Bluegrass Blessings. Allie Pleiter

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      “She went through with it?” Dinah balked when Cameron returned to the bakery. “Sandy said George had an idea to finally sell Lullaby Lane by getting someone from out of town to invest in it by its legal name—the something-something extension. And it’s you.” She got a look on her face that was half shock, half amusement. “You bought Lullaby Lane. Man, I thought I was having a bad week.”

      Cameron stared around the bakery. His bakery, actually. He now owned cupcakes and lullabies. It’d be hard to think of anything farther from real estate empires and high finance. “I bought a parcel of land called the Route 26 extension. The ‘Lullaby’ part was conveniently omitted.”

      Dinah hopped up on the counter and swung her legs over to slide off on the other side. “It’s just a silly name. You look like the kind of guy who can handle a challenge like that. Oh, the oven’s dead. Thanks for asking.”

      He stared at her. She was just this side of crazy.

      “I reckon you’ll be fine.” She had a completely fake, completely unconvincing look on her face.

      He glared until she dissolved into a cascade of giggles.

      “Okay, okay, everyone knows it by Lullaby Lane. It’s too sissy a name for all those horsemen and so nobody lives there.”

      He widened his stance. “Street names get changed all the time.”

      She shook her head, one unruly curl spilling out across her forehead. “Not in this town. Middleburg’s as anti-change as it gets. You have no idea what you’re dealing with here.”

      “You have no idea who you’re dealing with here.” He pointed to his chest. “I’ll find a way.”

      She pulled some napkins out of a box and started stuffing them into a holder on a table. “Well, suit yourself, but that will take some serious leverage, and y’all only been here—what—two days?”

      Cameron walked up and planted his hands on the table. “Well, then it’s a good thing I’ll have resourceful help.” He looked her in the eye. “You can’t afford a new oven, can you?”

      “Well,” she replied slowly, “I admit it’s a bit of a cash flow challenge, but the money I was saving up to buy my building has surprisingly freed up.” She gave him a pointed look.

      So she had designs on owning the building. No wonder she’d bristled when he’d told her who he was. “Have you got enough to replace the oven?”

      She stopped stuffing napkins, slowly moving her gaze up to meet his. “Almost.”

      He felt the first grin in days creep across his face. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll loan you the money for the oven if you help me get my name change.”

      “It’s just a name. You’re getting all crazy over nothing.”

      “A sissy name according to you. As for the crazy, it sounds like I’ll fit right in.”

      “I knew you would, honey,” Aunt Sandy’s voice came from behind him. He hadn’t even heard the bakery door open. “I’m so glad to have you out here instead of squeezed into a stuffy suit back there in New York.”

      Cameron couldn’t think of a moment when the word “impossible” didn’t describe his Aunt Sandy. The one his mother called “loony Aunt Sandy.” The “black sheep” sister of his mother’s well-groomed Massachusetts family—although looking at the woman, “blond sheep” would have been a better metaphor. “Aunt Sandy, I’m thinking I should haul you in for fraud. And I know enough attorneys that I might just do it. Lullaby Lane?”

      Sandy actually managed a look of remorse. “I did not lie. It is the Route 26 extension. That is its legal name. And I knew that my nephew Cameron was just the type of real estate mogul to take on a challenge like Lullaby Lane.”

      “A challenge is something you know about in advance and accept. As in willingly take on. This is more like an ambush. Dangerously close to a con job, if you ask me.”

      “Well, then,” Aunt Sandy said with an indulgent grin, “I suppose I should thank the Good Lord I’m not askin’.”

      She pointed a pink fingernail at Cameron. “You just think about one thing, son. There’s a reason you said yes. Maybe you know it somewhere inside, maybe only God knows it yet, but there’s a reason a detail-focused, suit-wearin’ planning type like you said yes to buying a hunk o’ land sight unseen. You think about that, hon.”

      She sauntered out of the bakery as if that were an acceptable explanation. It was annoyingly true that what Sandy had done was legal, but it was not especially ethical in Cameron’s book. And not at all the kind of stuff he’d expect out of a woman who claimed to have as much faith as Aunt Sandy did.

      Cameron thought perhaps he should just point his BMW east—toward civilization—and start driving. Somewhere between here and the Atlantic Ocean, somebody needed a commercial real estate broker. God just wasn’t cruel enough to make him stay here.

      Chapter Three

      Dinah glanced up from her cookie dough while Cameron negotiated—again—with the oven man. At first she was glad to have Cameron offer to take care of dealing with the repair man—dashing between the bakery and her apartment oven all day was keeping her running—but the minute a dollar sign got involved the man couldn’t seem to turn off the big city tycoon persona.

      “You can’t give me another fifty for the old one? You could get more than that for the scrap metal alone.”

      The repairman, a nice guy from a company that had been more than amiable to her in the past, looked up at Dinah as if to say where’d you find this guy? He pointed to a page on his clipboard. “I got a chart here says what I can give you. This is what I can give you. That’s it.”

      Cameron looked up from the knob he was twisting. “No leeway?”

      The poor man pushed his cap back on his head and exhaled. “Mister, if I had leeway I’d have given it to you the first time you asked. Asking three times ain’t gonna make things any different, okay?”

      “Okay.” Cameron sounded as if he’d lost some kind of battle instead of gotten her one hundred dollars more than she expected for Old Ironsides. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t even thought to ask them about buying the old one—she’d completely forgotten it could be sold as scrap. And that made a whole load of sense—the thing weighed a ton and she was pretty sure they sold scrap by the pound. Still, she thought Cameron was coming on a bit strong.

      “Did you have to go for the jugular?” she asked the minute the repairman left to get his dolly out of his truck. “It’s an oven, not a peace treaty.”

      “It’s not the best deal until the other guy says ‘no.’”

      Dinah cut out another cookie. “He said ‘no’ twenty minutes ago.”

      “Reluctance is not refusal.” Cameron pulled a towel off her counter and wiped the grease from his hands.

      “Is that what you do for a living? Beat other people down until you get what you want? The real estate brokers on television are all smiling guys eager to help families СКАЧАТЬ