Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel) (24 page)

She found herself wanting to laugh. “You know what I meant.”

“Sure. Okay. But we can still be friends?”

“Of course we can still be friends.” The thought of his disappearing from her life . . . she couldn’t even imagine it.

And then he asked, “What about kissing?”

She closed her eyes, blew out a slow breath. “That’s probably not a good idea.”

“Doing it again? Or doing it the first time?”

“Both.”

“You disappoint me, Brooklyn Harvey. I thought you were more adventurous than that.”

If she were adventurous, wouldn’t she have continued to travel on her own? Wouldn’t she have done more the last two years than watch movies and read books? Wouldn’t she have figured out how to have fun without Artie?

“Listen,” Callum said before she could push away the thoughts and find a response she could live with. “I need to go check on Addy. She’s been coughing and sneezing all afternoon.”

“Really?” No wonder he’d sounded distracted earlier. “She seemed fine today at school. Does she have a fever?”

“I took her temperature when we got here, and she was fine. Had to get Lena to run to the pharmacy for a thermometer.”

Brooklyn thought a moment, then asked, “Does she have allergies?”

“Nothing serious like peanuts or ragweed. Could be she just got into something in the storeroom, dust or whatever. I need to get my child laborers back in there to clean it up.”

“It didn’t look dirty the other night.” The night she’d kissed him. The night she’d tried to get beneath his clothes and find him. Find why she wanted him. Why she needed him. Find herself.

If his mind had made the same leap, he thankfully kept it to himself. “I haven’t had it scoured since the Valentine’s Day shipping rush. Who knows what she picked up back there. Look, I’ll talk to you later, okay? If Addy’s all right, my mom’s picking her up in the morning at nine, so I could meet you at nine thirty, unless that’s too early for you.”

“It’s fine, but we can do this another time. And really,” she said, realizing it would’ve been so much easier to be honest and admit she wanted to see him, “we don’t have to do it at all.”

“Tomorrow’s fine. My work schedule’s pretty light. Lena can handle things till I get in.”

Then he hung up, leaving her to wonder if friends was what she wanted to be with this man, or if she wanted to break the rules that were nudging her shoulder, pushing her out of the bubble she’d been living in all these years.

Pushing her toward him.

ADDY

FRIDAY NIGHT

If I had a mommy, I would want her to be just like Ms. Harvey. I don’t ever tell Daddy, but sometimes I pretend that’s who Ms. Harvey is. Daddy says there are some little girls who don’t have a daddy, and some little girls who don’t have a mommy, and some little girls have both of them and LOTS of them.

And sometimes I think it would be nice to have a kitty, too. Because a kitty and a little girl and a daddy and Ms. Harvey for a mommy would be the best family EVER. I want a big gray and white kitty. And I want to name her Pikachu. I promised Daddy that if we got a kitty I would never EVER sneeze.

Achoo!

“I heard that.”

I pull my covers down away from my itchy face and see Daddy looking at me from the door. I don’t want to be sick. If I’m sick, I can’t go to school and I HAVE to go to school. That’s where Ms. Harvey is. “It was just a tickle in my nose. It’s not there anymore.”

“That’s because it’s all over your sheets now.”

“Daddy! Tickles can’t get on sheets.”

He walks close to the bed and sits down. Then he puts his hand on my forehead to see if I feel like a fireplace.

“I’m not hot.”

“You’re warm.”

“Warm isn’t hot. Warm is like cool.”

He shakes his head. “Warm is not like cool.”

“Ms. Harvey says it is.”

“Does she now?”

“Uh-huh. Warm hasn’t made it all the way to hot yet. Like cool hasn’t made it all the way to cold yet.”

“I see,” he says, and he rubs his beard like it tickles. “Is that how Ms. Harvey tells it?”

I can’t remember Ms. Harvey’s real words, but I nod anyway. “If you don’t like it you can take it up with her.”

That makes Daddy laugh.

He’s so funny when he laughs. But then I want to laugh and it makes my throat hurt, and then my tummy hurts because my throat gets all tight but I am NOT SICK.

“Sit up a second. You need a spoon of the purple medicine,” he says.

The purple medicine is yummy, but it’s not candy so I pretend I don’t like it too much. And it is hard to swallow. My throat wants to close up and feels all sticky.

Daddy puts the top back on the bottle. “You didn’t eat much dinner. Sometimes when you don’t have an appetite that means you’re getting sick.”

“I do too have an appetite.”

“I didn’t see it tonight.”

“I kept it in my tummy because I ate too many of Grammy’s sugar cookies when she came to see me at Bliss.”

Then Daddy says some bad words I’m not allowed to EVER REPEAT. But I hear them in my head and I want to know what they mean and when I’ll be old enough to say them.

“Listen, pumpkin. I know you love your Grammy, and Grammy loves you, but it’s okay if you just eat one cookie and save the rest for after your dinner.”

“If I eat my dinner I’ll be too full to eat them.”

“Yeah. That’s the point.”

“What is a point? Like a pencil?”

“Nothing, sweetheart. Never mind.” Then he puts his hand on my forehead again. “Does your throat hurt when you swallow?”

“I don’t have anything to swallow. If I had a piece of ooey gooey cake I could swallow it.” I really, really want a piece of ooey gooey cake.

“You can swallow your spit.”

“Daddy, you are just yucky.”

“Here. Drink some water.”

I do, and it hurts a little bit, but I don’t want him to know because then he won’t help me make an ooey gooey cake.

“That’s what I thought,” he says, when I open my eyes after the hurt stops.

“Are you going to make me stay home from school tomorrow?”

“I am. Because it’s Saturday.”

“Does that mean I don’t get to see Ms. Harvey?”

“Saturday is the weekend, pumpkin. It’s Ms. Harvey’s day off.”

“Is it my day off, too?”

“It is.”

“And Grammy’s? She’s going to take me to look for an Easter dress.”

Daddy shakes his head and tugs at my hair. “You’re not going anywhere if you’re still sneezing.”

“I won’t be. I promise. Can you come with us, too?”

“I would love to come, but I have to work. This week I don’t get a day off till Sunday.”

“How come you have to wait till Sunday?” I don’t like it when Daddy works so much.

“Because people who don’t have to work on Saturday like to come buy chocolates. I have to be there to sell them.”

“But Lena sells them. You just make them.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“It’s just candy, Daddy. Candy IS easy. It’s not hard like ooey gooey cake.”

He moves my hair away from my face and touches the end of my nose. Then I scoot down so he can pull up my covers and tuck me in like a cozy bug in a rug before he reads me a Pete the Cat story. “If you’re running a fever in the morning, you’re staying home.”

“That’s okay, Daddy. I don’t mind.”

But I would mind if I had to miss school and not see Ms. Harvey.

Rather than sitting on Addy’s bed and leaning against the brick wall at the head as he usually did for story time, Callum perched on the edge of the mattress, figuring as bad as she felt with her allergies, and with the medicine due to kick in, he wouldn’t be here long. He was right. He didn’t even make it through half the book before she fell asleep.

Leaving her with a brush of his lips to her brow, then lingering at her doorway with a prayer that he not screw up this parenting thing, that he help her become a well-rounded, decent, and productive member of the human community, he headed for the kitchen and the small offset pantry where he stored his chocolate-making supplies.

Since opening Bliss, he rarely made candy at home. He didn’t keep any but the most basic of ingredients in the loft, and his best molds were at the shop. But there was just something about going back to his roots that settled him. And tonight he was feeling the need to be settled. Plus, he’d be seeing Brooklyn tomorrow. He’d been terse on the phone with her earlier, concerned about Addy, and he made his best apologies with chocolate.

Okay. Brooklyn didn’t date men whose kids she taught. He got it, and he could respect it, though it made for a bit of a hurdle; by the time Addy was no longer one of her students, Brooklyn would be on her way out of town. She might return, she might not, meaning he had to make sure she knew his interest went beyond last weekend’s kiss. A kiss that had thrown him far enough off-kilter he’d been afraid to touch base all week: afraid he’d gone too far and she wouldn’t want to see him again, afraid seeing her again would have them going even further when sex at this stage of the game wouldn’t be smart. She wasn’t ready, and, he feared, she was too hung up on the past.

No, the best thing to do would be get her to change her mind about leaving for good—though that wouldn’t be fair to either of them. She had to do what she had to do; he knew without a doubt she’d regret staying, and he’d regret persuading her. Her loyalty to her husband and the man’s family was admirable, and he couldn’t compete. He didn’t want to compete.

What he wanted was for her to choose him because he was the one she now wanted. At least he didn’t have to worry about physical attraction, though he’d been pretty sure all along that wouldn’t be an issue. The issue was a lot more complicated than that: his rival, though he hated thinking of a dead man that way, was a ghost, and Brooklyn still haunted.

The fruit bowl in his kitchen yielded but one lone banana. He and Addy had split the last orange this morning. He’d sent an apple for her lunch, and brought the remaining one to Bliss for her to have after school. Hmm. She must’ve left it there, too full after eating his mother’s cookies. Whatever else he did this weekend, Sunday he had to buy groceries.

The freezer contained frozen raspberries, blueberries, and cherries, the refrigerator two plump lemons. He’d already given Brooklyn the lemongrass candy, and he’d be making truffles with crème de framboise, crème de myrtille, and crème de griotte next week, so . . . Bananas, er,
Banana
Foster it was.

Digging a skillet from the cabinet, he set it on the stove, then grabbed a cutting board and a knife. Leaving those on the counter, he reached above the fridge for a bottle of dark rum and one of banana liqueur. From the pantry, he snagged the Vietnamese cinnamon he kept on hand for French toast and a box of brown sugar. The few molds he had were on the same shelf as his retired tempering machine. Retired from Bliss anyway.

The only cocoa butter he had turned out to be a jeweled ivory. Close enough to the yellow he usually used. More interested in the flavor than the color or the shape, he went with one that was a sort of trapezoidal prism. The edges and angles were great for showing off the shimmer of the shell.

He’d watched Brooklyn down the Queen Cayenne and witnessed her appreciation for the chocolate as much as the pepper’s bite. The Bananas Foster recipe yielded an equally taste-intensive experience: the caramelized brown sugar and banana, the tickle of the cinnamon, the headiness of the rum, and the extravagance of the butter and cream.

Unlike the last two candies he’d made her, this was one he kept in the shop during the summer. The ingredients brought to mind the tropics and clear skies and blue waters. He thought it appropriately symbolic of her trip to the Italian Riviera, and figured making it would show his support, when her going to Italy was the last thing he wanted.

Measuring out just enough chocolate for the half tray’s worth of filling he’d get out of his single banana, he tossed the discs into his tabletop tempering machine, then checked the bottle of cocoa butter warming in a bowl of hot water. The outer ring had melted, so shaking the seed of the solid center brought the liquid to a tempered state.

On the phone this afternoon, she’d called his daughter Addy, he mused, swirling the barest glaze of cocoa butter into the molds with his fingertip. Addy, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Obviously she’d heard him use the nickname, but she’d continued to call her Adrianne, putting up, he supposed, some sort of wall since Addy was in her class.

He wanted to change that, but didn’t want to make things hard on Brooklyn. As far as he knew, her stance on dating was her own, not a school regulation; she obviously had her reasons. He was going to have to find a way to get her to ditch them without causing her any grief.