Bluegrass Blessings. Allie Pleiter
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Название: Bluegrass Blessings
Автор: Allie Pleiter
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Короткие любовные романы
Серия: Mills & Boon Love Inspired
isbn: 9781408963500
isbn:
“Well, yeah, that’d hardly do the trick, would it?” she laughed. He expected her to have a high, musical laugh, but instead the low notes of her silky chuckle tickled him somewhere under his ribs. “But really, is that what happened? You called the cops on some guys so your own company fired you? Can they do that, legally? I mean, that’s gangster stuff.”
Cameron laughed. “My old boss would tell you that’s simply a highly competitive marketplace. Everybody’s scratching everyone else’s back. Especially in a place like New York.”
She shifted her weight. “Are you sorry you did it?” she asked in a tone so sincere it caught him off guard. “With all it cost you, would you do it again?”
Funny how no one had asked him that before now. Which was odd, because it really was the question of the hour, wasn’t it? Was it all worth the cost? Would he have been able to sleep at night if he’d kept his mouth shut?
“You know,” he said quite honestly, “I thought I’d know that for sure by now.” Again, the prepared “noble guy” answer he’d crafted for the world just wouldn’t come. “I keep waiting for that great big atta boy of peace to come down from God and, well, I’m still waiting.”
A warm tone softened in her eyes. It looked far too much like pity and that sprouted a hard spot in the pit of his stomach. He really didn’t know what he wanted from all this, but he knew for certain he didn’t want pity. And for some reason, especially not from her. He shuffled his papers, suddenly wanting this conversation over.
“This isn’t one of those black-and-white morality tales, Miss Hopkins. There’s no hero, there’s no wicked witch. I made the best choice I could at the time and I’ll just deal with what comes.”
Her face told him his tone had been sharper than he would have liked, but she seemed able to irk him with a single look. Not even his boss…ahem, his old boss—could get to him so quickly.
“Hey, you don’t have to prove anything to me.” She yanked the potholder from her pocket and huffed back toward the door. He slumped in his seat, half glad to be rid of her, half contrite for being such a beast.
“For what it’s worth,” he heard her call out from the hall as she pulled the door shut, “it sounds like you got a lousy deal.”
When the door clicked shut behind her, he tossed his pencil down and thought, here or there?
Dinah stared at the envelope now opened on her bakery’s kitchen counter. Last time I checked, Lord, You were still in control. But can You see how I feel like the world’s ganging up on me? Did she have to send this card? Now?
A perfectly good morning—including the installation of Taste and See’s new oven—had been ruined by a single piece of mail. All her euphoria over having an oven that actually obeyed the temperature she set on the dial—Dinah’s math skills never really were up to speed when it came to compensating for Old Ironsides being 27 degrees too hot—was lost in the contents of one pale blue envelope.
Mom.
Dinah stared at the final two words of the card: “Come home.” Suddenly she was eight years old and being told to come in from the thrilling Jersey seashore waves to wash up for dinner. To Dinah, “come home” never had any of those “welcome back” warm, fuzzy connotations. “Come home” was a command putting an end to anything fun or anything she called her own.
A command, in this particular instance, to “stop all this Kentucky nonsense and come back to your family where you belong.” Dinah poured herself another cup of coffee and winced at the concept. She couldn’t think of any place she felt like she belonged less than that manicured Jersey suburb. “All this Kentucky nonsense” felt more like “home” or “where she belonged” than anything on the East Coast. Back home she was a square peg being continually squashed into a round hole. Here, those things her mother delicately called her “eccentricities” were welcomed, if not outright celebrated. Her craving to do something so pedestrian as baking, something so manual chafed at the academic and scientific values of her parents. Dinah knew God had brought her to Middleburg as sure as she knew anything in this world.
Middleburg is my home, Lord. How will I ever get her to understand that? Why can’t she let me be who You made me to be? Why can’t she let me be, period?
Dinah tucked the offending card into her back pocket as she heard the bakery’s front door chime. She walked out of the kitchen to find Emily Montague coming into the bakery. The woman was grinning from ear to ear and it reminded Dinah of all the reasons she did what she did. She’d been looking forward to this appointment all week—how on earth could she have forgotten it was this morning? Thanks, Lord, for sending me the reminder I needed, Dinah prayed silently as she reached for the file of sketches she had ready for her friend.
“I’m here,” Emily called out. “This is going to be so much fun.”
Dinah motioned to the little corner table that sat by the bakery’s front windows while she reached for a second mug and some hot water. “Tea for you, coffee for me.”
Emily ran the West of Paris bath shop down the street and was in the middle of planning her February wedding to a local horse farmer named Gil Sorrent. Dinah was happy to see her friend so madly in love and even happier to bake her the wedding cake of her dreams. Even if it meant a little extra work around an already-busy time.
“You’re sure you can do this? I just heard you’ll be doing all the cookies for that new fund-raiser.”
Dinah sat upright in her chair and hoisted her coffee mug. “That’s right. You’re looking at the Middleburg Community Fund’s official Cookiegram baker. Complete with a fancy new oven thanks to the untimely but welcome death of Old Ironsides back there.”
“Right,” said Emily, “Sandy Burnside told me your oven died.”
“I choose to believe God was simply better equipping me for the surge of business ahead. And no amount of cookies could put me off baking my friend’s spectacular wedding cake.” Dinah opened the file. “I took a look at the handkerchiefs you showed me and made a few sketches.” Emily loved all things vintage and had given Dinah an assortment of delicate antique handkerchiefs with embroidered pastel borders as motifs to incorporate into the cake decoration. Emily was nothing if not a woman who knew what she wanted and Dinah liked her for that.
“You’re sure you’ll have time?” Emily was also a first-class control freak, although love had softened her edges.
“Honey, for you I’ll make time. You’re my top February priority. Cookies are easy. Wedding cakes—those are the stuff of bakers’ dreams.” All the more reason not to crawl back to New Jersey, Dinah thought as she poured Emily’s tea. You’ve got a bustling bakery business to run.
They chatted through an hour of delightful options—fillings, shapes, colors, patterns—before choosing a design. Dinah was particularly tickled that Emily’s favorite design was her first choice as well: a lovely, delicate trio of ovals—vintage enough to suit Emily’s style, but not so fussy that her fiancé, Gil, would groan. They were a textbook case of opposites attract, those two. Emily was all soft, delicate pastels, whereas Gil was a large, dark, storm cloud of a man—at СКАЧАТЬ