Be Mine This Christmas

by Jean Brashear

  “Good grief, no. I’m not fit for sitting around.”

  “Wouldn’t you and Arnie like to travel? See places besides Sweetgrass Springs?”

  “Are you trying to get rid of me, young man?”

  He blushed and nearly stammered. “Of course not. We’d all be lost without you.”

  Ruby smiled, but in her heart she knew the time was coming. Arnie had brought up some trips he’d like to take her on, and though for most of her life, she’d refused to consider being anywhere but here, truth was, the survival of Sweetgrass wasn’t all on her shoulders now. Many competent and much younger hands shared the burden. She could lay hers down, and some mornings when it was awful hard to get out of bed, she wondered how it would feel to take a step back. Let the reins go.

  Her gaze skipped over to Henry, busy at the grill. He’d started here as a busboy, but he had a deft hand in the kitchen, and the garden he tended for the cafe and for Dreams had already provided a surprising bounty, considering its late start. And Jeanette was right: she could rely on Henry to take excellent care of the details. Not for the first time, she considered making him a partner, though she’d need to talk to Scarlett first. Her granddaughter was incredibly busy with her new love, her new baby and the restaurant that brought folks from miles and miles away for the exquisite cuisine served in a unique setting.

  But it had only been two years ago that Ruby had thought the cafe and Sweetgrass both might die with her. Having not one but now two generations set to follow her was a luxury she hadn’t expected to experience since the day her daughter Georgia had vanished so long ago.

  If Scarlett wanted the cafe, it would be hers.

  But Scarlett adored Henry, too, so she might be open to sharing with him.

  For a moment she scanned the crowd and thought how far they’d come in two years. Sweetgrass teemed with life and new hopes now. She loved every face she saw out there, every inch of floor and walls of this place she’d held onto with all her strength for all these years.

  “Ruby?” Henry asked from beside her. “Everything okay?”

  She emerged from her reverie and patted his shoulder. “Couldn’t be better.” She rubbed his arm. “I bless the day you walked in my front door, Henry Jansen.”

  He ducked his head, smiling. “Luckiest day of my life.”

  “Blue, you got a hankie?” Jeanette drawled from across the pass-through. “We got us a Hallmark moment in the kitchen.”

  “If you’re not careful, young lady, I’m coming around and hugging you,” Ruby retorted.

  Jeanette’s eyes were suspiciously moist even as she tossed her head. “You’d have to catch me first. How about you two do some cooking instead?”

  Ruby winked at Henry and Blue. “I believe I will do just that. What’s next?”

  Brenda’s mother Blue Fontaine clipped up the ticket. “Two specials, extra mashed potatoes. Plus Spike called and said she needs more avocados.”

  Ruby shook her head. “Henry, can you figure out how to grow her a tree or two? I swear those gamers across their way eat their weight in guacamole every day.”

  “Not the best climate,” Henry noted. “Too cold. But maybe Jackson could send a plane to Florida every day to get more.”

  Ruby sighed. “We have a few in the back, right?”

  “And delivery tomorrow,” Henry noted. “Here’s the order for Table Ten, Blue.”

  “Got it.” She grinned at Ruby as she turned with platters in her hands. “And if you need any help catching Jeanette, I’m on it.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, thank you kindly.” Ruby set down her spatula and moved toward the dining room. “Come here, young lady.”

  “I’m out of here.” Jeanette scooted off, while Henry and Ruby shared a grin.

  Spike Ridley’s phone rang, but she saw who it was and ignored it. She was just about to walk over to Ruby’s to grab more avocados for the guacamole the geeks plowed through as if they hadn’t eaten for weeks. No matter how much else they ate—and man, those skinny nerds could chow down like nothing she’d ever seen—her boys couldn’t seem to get enough of the substance. She made that and salsa by the bucketloads every week.

  I’m a pastry chef, not a line cook, she thought. But in truth, she, like everyone else at Ruby’s, pitched in wherever she was needed. She’d moved to this little burg for a change of pace from one too many temperamental big-name chefs at the encouragement of Maddie Gallagher, Scarlett’s cousin. She’d always been a have-mixer, will-travel pastry chef who enjoyed moving around, and her imagination was piqued when she learned that not only Maddie, with whom she’d worked in New York, had fallen down the rabbit hole of small town life with her own cowboy love. Not only that, but Maddie’s cousin-by-marriage Scarlett, trained in Paris, had essentially done the same. Four kids later, Maddie was still crazy in love, and Scarlett, with her first just a baby, was the same with her Ian.

  Spike sure hoped whatever they both had wasn’t catching. She’d thought long and hard before yielding to Maddie’s urging. She’d been too curious not to investigate, however, especially once she’d heard Scarlett’s plans for a high-end destination restaurant to be housed in the restored former courthouse.

  Sweetgrass Springs, to a big-city girl with piercings and tattoos, was a revelation. She still wasn’t sure why she hung around. From a career standpoint it made no sense.

  But here she was for the next little while. She never stayed anywhere long.

  She’d taken on running video game mogul Jackson Gallagher’s geek commissary while waiting for Ruby’s Dream to open. Now the restaurant was up and running, and its initial success was heartening. People came from miles away—like two hundred, even—to sample Scarlett’s astonishing fare. Her own desserts were gaining a rep, too, and she could have easily opened a bakery if she so desired.

  She could go back to New York or San Francisco. If she wanted to stay in Texas, Austin was a foodie heaven and she’d be welcomed there, she’d already been assured by rival chefs who’d sniffed out her presence in this tiny burg.

  So why was she still here in this podunk little place, so far off the map it was a wonder that all of them didn’t get lost?

  Her phone rang again, and she knew her mother would keep trying until Spike gave in. With a sigh, she answered. “Hello, Mother.”

  “Darling,” came the ultra-cultured dulcet tones of the aristocrat Elaine Ridley Rossman would have been had she lived in an earlier time and a different country. She was the next thing to American royalty, a society maven who had once been the stellar debutante of her day.

  And she had an unregenerate goth child who continued to disappoint her.

  “Phoebe, darling, you must come home.”

  For a second, Spike’s heart clutched. “What’s wrong? Is Grams ill?” Her grandmother was the only person in her family who attempted to understand her, but she was Spike’s paternal grandmother, and her father had been dead for nearly ten years. Her mother had wasted no time remarrying a truly blue-blooded man to make up for her earlier lapse in judgment when Derek Ridley’s charisma had overcome her ambitions.

  Spike stifled a little shudder at the thought of her patrician mother having sex with a man whose earthy nature must have—

  Don’t go there.

  “As far as I know, your grandmother Dorothea is fine. She’ll outlive us all.”

  Spike fervently hoped so. Her grandmother—who preferred to be called Dot, anyway—was the one tie that could lure her back to that privileged world in which she’d been raised. But Grams, though likely able to buy and sell Elaine’s current husband several times over, didn’t cotton to the elitist lifestyle Spike’s mother preferred. Grams was old money New England, and that meant not flaunting it. Spike didn’t think she’d bought new furniture since she married her long-dead husband, and her clothes were well-made but classic in their styling.

  Neither woman, however, understood why Spike had rebelled so far as to get pierced and tattooed in flagrant disavowal of the
debutante she was supposed to be. The difference was that Grams found it amusing and loved Spike in spite of it. She’d even bent so far as to learn to call her Spike, the name chosen to be as opposite Phoebe as humanly possible.

  Elaine would never unbend.

  “If no one’s ill, I’m very busy at work and can’t possibly come.” She didn’t say come home because the tony Connecticut countryside where she’d been raised was anything but.

  Her mother could learn a lesson or two from Sweetgrass Springs.

  Spike couldn’t stop a huge grin at the thought of Elaine and Ruby meeting up.

  “But it’s Christmas.”

  “And so it has been every year this time. It’s a busy time in the food industry.”

  She could almost see her mother shudder. Why a daughter of hers was cooking for a living was possibly as incomprehensible as the body art. Oh, it would have been all right if Spike had chosen to cook gourmet meals to entertain friends and family instead of employing a cook, as long as she kept up her social obligations.

  Kill me now. Spike could barely breathe for thinking of the rarified atmosphere in which she’d been raised. Her father had provided room to grow as long as he was alive. He’d let her be the tomboy she was, had taught her to shoot and ride and play a bruising game of field hockey to offset the hours she’d been expected to learn social graces and waste her life on fittings and manicures and cotillion.

  But once he was gone, there was no one to relieve the smothering pressure of Elaine’s expectations, and Spike had begun to spend more and more time at her grandmother’s.

  It was there that she’d learned to cook. Learned the joy of making people happy with food and exercising her creativity. Not from the grandmother who’d always employed a cook, however. Grams’s house in Greenwich was not that hard to sneak out of at night. Grams slept deeply, while Spike had roamed to the grubbier side of Stamford. She’d made friends of busboys and line cooks smoking on back steps of cafes that were little more than dives, and she’d learned a whole new world of preparing food. In return, she’d made some of the desserts she’d tested out in Grams’s kitchen, and head cooks had repaid her in food Elaine would have died to see her eating—along with money Spike had used to get her first couple of tattoos.

  Those embarrassed her now, so sweet and innocent, but she’d kept the unicorn and the rose because they were her first steps out into the world beyond her mother’s ivy prison.

  “Darling, it doesn’t look good for you to never come home. Everyone’s children return home at Christmas, at least now and then.”

  Elaine would die before she said I miss you, and truthfully, Spike wasn’t sure her mother did. She might miss the idea of her daughter, but not the reality. Elaine was all about appearances, and Spike realized with a jolt that she felt sorry for her mother instead of the years of anger and rebellion that had been her only emotions. Well, that and the why can’t you love me for who I am that she’d once let herself ask.

  Elaine’s icy You’ll come to your senses one day; I only hope it’s not too late was all she’d gotten.

  Mostly Elaine made her tired now. “I shipped the presents already. I’m sorry, but I’m needed here.”

  Elaine’s disapproval and disdain spoke loudly in her silence. “Very well. Goodbye, Phoebe.” She closed with her mantra. “I hope you come to your senses before it’s too late.”

  Too late for what? For me to fall in line and be who you want me to be? Hated tears pricked at her eyes, but she would not let them be heard. “Goodbye, Mother.”

  But Elaine was already gone.

  “You have a mother?” Big D the geek said from the doorway in incredulous tones, exaggerated for effect. “I thought you were sprung straight from the forehead of the Pastry God for sure.”

  But his eyes were kind, this odd friend of hers. “He would have approved of me, at least.”

  “Parents. Can’t live with ’em, can’t get born without ’em.” He slung a collegial arm around her shoulders. “Life’s a bitch. Does this mean no more guacamole tonight? I can’t really think straight without it.”

  She shook her head and grinned. “Jackson would never forgive me if his geeks stopped thinking straight. And heaven knows what mischief you’d get up to instead.”

  “Absolutely right. Move it, kid. We got avocados to rescue from the jaws of mere cowboys. Though I saw through the window that your head honey Billy Ritter just showed up at Ruby’s, and I hear he can eat his weight in Tex-Mex.”

  “He’s not my honey.” Though Ian McLaren’s foreman was awfully hot in a cowboy kind of way.

  “He hasn’t gotten the memo. But never fear—I’ll protect you from the big, bad cowboy and his dark and dangerous brother.”

  Since Big D was five foot eight and one hundred thirty pounds soaking wet, she wasn’t reassured.

  Billy’s brother Cal probably looked her type, all badass and sexy, more than Billy did. Once upon a time, Cal was exactly who she’d have gone for, in order to fulfill her mother’s worst fears. She’d heard wisps of stories about him, how he’d been in constant trouble until he’d graduated, how he’d wound up in the military doing something dangerous. But there was an aura about him, something haunted and grim. Ian said he was a hard worker, but he was also clear that he didn’t expect Cal to hang around.

  Cal was her male counterpart, she realized. Just like her, he’d be gone without warning.

  He’d be perfect to have a scorching affair with. He’d never tie her down.

  Too bad it was Billy who had more of her attention than she wished. Oh, he looked a little dangerous himself, with his tough build, his dark brown hair always tousled as though some woman’s fingers had run through it, his caramel eyes shaded by lashes so thick any girl would die for them. But there was a kindness to him that shone through, never mind that he’d barely spoken two words to her since she’d arrived in town. For all she knew, he might be mute. Or maybe only as shy with her as Henry Jansen had been with Brenda Jones, at least once upon a time.

  Now Henry and Brenda were the cutest couple Spike had ever seen, all shy blushes and stolen kisses, and pretty much inseparable. It was almost as if love floated in the air here in Sweetgrass Springs, ready to steal your breath—and then your heart.

  Fortunately she was immune.

  “I like this crazy town,” she sighed.

  “It does grow on you for sure,” Big D responded. “At least when I’m not too faint from hunger to feel it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, bottomless pit. Let’s go get some supplies.”

  “Now you’re talking.”

  Gib’s night was not the least bit restful. Instead he lay awake, his mind awhirl with images of the young Dulcie, so soft and sweet, yet capable of a deceit he’d never imagined. Those dreams were interwoven with ones of the woman he’d just encountered, still beautiful in his eyes but burdened in more ways than the four children she’d towed with her. Sweetgrass was a small town, and Aunt Nita had filled in some of the details he was driven to know. Dulcie had been back for several months, but he’d never been told. He understood that his aunt had been trying to save him heartache.

  He’d have said his heart was just fine.

  Until tonight. Until he’d seen her again.

  Dulcie was a teacher, just as she’d always wanted to be. He would never have asked her to give that up. He’d had everything figured out, how their lives would proceed. All she’d had to do was join him in Charlotte as they’d planned.

  He veered away from the bitterness that threatened. He was trying hard not to judge her, even though the very sight of her had been a knife to the heart and brought back everything he’d spent years burying: the rage, the ache, the emptiness. Most of all, the questions.

  She was still so damn beautiful. Hers had always been a quiet beauty, but it had been a lodestone to his heart. She was thinner now—he’d like to feed her. Give her rest. Hold her close and kiss those sweet lips until she made that soft noise he—

&nbs
p; No.

  He would see her again, talk to her. Despite her obvious reluctance to be around him, he would force her to explain. He’d found out where she lived and, most importantly, that she was a widow, so there would be no husband to block him from seeing her. From asking her why she’d broken up with him. Why she’d destroyed their dream.

  Why does it matter? one part of him asked.

  Gib shook his head. Because apparently he wasn’t as over her as he’d thought. Hell.

  Well, she might not want to see him, but he was going over there, anyway, at least once. He spent the remainder of the night analyzing. Strategizing. All things he was very, very good at.

  As dawn rose, Gib wasn’t rested, but somehow he still found himself full of energy. He hadn’t gotten where he was by being timid. He was cautious with his money and, since Dulcie, had been guarded with his heart. But in racing, he had never been afraid to take a chance.

  Plus he had an ace in the hole: Torie. Clearly a diehard fan and gearhead in the making. What mother, even one less loving than Dulcie, would deny her child a chance at a dream? There were all sorts of strings Gib could pull to give Torie a leg up, and if he had to use Dulcie’s daughter as an excuse to see Dulcie again, he wouldn’t hesitate.

  He picked up his phone and started making plans.

  Chapter Two

  The next evening, Dulcie was just beginning dinner while supervising Andre’s homework and placating a hungry Bobby with slices of apple when she heard Lily call out from the living room. “Mommy, it’s that man.”

  “What man, honey?” A shiver ran through her. Please, no. No.

  “Mom! It’s him! It’s Gib Douglas at our front door!” Torie sounded as if she’d just sighted her favorite rock star or maybe Santa Claus, though neither of them would have thrilled her half so much.

  Dulcie checked the pots on the stove and made certain the handles were turned inward. “Andre, you work on that second math—” Her shoulders sank. Andre had dropped his pencil and raced for the front door.