Cupcakes & Chardonnay (16 page)

Suzanne followed him outside to the courtyard seating area in the back. "Well ... umm ... I'm afraid Daryle had his men repaint it." She looked at Brent apologetically. "If it's any consolation, he had them repaint everything I did, too."

Brent laughed and playfully punched her on the arm. "That's probably just as well. Spatulas are our weapons of choice, not paintbrushes."

"Let me show you the kitchen," Suzanne pulled him around to the side of the building and the kitchen entrance.

Brent looked around admiringly at the shiny stainless steel appliances and the efficient chaos of her staff. "Sweet," he said. "Pun intended. So where is that top-secret chardonnay cupcake? Do I get to finally taste this masterful concoction?"

Suzanne snagged one from a tray Karen was ferrying out to the front. Brent peeled back the paper and took a bite, chewing thoughtfully. "Mmm, I like it." He swallowed and took a second bite. "I like it a lot, Suzie-Q. I might have to make room on the HobNob's dessert menu. These would be perfect for Sunday brunch."

"Well, the catering kitchen is opening week after next. We'll finally have the production capacity we need."

Brent wrapped his burly arms around her. "Congratulations, Suzie-Q. Much as it pains me to say it, it was a good idea for you to leave my restaurant. I was just holding you back there."

I hope the fire department doesn't show up, Daryle thought as he peered in the front window of the new Cupcakery. I don't think this building is rated for quite that many people.

He smiled and walked around to the kitchen entrance. A fire hazard-sized crowd was a good sign. A very good sign, indeed. He slipped into the kitchen quietly, not a difficult thing to do, really, in a commercial kitchen. He'd never been able to understand how Suzanne could spend all day in this barely controlled chaos. He needed to get out of his office every now and then, get away from the ringing phone and pinging email, and walk out to the farthest edges of the vineyards. He needed to be able to hear himself think.

He looked around for Suzanne, amid the whirring mixers and clattering trays. Ah, there she was! And there was Brent.

"That figures," Daryle muttered. Leave it to Brent to get here first and show, yet again, another way in which Daryle was unworthy of Suzanne. He was her husband and still he didn't manage to get to the grand opening before her former boss did. Alanna had nagged him to leave the hospital earlier but he had waited to see if his mother would wake up. She hadn't and finally Alanna had all but pushed him out the door, with orders to bring back cupcakes for the nurses.

Suzanne had impossibly high standards for men, to begin with, and he knew Brent only encouraged her to keep those standards at unattainable heights. At least when it came to Daryle, anyway. It was one thing to have to compete with another man for a woman's attention. It was another thing entirely to deal with someone who considered himself your wife's personal bodyguard.

As if on cue, he watched as Brent enfolded Suzanne in a big, tight hug. Brent spotted him and gave him a look of undisguised contempt. Daryle felt that tight squeeze of jealousy gripping his chest. He wanted to kick himself. Why hadn't he gotten here first? He should have been the one to congratulate Suzanne, to share in her happiness. Maybe Brent was right. Maybe he wasn't worthy of her.

"Don't look now, but Daryle's here," Brent said.

Suzanne nearly popped out of his arms in her effort to see past him. Brent was dismayed to see the sudden spike in her already happy mood, and the way her face lit up at the mention of Daryle's name. But he held his tongue and quietly slipped out to the front of the shop to buy some cupcakes. If he was lucky, he'd take the last of whichever flavor was Daryle's favorite.

Suzanne rushed over to where Daryle was standing, in faded jeans and a rumpled shirt that looked as though he had slept in it. "How is your mother?" she asked. Her heart dropped when he simply grimaced and looked down at his feet.

"I'm sorry I didn't get here sooner," he said. "I was hoping she'd wake up. I wanted to tell her that your shop opened."

"But .." Suzanne said hesitantly.

He shook his head sadly.

"I'm sorry. Alanna will call you if she wakes, I'm sure," Suzanne reached out and touched his wrist, where it was exposed, tanned and lean, below the rolled cuff of his shirtsleeve. What she really wanted to do was wrap her arms around him, comfort him, take some of his sorrow off his shoulders. But that awkwardness between them had returned. They had been so close in Chicago, like any normal couple, and now everything was back to business.

"Do you have a minute? I have something to show you," she said, leading him over to a tray of just frosted cupcakes. At one point during the conference, she had almost given in and told him what she was doing, instead of keeping it a surprise. She wasn't sure how well Daryle handled surprises. Now, she held her breath as his eyes skimmed over the tray. He was quiet. Too quiet, Suzanne thought. She wished she were able to read that face. But when his jaw set like that and his eyes went dark and thoughtful, he was completely unreadable. Wasn't he going to say anything?

Finally, she took a slow quiet breath and picked up one of the cupcakes, carefully peeled off the paper and held it out to him. "This is the Iris cupcake. It's The Cupcakery's newest flavor," she said, warily, beginning to get worried about his silence. A month ago, she wouldn't have cared whether Daryle approved of it. Even if he hadn't liked it, she would have kept it on the menu anyway. Damn the torpedoes!

But now there was no denying that she cared about his reaction. The pounding in her chest was evidence of that. If he didn't like it, she knew she'd have to pull it from the menu here and cancel her plan to add it to the Marina shop. If only Iris herself could have been here today. She would have loved it, would have embraced the idea of a namesake cupcake. But Iris was lying in a hospital bed. It was her inscrutable, mercurial son here instead.

"It's been our bestselling flavor today," she ventured cautiously.

That seemed to break the trance Daryle was in. He bit gingerly into the cupcake. Suzanne watched him, expectantly, as he chewed slowly, thoughtfully. There was a smudge of white icing on his upper lip and it took all of Suzanne's willpower to resist stretching up on her tiptoes and kissing it away. As if reading her mind, his tongue licked it away.

Suzanne opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. He took another bite.             

"Is there ... " His brow furrowed in concentration. "Is there wine in this cupcake?"

Suzanne's face broke into a wide smile and she finally allowed herself to exhale. "Yes! A touch of oakiness, hints of melon and apple, a frisson of vanilla," she quoted the label from Iris Vineyards' chardonnay.

"Wait—you put
our
wine in this?"

Uh-oh.
Suzanne's heart sank. "Yes. I did it for your mother," she said quietly. "I had expected she would be here ..." Her voice trailed off.

"Oh Suzanne. She would have loved this. Her own cupcake? Are you kidding? It would have been one more thing to lord over her luncheon friends."

"I set aside two dozen for you to take back. When I realized how fast they were selling."

"When did you have time to create a new recipe?" he asked. "I'm impressed, Suzie-Q. I really am." Just when you think you know her, he thought, she turns around and does something that makes you look at her all over again. And he definitely wanted to look at her now. She was in her element here, in her pink and brown apron—how many women could wear that and make it look that sexy, he wondered. Not many. No one he had ever known, at any rate.

She had that sparkle in her eye today, too, the one that appeared whenever she spoke about The Cupcakery. This is where she belongs, he realized. She's going to build herself a cupcake empire. He could see it clearly. She'd have shops all along the California coast.
What was I thinking, making her go to the wine conference with me for a week?
Not that he hadn't enjoyed himself. And he was pretty certain this time that she had enjoyed herself, too. But where did she find the time to do everything that she did? Open a new shop, keep the old one running, concoct a new recipe ... and still look as bright and energetic as always?

On top of that, he knew she'd left the winery before dawn. He'd come back from the hospital in the middle of the night. Unable to sleep, he ended up just walking the halls for hours. She slipped out of his room without him noticing, but he'd heard the engine of her car as she drove down the long vineyard driveway.

He was suddenly keenly aware of his own disheveled state. He was barely holding it together these days.

His cell phone rang. He looked at it. "It's Alanna." As he listened to what his sister was saying, Suzanne disappeared into the heart of the kitchen chaos. She returned just as he hung up.

"Mother is awake. I'm going back to the hospital. Hopefully she'll still be conscious by the time I get there."

"Give her my love," Suzanne said, pushing a white pastry box into his hands.

He caught her hands before she could move away. "Have dinner with me tonight."

Suzanne hesitated. "It would have to be late ..."

"As late as you want. I'll have the restaurant fix us something. We can eat at home. You can tell me about the big day," he replied, looking around at the people streaming in and out of the kitchen, in and out of the front door, cupcakes in hand, smiles on their faces. Suzanne made a lot of people smile. Not to name any names, he thought as he left The Cupcakery, carrying cupcakes and smiling himself.

Suzanne was awakened by the ringing of a phone and then a ruckus on the mattress next to her. She opened her eyes, sleepily, to see Daryle scrambling to extricate himself from the bed linens and get to his phone, which was still in his pants pocket. The pants were in a heap on the floor, right where Suzanne had taken them off of him.

He answered the phone on the last ring. Suzanne sat up in the bed, pulling up the sheet to cover her breasts and shoulders. This couldn't be good. Middle-of-the-night calls never were. She watched as Daryle took several deep breaths, as if he were trying to calm himself. He said little, his forehead creased in concentration. "Okay," he said several times. "Will do." "I understand." And finally, "Thank you."

He walked slowly toward the bed and gently placed the phone on the nightstand. Then he sat down on the edge of the mattress. Suzanne knew what was coming. She slid up behind him on the mattress and wrapped her arms around his back and chest.

"That was the hospital," Daryle said, his voice cracking. "She's gone."

Suzanne had never seen Daryle cry. Had never seen any man cry, really. But she held Daryle as his body shuddered in rolling earthquakes of grief, until dawn when he fell asleep at last, exhausted.

Chapter 12

"Mr. Kennedy will be with you shortly," the receptionist said, hanging up the phone. She smiled at Daryle. She was young and shapely with deep red hair that curled beguilingly just below the collar of her grey silk blouse. Daryle didn't notice.

He walked across the thickly carpeted lobby of Kennedy, Callahan, Dante and Baugh to stand in front of the floor to ceiling windows on the other side. The lobby was as quiet as a doctor's office, the only sound that of the receptionist's low, measured voice paging partners and associates. Liam Kennedy had been the Catterton family's lawyer for

as long as Daryle could remember.

He looked out over the bay and the grey spans of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Daryle preferred the Bay Bridge to the city's other, more famous bridge, the Golden Gate. He liked driving west on the Bay Bridge at dusk, with the downtown skyline silhouetted against a darkening pink and violet sky. Today it was mid-afternoon and already white billows of fog were rolling in under the bridge.

"Daryle." Liam Kennedy clapped a hand on his shoulder. Daryle turned and found his hand gripped in Liam's sure handshake. "Very sorry about your mother, you know that. I'm not sure Napa will be the same without her. Come on into my office."

Liam's office shared the same expansive view as the lobby.

"Let's sit over here," Liam gestured toward a grouping of black leather chairs around a small coffee table. "Can I get you something to drink? Coffee? Water? Grappa?"

The grappa sounded tantalizing, but Daryle refused. He was driving back to Napa tonight, after a day spent visiting restaurants and reviewing wine lists.

"So how are you doing?" Liam asked. "How is Alanna? I saw her show at the museum. Very nice."

"I'm holding up. The winery keeps me busy. Alanna flew home to New York last night."

"Well, we're working through the estate matters as fast as we can," Liam said. "Your mother made a zillion small bequests to people. Half the world, it seems."

"That was mother. I'm not here about that, however. I'm here about the divorce."

Liam was silent for a long moment, then a look of recognition lit up his eyes. "Right. I had forgotten about that. You and your ... wife ... seemed close at the funeral. She's a lovely woman."

"Yes, she is a lovely woman."

"Do you need to do this so soon? Why not wait until a little more time has passed? Wait until your one year anniversary? Doing it now will raise some eyebrows."