was in jeans and a plain blouse she wore untucked. He was in tweed slacks and a sport shirt. And yet even sitting in her spotless white kitchen with its bright red and navy blue accents, separated from her cozy living room and Carter only by an island counter, it was still in the back of Heddy’s mind to find the pitfalls in this deal.
“Not going to happen,” he said without any indication that he’d taken offense at her suspicion. “You make the best cheesecakes and you have the recipes and the techniques. I already told you that I’m fine with you guarding those things. I’m not trying to wiggle my way in and steal your trade secrets so we can turn around and produce the cheesecakes ourselves.”
Heddy had no idea why the thought of him wiggling his way in to anything seemed a tad alluring but she ignored it and forced herself to focus on more important matters.
“But even as it is—just tonight—you’re learning things you could copy. Flavor combinations I put together. Brainstorms I’ve had for varieties no one else makes—”
“Anybody who walked into your shop and tasted something would have that same information, wouldn’t they?”
Heddy shrugged, conceding his point. She had been fairly revealing in telling him how she got certain degrees of flavor—for instance in her blackberry chocolate cheesecake—and now she wished she hadn’t.
“Think of the big picture, Heddy,” he advised. “With some things it’s to our advantage to go into production ourselves—to have our own factories—because it would cost us more to buy from someone else. But for this? For one item in a line of gourmet foods? That’s a niche. It’s more cost- and time-efficient to buy what you produce than to find and hire chefs to develop a recipe, to have to continue to operate production after it’s set up, to have the expense of employees, their benefits and what-have-you long-term. Just for cheesecakes. Can’t you see that it makes more sense to do it this way? We’re not conspiring against you. We’re just doing good business that will hopefully benefit us all.”
Heddy did see that perspective and decided that, if she was going to do this, she needed to tune out some of her mother’s concerns.
“So that’s what I do as Camden Superstores’ start-up guy,” Lang concluded. “What about you? Have you always been a cheesecake maker? Were you baking for someone else and then decided to go out on your own or—”
Heddy shook her head. “Before the shop I just made cheesecakes for fun. It was one of those things where every time somebody ate one they’d tell me I should go into business. So when I needed a change of paths, I thought I’d give it a try.”
“It’s just not so easy to make a living even when what you’re selling is this good,” he concluded.
“I guess not.”
“What did you need a change of path from?” he asked, taking his third bite of the blackberry chocolate cheesecake even though the decision had already been made to use it as one of the first flavors.
“I was a pediatric nurse. I worked at Children’s Hospital.”
“Sick kids... I’d guess there’s a pretty high burnout rate in that,” he said.
“It wasn’t burnout.”
“You left for another reason?” he queried.
She caught herself staring at the bit of scruffy beard that shadowed his sculpted jaw and registering how much she liked it. In an effort to stop studying the man, she rearranged the plates so some of the samples he’d yet to taste were closer to him.
“Something happened that changed my whole life,” she admitted. “Overnight. For a while I couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning. Then, when I had to, I just couldn’t go back to what I’d been doing before. I needed something different.”
She didn’t know why she’d even told him that much.
Maybe it was the soft way those blue eyes were now looking at her. They just sort of sucked her in....
He nodded. “Sometimes life kicks you in the teeth,” he said as if he understood even without knowing any of the details.
“Sometimes it does,” she agreed. “Did life kick you in the teeth and leave you with Carter?” she asked, knowing she was prying and that it was probably out of line. But she didn’t want to go on talking about herself and she couldn’t help wonder
ing.
“It’s more like a kick in the teeth spun me around in a direction I shouldn’t have taken and Carter is what came out of that.”
Heddy’s confusion must have shown in her expression because he laughed. And then he surprised her with his candidness.
“I spun out of one relationship into a rebound...” He searched for the right word, then said, “I don’t know if you could call it a rebound relationship exactly, because the whole thing was purely physical. And safe, I thought. But whatever you call it, I spun out of one relationship that actually was a relationship and got involved with someone else. For just a little while before it got weird.”
“Weird?”
“You know how those things go. I met this woman named Viv at a party. She seemed normal. Really, really cheery, but normal. We hit it off, started seeing each other—”
“On a purely physical basis,” Heddy reminded him, unsure exactly why that made her feel something and what that something was. It couldn’t have been jealousy....
“It was purely physical,” he confirmed. “But it barely lasted a few weeks before she sort of freaked out on me. I found out after the fact, from a friend of hers, that she had some pretty severe emotional and mental problems. Apparently we met in one of her up times—that accounted for the cheeriness. She was happy, full of energy, fun. But then she crashed....”
“Not so much fun.”
“Definitely not. In fact she was a little scary. The woman had a really dark down side. I tried to convince her to get help, but that was a hot-button issue. About the time I was getting freaked out and wondering what I’d gotten myself into, she had one of her wild, irrational outbursts and said she didn’t want to ever see me again. I figured I’d dodged a bullet and was only too happy to call it quits.”
“Then she wanted it on again?”
“No, that was it. The last I ever saw or heard from her. A little over three years ago. I wrote it off to a bad dating experience and forgot about it. Until the end of January when I got a call from social services....”
He said that ominously.
“Surprise, you’re a daddy?” Heddy offered on a guess.
“Not quite. They said they had this kid—sadly neglected, abandoned by his mother with a note saying she didn’t know which of four men his father was.”
“Four?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I was rebounding, spinning, I didn’t actually ask if she was seeing someone else.”
“And she was seeing three someone elses?”
“That’s what the social worker said. That there were four candidates for Carter’s father and I was one of them.”
“Oh, dear.”
“Yeah,” he said, grimacing and showing that he wasn’t proud of any of what he was telling her. Which somehow made her appreciate that he was telling her.
“Anyway, Viv had made it clear that she wanted nothing more to do with being a mother. She’d relinquished all parental rights. But DNA testing was necessary to determine the kid’s father. Then whoever it was could either take him or relinquish their rights, too, so he could be adopted and not just left to be shuffled through foster care his whole life. I jumped at DNA testing because I was so sure the kid couldn’t be mine. I was really careful.”
“But things fail...” Another guess.
“Apparently so. No one was more shocked than I was when the test proved Carter was mine.”
“And rather than signing away your parental rights for someone else to raise him, you took him.”
Lang’s eyebrows arched toward his hairline as he closed his eyes and breathed a sigh. “He’s my flesh and blood. I couldn’t... I had to... You know...”
Obviously it hadn’t been an easy decision. Or one he was finding easy to live with.
“I didn’t—pretty much don’t—know the first thing about kids,” he said with a self-deprecating laugh, adding facetiously, “You probably didn’t even notice, did you?”
Heddy merely smiled, not wanting to criticize.
“But yeah, he’s mine and I took him. Only I kind of dropped the ball after catching it,” he confided, his expression showing guilt now.
“How so?”
“I’ve been passing him around to my two sisters, my cousin Jani and my grandmother—the women in my family. They’ve really been doing the work. I just sort of drove him from one of their places to the other.”
Heddy laughed. “Good plan.”
“Yeah, but last weekend that came to an end. They ganged up on me and said it was time for me to step up to the plate. That I was on my own with Carter. They gave me a crash course in how to take care of him, made sure I could do it all with at least some proficiency, and that was it. I left the family’s weekly Sunday dinner at my grandmother’s house with Carter, a boatload of instructions and no more help.”
“None?”
“None,” he said in a dire tone. “I have my secretary interviewing nannies, but so far that hasn’t gone anywhere. Although I’m fairly certain that she’s under orders from my grandmother to take her time. And until I get some help, Carter is all mine, day and night.”
“Why would your grandmother give your secretary orders to be slow about finding you a nanny?”
“She thinks Carter and I need to get to know each other without anyone running interference, that we have to ‘bond,’” he said, clearly repeating the term someone else had used. “My family has come up with some theories about me since the kick-in-the-teeth—their armchair psychoanalysis—and they think the only way I’ll ever actually let Carter in and become a father to him is if I don’t have any kind of buffer.”
“You don’t agree?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Seems to me that if this was a normal situation there would be two parents so there would be some built-in buffers and support, wouldn’t there? But like I said, I don’t know anything about parenthood or about bonding or any of that. I’m just doing the best I can right now. It’s all new to me. Carter is new to me. I’m new to him. We’re finding our way, I guess. I hope. All I know without a doubt is that I might be the Camden Superstores start-up guy, but I’m not doing so well as a start-up dad. Dad. Even saying the word feels strange.”
“Look on the bright side. You’re past the bottles and the middle-of-the-night feedings, the colic, the teaching to eat solid foods, the teething, the crying for no reason for hours on end, the endless pacing and jiggling and bouncing to try to stop that crying....”
“You know a lot about this stuff.”
Heddy merely shrugged. “I’m just saying you could have even more on your hands.”
“Seems like most days I still have quite a bit on my hands.... And down the front of my clothes, and in my face, and on my shoes, and in my hair or his and—”
“It will get better,” Heddy assured him with another laugh.
“Easy for you to say.”
Actually, none of this was easy for her to talk about. But Heddy didn’t tell him that she would give anything to be where he was with her own daughter, to have been able to know Tina at two and a half....
“My family probably is right,” he admitted. “Carter is mine. It’s not just a matter of paying the bills or pushing him off on other people to take care of. And I don’t want him to grow up without ever getting to know him, without him ever knowing me. I want to be good at this. I’m just having a tough time coming to grips with instant fatherhood to a two-and-a-half-year-old. I figured I’d have kids someday. Just not like this....”
“The things that aren’t supposed to happen are the hardest to accept,” Heddy agreed, realizing that in sharing some personal information and letting her see a little vulnerability, Lang Camden was all the more appealing.
Which meant that they should get back to strictly business.
“Last one,�
�� she said, pushing forward the slice of chocolate orange spice cheesecake.
Lang tasted it, savored it and showed his appreciation with a rapturous roll of the eyes.
He swallowed and said, “Lady, you really know what you’re doing with cheesecake. I can’t believe you haven’t had customers lined up outside your door.”
“Since you’ll be selling the cheesecakes, I’m glad you feel that way.”
“Write up a bill for all of these. Let’s pack the leftovers, and I’ll take them with me. Will they keep until Sunday?”
Heddy hadn’t thought he would pay her for this but in her financial situation she couldn’t afford to argue. “Wrapped well and refrigerated, yes, they’ll still be good on Sunday. Or you could freeze them and they’d last longer than that.”
“Sunday will be fine. We have family dinner every Sunday at my grandmother’s house. We all bring something and I think fifteen of these cheesecakes might be enough,” he said.
“They’re small,” Heddy warned. She’d used her six-inch pans to make the samples.
“Then you better throw in whatever you have left in the case today that will still be good on Sunday because there are a lot of us.”
Heddy wasn’t sure if he was doing this as a way of reimbursing her for what would otherwise be a loss or if he genuinely wanted the cheesecakes for his Sunday dinner. But again, she didn’t argue. She only said, “I hope you have a big refrigerator.”
“Big and mostly empty. I’m not much of a cook.”
Heddy was pleasantly surprised by the fact that he pitched in and worked right alongside her to wrap and box all the cheesecakes. Then, while Carter was still sleeping on her sofa, she helped Lang load them into the rear portion of his SUV.
After he wrote her a substantial check for the cheesecakes and left it on the table, Heddy found herself standing not far in front of him in her kitchen, looking up into that handsome face as he said, “So, we’re on for Saturday? We’ll look at what commercial kitchen space is for sale and hit the restaurant supply store to get started ordering some basic equipment—mixers, pans, that kind of thing? On my dime for now, to come out of the grant when the paperwork is finished, of course. Which should be early next week.”
It's a Boy! Page 5