Love Finds You in Hershey, Pennsylvania (24 page)

The phone calls piled up, countless failed recipes overflowed from the trash, and Kylie asked Jasper several times when they were going to start seeing Mommy again. But each time he hoped Sadie might relent, something would set her off once more and she’d start baking from scratch in an effort to conquer what seemed to be the impossible. The nearer they drew to the day of the competition, the worse her moods became until Jasper finally just stopped answering the phone and popping into the kitchen to check on her. He felt as if they were on the Great Bear roller coaster at Hersheypark, just holding on with all their might and praying that the ride might be over soon.

When Mac braved a visit one night, he unknowingly provided Jasper and Kylie with a much-needed taste-testing respite. Sadie spooned three different chocolate puddings onto his palate and then forced a cocoa cream puff down his throat. He winced when her back was turned but wisely mumbled, “I think you might have something there,” when asked how her recipes measured up.

Upon emerging from the scene of destruction, he calmly asked Jasper for a bottle of Mylanta and spent the remainder of the evening watching TV with Kylie and dividing his time between the Mylanta and a roll of Mentos to attempt to clear the taste from his mouth.

With Kylie engaged by her grandfather, Jasper was left free and without excuse not to answer the phone, although he cringed with every ring that sounded. For the most part, he screened the calls as best he could; unless it was someone from the restaurant, he made his apologies and declined to disturb Sadie in the kitchen. But when Lucinda Lowell called concerning the details for Sadie’s entry in the competition that weekend, Jasper knew he had to steel himself for a visit to the kitchen. He politely asked Lucinda to hold, drew a deep breath and, as the theme song to
The Swan Princess
built to a crescendo in the other room, entered Sadie’s domain.

She stood at the counter with her hands in a mixing bowl, up to her elbows in chocolate glaze. A coating of confectioner’s sugar lay so thickly on her head she looked as though she’d gone prematurely gray. The kitchen counters were splattered with a variety of cocoa-brown splotches in varying states of congealed puddles. The mixer, a host of ingredients, and nearly every piece of cookware Sadie owned lay strewn about, and in a mound of crumpled paper around the waste bin were the remains of failed recipes from the week’s experimentation.

Sadie didn’t look up as he entered the room but continued to whip the glaze in the mixing bowl. Jasper cleared his throat, to no avail. Sadie’s lips were moving in silent calculation, but the only sound was the rattle of the bowl as it rolled against the counter from the force of her movements.

“Sadie?”

She was oblivious to his interruption. He coughed, bit his lip, debated whether to return to take a message from Lucinda, and then figured he’d try again.

“Umm…Sadie? There’s a telephone call for you.”

Her head shot up in sudden attention, like a lion smelling prey nearby. Jasper, having never been a very big fan of the Discovery Channel, wished he had left well enough alone. He didn’t like the feral gleam in Sadie’s eye.

“
What
…did you say?”

He knew then that breaking her concentration was the worst mistake he could have made. He shuffled his feet, ran a worried hand through his perpetually disheveled hair, and then dug his fists deep into the pockets of his jeans.

“Uh…telephone’s for you?” He offered it as though it were the answer to a quiz question, and he had a fleeting appreciation for what his fifth-grade class felt when he called one of them to answer a tough question on the spot.

Fortunately for his students, he never reacted with the response Sadie fired at him now. She exploded like one of her desserts from the oven.

“How many times do I have to say it
? Absolutely, positively,
no
unnecessary interruptions!”
She threw the entire bowl of glaze she’d been working on—spatula, whisk, and all—into the sink.

Jasper realized then how poorly timed his intrusion really was. Lucinda had called right in the midst of another dessert disaster.

“This is my life’s work at stake!” she continued to rant. “And the entire world has suddenly chosen
this week
to lob itself at my doorstep!”

She raised a sugar-coated finger and pointed at him with all the chilling haughtiness of Martha Stewart on a bad day. He felt very much as though he deserved to be flushed down the volcano along with Malibu Ken’s leg. “And
you
! Jasper, of all people,
you
should know better! I would have thought
you
could understand how important this is to me!”

He sighed but didn’t interrupt. At least he knew that much.

“I simply cannot accept any interruptions at this crucial stage— the competition is this weekend…
this weekend
, Jasper! Now get back in there”—her finger shifted to the door—“and
take…a…message
.”

Jasper ducked out without even offering an apology. It was like
Chefs Gone Wild
. If he had taped the entire thing, he could have at least sold the past three weeks as a viable reality series. He was sure of it.

Returning to the hall, he noticed that the television had fallen silent. He hoped to high heaven Mac had removed Kylie from the room so she hadn’t been forced to listen to Attila the Pastry Chef in there. It was as if they’d been treated to a real-life reenactment of
Saving Private Ryan
. He prayed it hadn’t carried through the telephone receiver.

Jasper picked it up and cleared his throat.

“Uh, Lucinda? Yeah, Sadie can’t come to the phone right now. Perhaps you could give me the details of where she needs to take her entry, and I…uh…can get back to you on…um…what type of dessert she’s going to be making.”

As Jasper scribbled down Lucinda’s instructions, he repeated what she said. He knew that if he valued his life then he needed to copy down the words verbatim. Over the course of his conversation, he became vaguely aware that things had grown deathly silent in the kitchen. Studying his handwritten notes, he tried to ignore his feeling of dread as he read back to Lucinda, “Take her entry to the church’s fellowship hall kitchen.”

“JASPER!”

Sadie’s indignant yelp startled him so much he dropped the phone. It clattered to the hardwood floor with a rattle, and Sadie yelped again in dismay.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was about the competition?”

Her words were a stage whisper, but the fury in them was clear. He was beginning to feel like one of those sad desserts he’d been catching glimpses of all week—deflated, bitter, and scorched. The desserts couldn’t do anything right, and neither could he.

Sadie rescued the phone, miraculously intact, and as Lucinda’s concerned, “Hello? Jasper, are you there?” came through the receiver, Sadie gave Jasper a glare so sharp that it felt like Furi knives slicing him to paper-fine strips.

But when Sadie spoke into the phone, her voice was the stuff of angel food cake: soft, sweet, and light.

“Lucinda? It’s Sadie. So sorry about that—Jasper failed to tell me it was you.”

Another knife-slashing glance.

“…phone dropped, yes. So, anyway, you were saying?”

As Sadie took down the details herself this time, Jasper stood to the side, arms folded and eyes narrowed. Sadie scribbled Lucinda’s instructions down furiously, completely oblivious to Jasper’s expression.

When the phone was laid to rest in the cradle once more, she stared at the notes she had written for such an inestimable length of time that Jasper’s frustration slowly ebbed to a soft pricking and not the piercing gash it had been several moments before.

He watched as Sadie raised a palm to shield her eyes, as though by blocking out Lucinda’s message she could erase the strain the past few weeks had cost her. Jasper’s frustration melted completely at the sight, and he quickly stepped forward to lay his hands on her shoulders. She jerked in surprise and glanced at him. She hadn’t even known he’d been standing there all this time.

“Oh,” she softly muttered. He worked his fingers into her shoulder blades, his pity swelling even more as he felt the mounds of knots pinching her nerves.

She sighed happily and dropped her chin to her chest to signal that he could continue for as long as he desired. He worked out a few kinks, mentally made a note to buy Sadie a gift certificate to the Hershey Hotel’s Chocolate Spa for her next birthday, and then wrapped his arms around her waist from behind, tucking her firmly against him.

She kept her head lowered as he nuzzled her neck.

“So tired…,” she mumbled sleepily and then dispelled a massive yawn.

“You’ve been working hard,” he murmured, before planting a row of kisses behind her ear. She shivered a little.

“I just can’t get it right,” she spoke more to herself than to him.

“You will,” he recklessly stated, at the moment far more interested in the curve of her jawline than the sampling of desserts that had passed through the kitchen.

“You don’t know that,” she declared somewhat snappishly.

“Sure,” he whispered distractedly, “you’ll get it right. And if not, what’s it matter? It’s only dessert… .”

Had he been in a more cognizant state of mind, Jasper would have been fully aware of what he was saying. But tempted by Sadie’s warmth and the tangy taste of the perspiration along her forehead mingling with the sweet layer of confectioner’s sugar, he wasn’t paying complete attention.

“It’s only dessert?”

“Mmm-hmm,” he mumbled as he continued to press his lips along her hairline.

“Only dessert?”

“Not that important at all,” he foolishly replied, as he marveled at the softness of her skin. He was in the midst of contemplating what sort of flavor of truffle Sadie might be, were she in fact a candy and not a flesh-and-blood woman, when the next thing he knew, the phone’s message pad was slammed against his ear with resounding force.

“It is
not
just a competition! Don’t you get it?”

Jasper took a step back, rubbed his ear, and desperately tried to cast his mind backward over the last three minutes to figure out what he’d said to put the savage glitter back in Sadie’s eyes.

“No, I do, Sadie—I do get it! I know how important this is to you… .” He stretched out his arm in reconciliation. She slapped it away.

“You just said it wasn’t important at all!”

“I did?” He bit the inside of his cheek. It did sound familiar— something about importance when he was really thinking just how important it was that Sadie had such sweet-tasting ears. He winced as her words sank in. “I didn’t mean it wasn’t important…not exactly, anyway…but Sadie…”

Whoa, boy. It was probably just sugar, but it looked as though steam were puffing out her ears.

“There
is
the matter of priorities,” he gently protested in his defense.

Wow. He didn’t know her nostrils could flare like that.

A long, deafening silence stretched between them. To his horror, Jasper watched as tears filled Sadie’s eyes.

“You don’t think I can do it, do you?” she sniffled.

“Sadie,” Jasper softly pleaded, “you know that’s not what I meant.”

She hiccupped and ran a palm against her cheek, catching the droplets that flowed from her eyes and creating a sticky paste of sugar and water against her skin.

“Why doesn’t anyone believe in me?” she questioned, more to herself than to him.

“Aw, Sadie…” He stepped forward, his own frustration forgotten in the face of her vulnerability. “Come here.”

She didn’t hesitate stepping into the warmth of his embrace, burying her face in his chest, and leaving several sugary imprints against his T-shirt.

“Shh,” he soothed, as he ran his hands over her smooth hair. “It’ll be all right,” he consoled.

She dug her face in deeper, and he briefly wondered how she could breathe.

“You’ve just been totally stressed out the last few weeks,” he excused her.

“Butter half tu-tu dis,” she protested to his chest.

He wrapped his hands gently around her shoulders and drew her back a little so that her mouth was free to speak.

“Run that by me again.”

Her brown eyes swam with desperation. “But I have to do this,” she repeated, this time in distinct tones. She leaned forward once more, this time resting her cheek against his chest.

He didn’t understand why the dessert thing was so important to her, but he accepted it. At the same time, he didn’t know how to help her past her desperate attempts to be something she was not meant to be. If loving her unconditionally wasn’t enough, then what was?

She melted against him in slow degrees. The television had started humming once more in the other room, and Jasper recognized the theme song to one of Kylie’s favorite cartoons. Sadie sighed, and he sensed she might finally be relaxing. He stroked his fingers up and down her back to calm her and hoped it was having the proper effect.

After a while he thought maybe now was the time to broach a subject that had lain heavily on him for the past couple of weeks. He had received a phone call weeks ago, something that could change everything for him and for Sadie, but up until now, he had found no opportune time to share his news with her. He could hardly compete with the smoke alarm or homemade chocolate icing, not in Sadie’s world anyway.

But with Sadie tucked tightly against him and the competition momentarily forgotten, perhaps he could hope for some measure of rationality when he announced his news to her.

“Listen, Sadie…there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”

She snuggled closer, wrapping her arms around his waist and sighing contentedly. He felt a small trickle of relief at this.

“Now, before you jump to conclusions, I just want you to know that nothing has been decided yet. There’s still plenty of time for us to weigh the options and make a decision.”

Sadie swayed a little on her feet, and he hoped she wasn’t so exhausted she’d fall asleep on him.

“The truth is, I’m not really sure how I feel about it, but…well… I might as well just go ahead and tell you.”