Always the Baker, Never the Bride (9 page)

“It’s okay. I have a plan to let Pearl break the news.”

“Pearl?” Jackson inquired.

“That’s Anton’s sous chef,” Susannah told him.

“She doesn’t wear a dog collar, does she?” Georgiann asked, wide-eyed, and everyone broke into laughter.

“It’s not really a dog collar,” Emma said, leaning in toward Georgiann. “It’s just … well, Fee has a unique personal style.”

“Oh. All right.”

Emma gave Georgiann’s shoulder a pat as she grinned at Jackson. “Thank you so much.”

“A baseball-themed weddin’,” Georgiann drawled as Emma headed down the hall toward the stairs. “Can you
imagine
?”

As Emma hurried across the courtyard, Fee tossed her a fragmented smile.

“This is Callie Beckinsale. Ms. Beckinsale, this is Emma Travis, our resident cake genius.”

The perky blonde’s grin swallowed most of her face, and over-whitened teeth flashed at Emma unexpectedly, like a surprise out of a children’s pop-up book.

“It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” she sang at a high pitch. “I was maid of honor in Susan Reese’s wedding last year, and you did the English garden cake? You were at The Backstreet then, of course. It was the one with the ivy around the bottom and the sugar flowers and the luscious fresh raspberries between the layers?”

“Yes,” Emma said, scraping back a wrought iron chair and joining the others at the bistro table. “I remember.”

“Well, Dan and I—Dan, that’s my fiancé–well, neither one of us had ever seen a cake like that one.” The woman spoke in fast spurts. She looked at Fee, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, and told her, “It was like a piece of art or something.”

Fee handed Emma her sketch pad. “Ms. Beckinsale, we’re going to be serving some samples. Can I get you some coffee to go with it? Or some tea?”

“A soda would be fine. Or just some water.” She shrugged at Emma and added, “I don’t drink coffee. Dan says I’m just a big kid that way. Twenty-six years old, and still drinking soda with everything. But that’s just the way I am, you know?”

Emma smiled, certain that Callie Beckinsale had the ability to make caffeine feel jumpy.

“Some cold water would probably be best,” she said. “It keeps the palate clean.”

“Oh, right. Okay. Whatever.”

As Fee went off to the kitchen, Emma peeled back the first few pages of her sketchbook.

“I took a look at the notes from your meeting with Madeline,” Emma said. “She tells me you and your fiancé met at a baseball game, and you’d like the reception to reflect your love of the game.”

“Yeah, Dan and me have season tickets to the Braves games. Our whole relationship revolves around baseball, really. So we’d like to tie that in to our after-party, you know? My cousin Lisa is making these darling little home plate centerpieces with these little tomahawks.”

“Tomahawks?”

“The Atlanta Braves? Tomahawks?”

“Oh, of course.”

“And we’re thinking about barbecue for the food.”

The corner of Emma’s mouth twitched as she realized her joke about hot dogs and Cracker Jack wasn’t so far off after all.

“We want it very low key, you know? Just a real kick-butt party with our friends.”

“Can you tell me something about the wedding itself?” Emma asked her. “Is it in a church, or outdoors?”

“Oh, it’s an outdoor wedding,” she replied with a sniff. “Dan went to high school here in Atlanta, and he was a big star on their baseball team, so we’re getting married right on the home plate where he used to play. It’s going to be very romantic.”

Emma stared at her for a long moment, wondering whether Callie was joking.

Pressing her lips together, Emma forced herself to blink. “Okay. Well, here’s a couple of ideas that I have for you.” She slid the pad across the tabletop toward Callie. “They each serve up to one hundred people, as you requested, and you said you wanted something nontraditional.”

“Dan and I are not traditional people.”

The mother of all understatements.

“This first one is more of a sleek, high-end wedding cake, but with baseball diamond-shaped layers, kind of topsy turvy, with bases and a home plate.”

“Oooh,” she exclaimed as she peered at the sketch pad. “That’s so cute.”

“Then the next one,” Emma continued, flipping over the page, “is a little more unusual.”

Emma couldn’t get another word in before Callie squealed and snatched the sketch pad from the table to get a closer look at the large sculpted baseball glove holding a pitcher bride and a catcher groom.

“This is the one.”

“Well, there’s a third—”

“No!” Callie exclaimed, and she slammed the pad down on the table and smacked it with her fist. “This one. This is the one!”

Emma chuckled. “All right. Let’s talk about the fi—”

Her words were chopped in half as Callie hopped over to Emma and thumped both arms around her, still hopping and yelping something unintelligible. When she finally let her go, Emma was still bobbing.

“You’re a
geeeeeenius
! She’s a genius!”

Emma followed the path of Callie’s excitement and her eyes met Jackson’s where he stood at the entrance to the courtyard, his charcoal gray shirt sleeves rolled to the elbow and his textured tie loose around his open collar.

“So I’ve heard,” he told Callie with a smirk. Nodding at Emma, he added, “Can I see you when you’re through?”

“In a few minutes?”

He nodded. “In the restaurant.”

“Sure.”

Jackson closed the doors, and Emma watched him through the glass as he sauntered across the lobby toward the kitchen.

“Who is
THAT
?” Callie asked her. “My boss.”

“Lucky you. He’s fine.”

Fee turned the corner holding a tray of samples and a crystal glass of iced water.

“I’m going to leave you to Fee to decide on your cake flavor and fillings,” Emma said, clutching her sketch pad. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Beckinsale.”

Callie nodded her hand enthusiastically and angled that full grill of bright-white teeth toward her.

Just as Emma started to leave, Callie stated, “Soon to be Mrs. Daniel Mahoney,” and then she giggled.

Emma turned back and stared at her. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“Callie Mahoney. That’s what my married name will be.”

“Danny Mahoney?”

“Yes.”

“You said your fiancé went to school here in Atlanta.”

“Yes, at George Washington High.”

Emma drew a shaky breath and smiled. “I went to Washington.”

“Did you? Did you know my Dan?” What were the odds? The same Danny who had watched her do a face plant on the floor the night she found out she was diabetic.

Emma nodded. “Yes. I did.”

“What a small world!”

It took her a moment, but Emma found her game face again. “It sure is. Please give Danny my best.”

Jackson knew if he spoke out loud the thoughts he was having just then, he would come off as selfish or ungrateful. It wasn’t like he didn’t know good and well that he was the luckiest so-and-so on the planet, having the sisters he had. Georgiann, Madeline and Norma Jean had been rallying around him all his life, and he’d often wondered what in the world he would do if he didn’t have their support.

“You can do it, baby
bruthah
!”

“Go get ’em, Jackson.”

But right then, in those few quiet moments alone in the restaurant, it was just him and the cup of coffee he’d scored from Fee in the kitchen. There was no backdrop of chatter or decisions being forced upon him that had been made in the name of Jackson’s own good. There was a calendar in front of him, scribbled with four different shapes of penmanship, cluttered with appointments and reminders and updates. Just coffee and a few chunks of cake samples he’d nabbed from the tray Fee had been preparing. As he popped the last bite of something lemon-filled into his mouth and drew a slow sip of coffee to wash it down, Jackson smiled. If only for that one tranquil moment in his empty restaurant, he’d found sheer bliss.

His twelve years at Drummond & Associates, with Susannah by his side, had been organized and chaos-free, but tossing three opinionated Southern belles into the mix had made even his routine with Susannah seem strained and unfamiliar. For the umpteenth time since he’d taken the leap, Jackson found himself wondering why he’d been so impulsive in this massive career change; but deep inside, he knew the answer. After spending his entire fourteen years of marriage devoted to making things right for Desiree in every way possible, that one niggling residual thread left undone in her life had choked him.

“I don’t have any regrets, Jackson,” she’d said to him, so beautiful even perched on the edge of her death. “My life with you has been more than I ever could have hoped for.”

“You don’t mind that we didn’t have children?” he’d prodded, and she shook her head with assurance. Trying to smile at her but failing miserably, he had asked, “Or that we didn’t buy that house in Buckhead before property values skyrocketed there?”

“Well, maybe that,” she conceded with a grin. “And, of course,
The Tanglewood
.”

Desiree had started out as a desk clerk at the small boutique hotel, and made concerted efforts to construct a career there. She’d celebrated the second anniversary of the assistant manager promotion just a few days before the cancer was diagnosed.

“I’ve been dreaming for so many years about buying the hotel and converting it,” she reminded him, and then paused to take a few deep breaths from the tube of oxygen gripping her nose. “It would have been so romantic, Jackson. I wish we’d done it together when the place was for sale a few years ago. Now Rupert Duncan is the owner, and the man has no imagination whatsoever. He just sees The Tanglewood as rooms, a restaurant and a front desk.”

“You really love the place,” he’d responded, and Desiree had looked up at him with a teary glaze in her dim eyes. This time, she was the one failing at her attempt to emit a reassuring smile.

“It’s been the second love of my life.”

And so, with those words the net was cast. Jackson’s love for his wife dragged that moment and those words right out of the air between them, and he’d clutched them to his heart for safekeeping until the afternoon just a few short months ago when he carelessly opened the newspaper and caught sight of a headline:

ROSWELL’S TANGLEWOOD ON THE AUCTION BLOCK AGAIN

Jackson’s thoughts were interrupted when Emma plunked down into the chair across the table from him with no warning at all. He swallowed around the lump in his throat in hopes of washing away the cloud of emotion before his employee picked up on it. But on second glance, he realized Emma seemed a little too preoccupied to pick up on anything going on with him.

“You all right?” he asked her, and she scrunched up her face like Norma’s five-year-old grandson Brant. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“You know that baseball wedding?”

“The Braves fans.”

She leaned back into the plush scarlet chair. “Turns out I know the groom.”

“Really.”

“Yep. Danny Mahoney. My high school boyfriend.”

Jackson thought it over for a moment, and then nodded. “Ahh. So you’re just realizing, if things had gone differently, it could be you having a baseball-themed wedding. That’s rough, huh? I guess you really missed out.”

A chuckle popped out of her, and she melted into a full grin as she covered her face with both hands and peeked at him through her fingers.

“A little perspective,” he reminded her, and then he gulped down the last of his coffee.

“Okay,” she replied with a giggle. “Point taken.”

“Listen, I wanted to discuss something with you. I was contacted earlier by an attorney here in town, a guy named Vincent Lewis.”

“Vincent Lewis,” she repeated. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“He’s representing the owner of The Backstreet Bakery where you used to work.”

“Harry?”

“Yes.”

“Why would Harry’s lawyer be contacting you?” she asked him, her hazel eyes flashing bright green emotion.