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Authors: Ellery Adams

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BOOK: Pies and Prejudice
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Dee dabbed at her face with her napkin and then, inexplicably, she smiled. “Not blue, Adelaide. Indigo. They’re the shade of blueberries. Blueberries and heartache.”

Sissy and Verena reached into their purses, popped open compacts, and examined their own stained cheeks.

“How marvelous!” Verena declared with a joyful laugh while Sissy looked thoughtful.

Grinning mischievously, Sissy grabbed her niece by the hand and gave it an excited squeeze. “Ella Mae, I have a
proposition
for you, my darling.”

Chapter 2

Ella Mae came to Havenwood with two sets of clothes. She’d arrived on her mother’s doorstep wearing a pair of black slacks, a sleeveless silk tank top, and a pair of sandals. She had Chewy’s leash in one hand and a duffel bag containing the food-encrusted clothing that she’d worn that day in culinary class in the other. Now her jeans, black T-shirt, and socks had been washed and folded into a neat pile on the wing chair of the guest room. Her mother had loaned her a white cotton nightgown, which Reba fanned out on the bed just as she’d done when Ella Mae was a girl. This was the extent of her current wardrobe.

The feel of the nightgown, coupled with the lavender scent of the guest room’s floral sheets, helped pull Ella Mae from a fractured dream involving a pair of naked redheads baking pies in her mother’s kitchen. Rolling onto her side, Ella Mae blinked the dream away by kissing Chewy on his nose. She accepted an affectionate face washing in return and then headed into the bathroom for a shower.

Inside the steam-filled stall, Ella Mae thought back on
yesterday’s bizarre reunion with her aunts. How could the pie have caused a discoloration of their tears? Perhaps some unusual pesticide had tainted the blueberries. And why had her aunts been so delighted by the odd physical reaction? Sissy had barely cleaned her face before digging out her day planner, penciling Ella Mae in to handle the desserts for The Havenwood School of the Art’s summer open house.

“I’m not serving blueberries, that’s for damn sure,” Ella Mae spoke to the fog-covered mirror in the bathroom. The air was muggy and close and she threw open a window to let it ooze outside. Wrapping herself in a towel, she went back to the bedroom, unfolded her jeans, and laid them out on the floor.

It was summertime in Havenwood. That meant average temperatures in the nineties with enough humidity to keep the damp hair on Ella Mae’s neck from ever drying. Smiling in anticipation, she picked up Reba’s fabric scissors and began to cut the legs off the jeans. She began at a conservative length, just above the knee and then, feeling brazen, sliced off a few more inches. The moment she tried on the jean shorts, she felt ten years younger.

She slid on her canvas Keds, which she’d also worn on her last day of culinary school, and drew her whiskey-colored hair into a high ponytail. She owned no makeup and had only her watch, a pair of diamond studs, and her wedding rings as accessories. She stuck the rings in the drawer of the nightstand and stared at them for a long moment, seeing how the gold and diamonds were rendered dull without the benefit of the light. Touching the bare skin of her ring finger, Ella Mae vowed to find a way to keep herself occupied so she wouldn’t spend the day brooding over her broken marriage. She decided to begin by cooking bacon and eggs for herself and Chewy.

The kitchen was quiet. Reba didn’t start her housekeeping duties until midmorning and her mother was a nocturnal creature. Last night, long after Ella Mae had fallen asleep
with the lamp burning and the paperback copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
from her high school freshmen English class splayed open on the quilt, she’d been awakened by the sound of mother padding around the house.

Ella Mae hadn’t slept well. She’d tossed and turned, disturbed by the absence of noise. In Manhattan, she was accustomed to the constant cacophony of sound enveloping her apartment building. In Havenwood, the police and ambulance sirens, blaring taxicab horns, and the shouting, swearing, or singing of strangers was replaced by the gentle sawing of crickets and the resonating croaks of bullfrogs. It was a different symphony, lacking the dissonance to replicate an urban melody.

In the empty kitchen, the quiet continued to rattle her. She ate breakfast, read the newspaper, and drank a cup of coffee. Wrens and finches twittered outside the window and the drone of cicadas began to increase in volume as the sun rose higher in the milky blue sky. Sighing, Ella Mae found her gaze wandering to her unencumbered ring finger again and again. Slamming the paper shut, she jumped out of her chair.

“Let’s go for a bike ride, Chewy,” Ella Mae said and hastily loaded the dirty plates into the dishwasher. She then led the leaping, exuberant terrier into the garage. “It’ll give me a chance to come up with a menu for Sissy’s event.”

Her bike was exactly where she’d left it, in the far corner behind the wheelbarrow. She cleaned it off with a wet rag, inflated the tires, and tried out the bell. She rang it three times, smiling at the merry trill, and settled Chewy in the roomy straw basket attached to the handlebars.

“Do not gnaw your seat,” she admonished her grinning dog as she began to pedal, but there was no need to worry. Chewy took to bicycle riding instantaneously, his dark chocolate eyes glimmering with excitement, his tongue lolling from between gleaming white teeth. As they passed under a lane of ancient magnolia trees, the sunlight streamed through the branches.

She rode for a mile, turning from the residential road onto the dirt path leading to the swimming hole.

“I wore a bikini last time I was here,” she told Chewy. “And when I jumped off the rope swing into the water, my top floated away. I about died when Hugh Dylan had to fetch it for me. He was the cutest boy in the entire school, but he never even looked at me until the one day I wanted to be invisible.”

Chewy was too busy soaking in the sights and smells to listen to Ella Mae’s remembrances. At eight months old he was still a puppy and, so far, had been exposed to greenery only at Central Park. Now there were trees and lush undergrowth as far as the eye could see. Squirrels teased him from the canopy, and everywhere he looked there were sticks. Hundred of sticks. Thousands of them.

Sensing his delight, Ella Mae rubbed his head. “We’ll find you a fine stick at the swimming hole. You’ll love getting your paws wet.”

The pair faced forward as the bike tore downhill, wind whipping through Chewy’s fur and lifting Ella Mae’s ponytail into the air like a kite’s tail.

When the ground leveled out, Ella Mae dismounted and leaned her bike against a tree. She told Chewy to jump out of the basket. Amazingly, he obeyed, running in circles around her ankles as she edged toward a clump of blackberry bushes concealing the edge of the rock and the fifty-foot drop to the cool water below.

Ella Mae heard a splash and, for some reason, felt as though she had invaded someone’s privacy. The swimming hole was known to all the locals and she’d bathed in its waters hundreds of times, but her seven-year absence made her feel like an intruder and she quickly hid behind a tree, peeking around the rough bark to catch a glimpse of the swimmer.

She saw his head and shoulders first, bursting from the water with the power of a breaching whale. He held his
muscular arms outward as if he might embrace the hillside above him, grab onto the billowy clouds, and pull the maize-colored sun from the sky. His hair was dark and clung to his neck in wet curls, and his broad back was rippled with muscles.

Unaware that he had an audience, the man flicked a coin high into the air and then watched as it fell into the deepest part of the swimming hole. Ella Mae saw the coin catch a sunbeam and wink once before it was swallowed by blue.

Chewy wagged his tail and raced down the path. Just as he let out an excited bark, the man dove under the water. Ella Mae followed her dog, keeping one eye on the uneven terrain and another on the surface, waiting for the man to come up for breath.

But he didn’t come up for breath.

“Oh, Lord,” she whispered, feeling her heart pound against her ribs. He’d been under for over a minute by the time she caught up to Chewy. He was sniffing a pile of clothes—khaki shorts and a Mountain Dew T-shirt—with gusto.

“Stop it,” Ella Mae hissed, her fearful gaze on the water.

After another thirty seconds, she decided to dive in after the swimmer. She ran back up the hill, preparing to jump straight into the deepest part of the pool, when the man suddenly appeared fifteen feet away from where he’d gone under. Now he was near the narrow stretch of shore, breathing hard and smiling.

He dropped the coin onto a flat stone, water streaming down his chiseled and tanned torso. Ella Mae couldn’t tear her gaze away. He was like a merman, slick and streamlined, powerfully built and ethereally handsome.

“Dante!” he called out, and Ella Mae crouched low, not wanting to be caught spying. She grabbed Chewy by the collar and pressed his muzzle to her chest and he bucked to break free, but at the moment, something very large crashed through the undergrowth on the opposite bank, drawing the attention of both Chewy and Ella Mae.

“Hey, boy!” The man stood, his arms opened to greet the
biggest dog Ella Mae had ever seen. He was white with black spots but was way too large to be a Dalmatian. With a resounding bark of joy, he jumped on his master and the two crashed into the water, the man’s laughter floating up to Ella Mae.

She picked up Chewy and hurried to her bike. “We’ll come back later,” she promised her squirming terrier. “I don’t have a swimsuit and I am
not
skinny-dipping with those two around.”

Still, the image of the man emerging from the water made her skin tighten and burn as if she’d been out in the sun too long. To quell the desire she felt stirring in her blood, Ella Mae began to silently recite the ingredients in a pine nut tart crust.

Safely back on the rock ledge, she untied the plastic bag she’d wound around the handlebars of her bike before setting out and began to fill it with plump, juicy blackberries.

She was already envisioning the pie she’d make to mark this trip to the swimming hole. The crust would be of crushed graham crackers, to echo the sandy bank. Then, a layer of moist blackberries, to remind her of the dark waters. And on the top, a cloud of lemon chiffon to represent the summer day. She’d garnish the edges with small blackberries and mint leaves.

Unbidden, her mind strayed to the day she’d first met Sloan Kitteridge. Ella Mae had ridden her bike to Havenwood’s roadside fruit stand to buy strawberries. Sloan was passing through town on his way to a company retreat at the lakeside resort when he spotted Ella Mae pedaling along. He was so caught up in the vision of this lovely girl with the long, tanned limbs, full lips, and hair floating out behind her like a ribbon of caramel, that he drove his rental car into a ditch.

Having stopped to see if the driver was injured, Ella Mae had taken one look at the handsome stranger and saw her ticket out of Havenwood. She’d gone away to college, of
course, but had returned home only to take an assortment of unfulfilling jobs. She’d dated a few local men but had never fallen in love. Feeling trapped by her mother’s silent but domineering presence, Ella Mae longed for escape, to have adventures like her archaeologist father—a man she’d never known. A man who’d died worlds away just a few days before her birth.

Ella Mae’s turn for adventure had come when Sloan drove into that ditch. He exited the car and smiled at her as if the accident had been a gift. He’d taken her to lunch, then dinner, and stayed at the resort long after his retreat was over. When he returned to New York ten days later, Ella Mae went with him, leaving all she knew behind to follow the whims of her heart.

“And here I am again,” she whispered to the trees. “Starting over.” She popped a blackberry into her mouth and chewed, savoring its tart succulence. “I can still have a good life. I can make my own happiness.”

Looping the bag of blackberries onto her right wrist, Ella Mae decided to focus on the tarts she’d bake for the open house instead of thinking about Sloan or the beautiful man from the swimming hole.

On the ride back to her mother’s house, which was called Partridge Hill and had been in the LeFaye family for two centuries, Ella Mae decided to take a shortcut in order to get the berries safely into the kitchen before they spoiled. This meant riding on the lane bordering the Gaynors’ property. Ella Mae would normally avoid this route, seeing as Loralyn Gaynor had been her enemy since the two girls were in kindergarten.

Ella Mae had no idea whether Loralyn still lived in Havenwood, but she pedaled as fast as she could past Rolling View, the Gaynors’ sprawling estate. Her mother had once told Ella Mae that it had held another, less bucolic title in the past, but the Gaynor family had expunged that name when they’d begun raising thoroughbred racehorses.

“She’s probably happily married with a perfect husband and a perfect house,” Ella Mae stated petulantly to Chewy. “Two darling cherubim for children and a job…No, she wouldn’t have a job, now would she? Loralyn was never fond of working. She cheated her way through school and hired someone to write her college application essays. She’ll have a housekeeper and a gardener and will spend her free time playing tennis and getting her hair done.”

BOOK: Pies and Prejudice
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