The Comfort of Favorite Things (A Hope Springs Novel) (4 page)

Everybody had their own tell. “But she had.”

“I wanted to ask her about it, but she blew it off, and I know better than to push.”

They all knew better, Becca mused. Ellie’s new crush may not have recognized the move as one of self-preservation, but Ellie had, and Becca would have. Thea, too. “Maybe you’ll have a chance to talk to her more later—”

“Goodness,” Ellie said, all giddy and syrupy sweet. “I hope so—”

“But Ellie,” Becca hurried out with, before the other woman got completely hippie daydreamy in that way that she did, “take it slow. You’ve been hurt enough for one lifetime.”

“And you’re a dear friend who worries too much.”

“I don’t worry too much. I probably don’t worry enough.” At least not about other people. She worried plenty about herself
.
“You don’t know anything about her or why she thought she needed that chair. It’s probably nothing. Could be she was just afraid you’d sew her a curtain,” she said, and Ellie snorted. “But it might be more than you need to take on. And now I’ll stop lecturing,” she said, because Ellie was sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes, which meant Becca’s point had gone as deep as it was going to.

“One thing I do know is that she’s thinking about buying Butters Bakery. So there.”

At that, Becca’s entire body went stiff. “What?”

Ellie nodded. “She said Peggy and her husband are retiring, and Peggy asked her if she’d be interested in buying them out.”

So Peggy was trolling for buyers. So what? That’s what sellers did. Smart ones didn’t offer their property to a nearly penniless abuse and rape victim—No. She was not a victim. She was done with thinking of herself that way. But still. “Dammit.”

“Damn what?” Thea asked, walking into the shop proper from the kitchen. “What are you two up to?”

Becca shook her head, so Ellie answered. “I was telling Becca that I just met Lena Mining, who works next door at Bliss.”

Thea frowned as she started sorting through the paperwork on her table, pushing aside Ellie’s fabric swatches and thread. “That was what the
dammit
was about?”

“No,” Becca said, having found her voice and the anger she seemed unable to stop using as fuel. “That was about Peggy Butters having offered her bakery to Lena before offering it to me.”

“She offered the bakery to you?” Ellie asked, wide-eyed. “Goodness, that would be so cool. I could bake bread here. You could bake cakes there. I can already imagine the lines out the door once word gets out about your hummingbird cake. Oh, and your pineapple upside-down cake. And your German chocolate with cream cheese.”

“It might be cool if I had more to my name than, oh, the nothing I do,” Becca said, rubbing at her eyes then looking up to see Thea staring. “What?”

Thea looked from Becca to Ellie and back, a twitch of a grin on her mouth as she crossed her arms. “I think we should bring the subject of Butters Bakery to the table tonight.”

To the table. Where the four of them, as a group, discussed issues with an impact on them all.

That meant making Butters Bakery more than just an extension of Bread and Bean. Making it something that would involve all of them, belong to all of them. Be something they could each call their own. A piece of it anyway.

Becca smiled, and for the first time all day, actually felt the emotion behind it.

CHAPTER FOUR

D
akota was hunkered on the floor measuring the baseboard when Thea pushed through the kitchen’s saloon doors and back into the front of the shop. He’d stepped out front earlier to take a call from Tennessee, and though he’d seen a red-haired woman go into the shop, the place had been empty when he’d gotten back to work.

He hadn’t been gone but maybe twenty minutes, but couldn’t rid himself of the notion that she’d come back to fire him. Juries who went into deliberations with their minds made up tended not to drag things out.

“Can you take a break?” she asked, looking down at him and swiping at the longest of her bangs. “I want to get your opinion on something.”

Because she valued what he thought? With the way she’d stormed out of here earlier, he couldn’t imagine that. But he was curious, so he stood, and though his day had barely gotten started, he said, “Sure.”

He jotted down the measurement, then wound up his tape measure and tucked it along with his notebook and pencil in the pocket of his tool belt, where it sat on an overturned box. “Can I leave this here, or do I need to put it in my truck?”

“It’s fine.” She’d moved to the front door, hardly paying attention to him at all. “We’re just going down the block.”

That meant the chocolate shop or the bakery, unless they were going to cross the street at the corner and hit the antique store or the pharmacy. He had to admit she had him curious.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” she said on their way outside.

Looking over, he was struck again by the clever Opening Soon sign in her window. It was a pencil drawing, an abstract depiction of a hand prying the top off a coffee can. He glanced back at Thea, not sure what she was apologizing for, but he was patient.

“You surprised me,” she said, squinting against the sun, tiny laugh lines appearing at the corners of her eyes. “And I hadn’t quite found my footing when Becca charged in. I was rude. I’m sorry.”

He studied her as they walked, watched her rub her hands up and down her bare arms. He’d never known Thea to easily admit she was wrong. He wondered if doing so made her uncomfortable, or if that was all on him. “I wasn’t expecting you either. All I knew was the client’s name was Clark.”

She stopped in front of Butters Bakery, her gaze searching for something in his. “So we’re good then? All the awkwardness out of the way?”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, as she pulled open the bakery’s door. He reached over her head and caught it, following her inside. There he was hit with a blast of a warm sugar scent reminiscent of the perfume she’d worn in high school. “I’m just off a year of reunions. Most have been pretty awkward.”

She gave him a quirk of a smile. “I suppose with your past that’s not unexpected.”

Because no one knew what to say to an ex-con. No one except Thea, who’d always been able to speak her mind. “Yep.”

“But since we’ve agreed not to talk about the past,” she said, heading for the long display case, “let’s eat cake.”

They were here to eat cake? He frowned as he accompanied her. Then he stopped frowning and instead wondered if his eyes were really bigger than his stomach, because he was going to need a whole lot of room for the cake eating he planned to do.

Why had he never come here before?

Best he could tell, he could order just about every flavor under the sun: chocolate, vanilla, coconut, caramel, banana—and dozens of variations of each. There was what he was pretty sure was red velvet. And German chocolate. And cake with cookies. Cake with candy. Cake with nuts. Cakes with strawberries, and with limes, and with frosting roses and ruffles and ribbons.

He listened as Thea ordered several items from the Hispanic woman manning the counter. The two were friendly, though he didn’t think they were necessarily friends—a thought that took him back to high school where most of Thea’s friends had been kids she wanted something from.

Including his sister.

Including him.

It wasn’t at all the vibe he’d sensed between her and Becca. Or sensed now.

“Have I missed anything you want?” Thea asked him.

He breathed deeply again, trying to separate the scent of sugar and the selfishness of the past from the woman in front of him now with slices of most every cake the place sold. “That should do it.”

“What about something to drink?”

“Coffee would be good. Just black.” He sure wasn’t going to need it sweet.

“Make it two,” she said to the woman filling the order, digging into her pocket for several folded bills and counting out what she needed.

He offered her a twenty. “Here.”

But she waved away his cash. “I’ve got this. It’s my experiment.”

Right. She’d said she wanted his opinion on something. He was going to guess it was cake.

They found a small table in the far front corner. Dakota sat with his back to the room, facing the window, holding his to-go cup of coffee while Thea doubled up some of the slices, sliding the empty plates beneath those now overflowing. Then she handed him a fork.

“So what’s the experiment?” he asked, his gaze moving from one plate to another. He wasn’t sure where to start.

She went with a chocolate cake with creamy fudge icing. “I want to see what the traffic is like on a weekday morning.”

“And you had to buy out the place? Why not sit out front?”

“The bistro tables?” she asked, and when he nodded, she said, “Those belong to Bliss.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want to get towed,” he said, Thea snorting at the joke as he sliced off a big bite of white cake iced with a lemon cream-cheese frosting, though he left the candied lime slice on the plate. “Wow,” he said, and sliced off another. “Just wow.”

“Good stuff, huh?” She’d moved to the strawberry cake. It had bits and pieces of strawberries in the very pink icing.

“Oh, man.” There was the second-best sort of orgasm going on in his mouth.

“You always did have a sweet tooth,” she said, licking icing from the fork’s tines, and grinning. “I guess that hasn’t changed?”

He did his best to ignore the flick of her tongue, but he felt the memory of it and had to look away. “Coming to live with Tennessee and Kaylie, and her baking dozens of brownies every day . . .” He shook his head. “It’s a wonder I don’t weigh a ton.”

“You might before we’re done here.” She glanced over as the door opened, watching the woman at the counter greet the customer as if they’d known each other for years. Then she looked back, taking him in as she chose a bite of cake with a whipped caramel icing. “And I’ll have to join you in that wheelbarrow. This is freakishly good.”

“I don’t know why I’ve never been in here.”

“I have, but not often enough. For obvious reasons,” she said, going for the vanilla.

“Desserts were one of the things I missed most while in prison,” he said, taking a bite of what he thought was Italian cream. The cake was nutty and moist and insanely good. “I mean, we’d get a cookie, or bowl of what was supposed to be banana pudding. But everything, even the scrambled eggs, tasted like chemically preserved cardboard. I guess the bread wasn’t bad. If you like the white stuff. Tear off the crust. Roll it up into a ball. Those things can hurt if they hit you right.”

She was slow to set down her fork, slower still to pick up her coffee cup. She held it with both hands, sipped through the slot in the to-go lid. Her hands were shaking just enough that the lid was a lifesaver. “As much as I missed you after you left,” she said, looking down at the cup and not him, “I missed Indiana almost as much.”

They’d agreed not to talk about the past. He should probably remind her of that. Problem was, he’d brought it up first. “How so?”

She shrugged. “Indiana?” she asked, and he nodded. “We started hanging with different crowds for some reason, so we didn’t see each other as often, or really at all unless we met up somewhere. I would still call her, but after a while, if I didn’t catch her at home, she stopped calling me back. She had a really hard time with you being gone.”

“Yeah,” he said, drawing out the word as he toyed with a maraschino cherry that had come unglued from its cake. He didn’t know what else to say.

“I should’ve been a better friend.” She shook her head and blew out a huff. “What am I saying? I should’ve been a friend, period. I knew she needed one. I guess I figured she had truer ones than I’d ever pretended to be. But I was having a hard enough time of my own without you around, and since selfish was my middle name . . .” The sentence trailed off and she shrugged. “I suck.”

That would’ve made him laugh if his whole gut wasn’t knotted up at the thought of what Indiana had gone through after he’d left. Tennessee had been there for her, sure. But Dakota’s sentencing had been a quick affair. He’d been guilty, and Robby’s parents had pushed hard, wanting Dakota punished to the full extent of the law. Good behavior had gotten him released after three years.

He lifted his gaze to meet hers. “Sometimes I wonder if keeping what had happened to ourselves, you and me, Tennessee and Indiana, wasn’t a mistake,” he said, the wall he’d built to keep that night locked away crumbling around him.

“You had your reasons,” she said, remembering him arriving at her house covered in blood, shaking and angry and afraid.

She thought back to the events of that night, the ones she knew, the ones he’d told her: He’d found Robby in an arcade where he was known to hang out. He hadn’t bothered to hide his face. He couldn’t let his sister spend the rest of her school years as the girl Robby Hunt had tried to rape. He didn’t want her living under that microscope, dealing with the pity or the speculation. It was bad enough she would carry the memory of the attack with her the rest of her life.

It wasn’t like Robby was going to brag about what he’d done. It would’ve been easy to keep it among the four of them, though his siblings had never known Dakota had sought out Thea and shared all. But Dakota hadn’t been thinking straight; his sister had just been assaulted. Honestly, though, had any of them? They’d been teenagers, the Keller siblings with absentee parents, Thea with a mother in name only. Dakota had agreed to pay whatever the price might be.

Thea had never told another soul. She’d never even mentioned what she knew to Indiana. “Does Indiana know you came to me that night after . . . Robby? Does Tennessee?”

“They do now,” he said, slicing into the banana spice cake with the brown sugar icing. It cracked beneath his fork like a praline, granules of candy scattering over the plate.

She thought he might be eating it because with his mouth full he wouldn’t have to talk. She couldn’t imagine he really wanted it. Not if his stomach felt anything like hers, all topsy-turvy and seasick.

The door chime rang again, and a woman with two preschoolers came in. The children headed for the pint-sized plastic table with building blocks and giant crayons and coloring books in separate slots.

“That was a stupid thing to do, you know,” Thea said. She listened to the woman’s order. Two dozen cookies for a school party. A custom cake for a surprise anniversary dinner. When she looked back at Dakota he was waiting, one brow arched, fork full of cake at the ready. She hurried to explain. “Keeping what had happened from your parents. Convincing Indiana not to press charges. Robby should’ve been the one arrested. He should’ve been the one to go to prison. Indiana would’ve survived the gossip. She was strong and smart and knew who she was.”

Dakota shoved the cake into his mouth, shaking his head as he chewed. He looked down, sliced off another bite, then said, “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s not like she had anyone at home in her corner either way. And at least by not telling them, it never became common knowledge,” he said and reached for his coffee. “She was better off with me gone and nobody knowing what had happened than with me being there and everyone pointing fingers and talking behind her back.”

Whether or not Thea agreed, and she wasn’t sure that she did, she wasn’t going to argue about this. It was over with. Done with. What-ifs and might-have-beens didn’t do anyone any good. Still . . .

She stared down at the cake crumbs littering the table. “I should’ve come to see you. I should’ve brought her to see you. The few times we connected, that’s all she talked about. Making the trip to Huntsville. How hard it was to get there.”

He nodded, then kept nodding, as if processing memories to depict what she’d said. “Yeah, well, it was only hard because our parents couldn’t be bothered.”

And even with all the abuse she’d seen in her life, the indifference of Drew and Tiffany Keller was one thing she would never understand. “That had to have hurt.”

“Not seeing them? Not really. Not seeing my brother and sister? That was tougher.” He shifted to the side in his chair, bumping one of the legs with his knee, and smiled. “With our folks never around, we’d always had this musketeer thing going on. All for one. One for all. Stupid, I guess.”

The three siblings. Not stupid at all. “Does that make me d’Artagnan?”

He chuckled under his breath and sipped at his coffee. “You spent enough time at our house to be a fourth.”

It had felt so much more like a home than the house she’d shared with her mother. And that with the Keller parents gone more often than not. They’d provided, in their own weird way. Food and shelter and every material thing their kids could want. Where they’d failed was in the lack of involvement, the dearth of emotional investment in Dakota, Tennessee, and Indiana’s lives.