Just Desserts

by Barbara Bretton

  Despite her proclaimed lack of regard for material pleasures, Jane preferred Egyptian cotton sheets, organic vegetables, and French milled soaps. Hayley’s sheets were Kmart blue-light specials. Her vegetables came straight from ShopRite and her soap was Dial or Irish Spring, depending which brand was on sale.

  Aunt Fiona was a bit of a snob too when it came to domestic pleasures. She also lived alone and had a beautifully decorated guest room at the ready. Why Jane hadn’t opted to stay with her sister was a mystery to everyone.

  Then again, that wasn’t the only mystery she had bumped into lately.

  “I told you Finn Rafferty liked you.”

  “Of course he likes me,” Hayley said. “I’m a likable person.”

  “You know what I mean. He likes likes you.”

  “Don’t go reading anything into Chinese food, Lizzie.” She tucked away the memory of his lovemaking to savor later in private. “At first I thought he came down here to back out of the deal.”

  “No way.”

  “I had the feeling all afternoon that there was something he wanted to tell me but every time I thought he was about to spill it, he changed the subject.”

  “So why didn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. At first he didn’t want to go downstairs and see how things were going on the job but I pushed—better to catch problems now than later—and he spent a long time inspecting the prelim drawings.”

  “They’re way cool,” Lizzie said around a mouthful of food. “You’re an artist, Mom. You could hang those drawings in a gallery.”

  Hayley had no false modesty about her artistic ability. Her talent was what had propelled her through school, not her academic achievements. “I don’t think he was really seeing any of it. It was like he was looking past them and thinking of a way to let me down gently.”

  “Well, he didn’t.”

  “No,” Hayley said as the memory of her rumpled bed blossomed before her eyes. “He certainly didn’t.”

  Like spontaneous combustion, the heat had flared between them, burning away everything but the feel of his mouth against hers, the rough, sweet touch of his hands on her body.

  But as much as she would love to believe he had driven four hours for the pleasure of her company, she was a realist and she knew there had been something else going on. The chemistry between them was just a bonus, one that neither of them had expected.

  She had spent the last few years maintaining a sharp focus and she couldn’t afford to lose it now when it was finally starting to pay off.

  No more Chinese food deliveries. No more naked men in hot-pink towels. No flirty e-mails, IMs, or phone calls. And definitely no long, deep kisses that made a woman forget her name.

  For the next couple of days she was going to be all about the work, but once that after-party was over…

  RAINBOWGIRL is online

  RAINBOWGIRL: Dad, r u here?

  RAINBOWGIRL: Dad? u didn’t answer my last email I’m getting worried

  RAINBOWGIRL timed out

  East Hampton—the Next Morning

  It was only nine o’clock and already the day was out of control.

  Finn had fielded a skirmish between Tommy and his sons, renegotiated the insurance contract with the airport, and participated in a major slugfest with the musician’s union rep in Atlantic City. At least it wasn’t a regular tour date, which involved a minimum of fifteen tour buses to haul the set, the musicians, and the roadies. The contracts surrounding that endeavor were enough to make a lawyer long for the days of the handshake deal.

  Tommy’s manager usually handled the special dressing-room requests part of the package but that nasty job had fallen to Finn this time around. There was something humbling about requesting twenty bottles of Poland Spring, two bowls of Cheez-Its, and a fridge stocked with Grey Goose and Yoo-hoo for a grown man.

  He had been on his way to the kitchen for caffeine reinforcements when Amber, Tommy’s eldest by his first wife, waylaid him five feet from the coffee machine.

  Like her father, Amber had married young but so far her marriage seemed to be rock solid.

  “She’s horrible!” She griped to Finn as he poured himself a cup of coffee. “Somebody’s got to talk some sense into Dad before it’s too late. The thought of that walking boob job as my stepmother makes me want to secede from the family.”

  “Willow is high-strung,” Finn said, marveling at his own mastery of understatement. Maybe it had something to do with not getting any sleep. “You remember what the first trimester was like. Add a wedding to that and you get—”

  “A first-class bitch. Don’t go making excuses for her, Finn. All she does is talk about that ridiculous prenup she’s so worried about. If she loved Dad, she wouldn’t be working it so hard, would she? I mean, everyone on the planet knows he’s a pushover when it comes to his family. It’s not like he wouldn’t be fair.”

  He caught sight of Jilly, Anton, and three of the backup dancers walking up from the beach.

  “We went over this before.” He led her into Tommy’s office at the back of the house and out of the line of fire. “The prenup is in your father’s best interests.” He let that sink in for maybe the fiftieth time. “We need to protect his assets, Amber, and sometimes the process can take a while.”

  “I don’t see why.” She flopped down onto the huge leather couch by the window and for a second Finn was reminded of the little girl who had followed him around the mansion like a shadow when he first moved in years ago. “It’s not like this is his first time.”

  He sat on the edge of Tommy’s glass-and-bleached-oak desk. “Every situation is different. Willow’s pregnant with Tom’s child. That complicates everything.” It was all about his kids, he explained to Amber. Tommy wanted to make sure their share of his assets would remain protected.

  Amber rolled her huge blue-green eyes. “Isn’t it about time somebody spoke to him about family planning? I love my sibs but this is getting ridiculous!”

  She smiled when she said it and Finn smiled back at her. “You know what I’m not saying, right?”

  “Yes, and I’m going out of the baby business as soon as number three is born,” she said, cradling her barely visible bump. “I mean, is he going to be seeding the crops when he’s in his eighties?”

  All of Tommy’s kids shared his quick temper and even quicker willingness to forgive and forget. It was one of the things he liked best about the Stiles family.

  “Why are you looking at me that way? It’s the new haircut, isn’t it? I told Jilly I wanted something different but—”

  He shook his head. “Sorry. I was just thinking how much like Tommy you are.”

  And how much like Hayley. After spending a day with her yesterday, he saw more similarities now than before. A way of speaking, of moving, those beautiful blue-green eyes that all of his children shared.

  “I’m worried,” she said, leaning back into the squashy sofa. “The way Willow’s dragging her feet…I just know she’s up to something.”

  “She’s not up to anything. Blame it on her lawyer and me. We’re ironing a few things out, that’s all. Give it another week or two and everything will be clear.” Probably too clear once they found out about Hayley and Lizzie, but they would deal with that problem when they got to it.

  “I don’t know why you just don’t hand her a settlement and be done with it. Is there anyone who actually believes this marriage has a chance in hell of lasting longer than it takes for the baby to be christened?”

  “Your father believes.”

  Amber sighed loudly. “The man’s sixty—”

  “Fifty-nine.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fifty-nine and counting. Shouldn’t he have learned something about old men and the young women who pretend to love them by now?”

  “Somebody else made that same observation to me recently and I’ll tell you what I told her: he’s an optimist. He keeps on believing no matter what.”

  “‘…What I told her?’” Am
ber’s eyebrows were practically on the ceiling. “You’re seeing someone! Since when?”

  “I’m not seeing anyone.” He hesitated. He hated these gray areas of half-truth. Especially with someone who was like family to him. “I saw her once. Yesterday. I don’t know where it’s going.”

  “So that’s why you weren’t answering your phone yesterday!”

  “I answered the phone. Ask your father. He called often enough.”

  “I phoned around six thirty and it went straight to voice mail.”

  “You didn’t leave a message.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Nobody you know.”

  “Is she from around here?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh.” She looked disappointed. “I was hoping you were interested in Susan Endicott from the bank.”

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “The short redhead in mortgages.”

  He couldn’t put a face to the name or the description. “Why would you think I was interested in her?”

  “I don’t know.” Amber shrugged. “She’s good-looking, funny, and she asked about you.” She aimed a look in his direction. “I guess I was hoping.”

  “You don’t have anything better to do than try to hook me up with a banker?”

  “We’ve already tried to hook you up with a real estate agent, a dancer, a nurse, and enough freelance writers to start a women’s basketball team. What are you looking for, a stripper with a Ph.D. in nuclear physics?”

  “She lives in New Jersey,” he offered. “She owns her own business. She has a kid.” And wit, ambition, a sense of humor, great legs…

  “That’s it?”

  “No, but that’s all you’re getting.”

  Amber’s younger sister Beryl, known to the family as the human whirlwind, burst into the room. Beryl was a jewelry designer who believed there was no part of the human body that couldn’t benefit from adornment, a belief system that had led to some strange situations at airport security checkpoints.

  “Damn it, Am! Thanks for leaving me with five car seats to cram into the limo. Do you know how long it takes to get five—not two or three, we’re talking five—of those things secured? I had to rope poor Anton into helping me corral the kids. Your two actually made the poor man break into a sweat. It wasn’t a pretty sight.”

  Finn laughed out loud. “I would’ve paid to see that.”

  Beryl wagged a finger in his direction. “Just you wait, Finn Rafferty! One day you’ll be wrestling with a car seat and we’ll be the ones laughing.”

  “Only if I’m setting it up for one of your brood.”

  “Finn’s seeing someone,” Amber interrupted. “I think he really likes her.”

  “Since when?” Beryl asked him.

  “Go ahead.” He tossed it to Amber. “You seem to have all the answers.”

  “She’s not from around here,” Amber said, ignoring him, “and she has a kid.”

  Beryl’s eyes were alight with curiosity. “When are we going to meet her?”

  “Don’t you two have five kids in restraints waiting for you?”

  “He’s trying to change the subject,” Amber said.

  “You think?” Beryl turned back to Finn. “You’re lucky we’re on the limo clock, faux brother, otherwise we’d get the truth out of you.”

  “Not a chance,” he said.

  “Nothing I like better than a challenge.” Beryl planted a sisterly kiss on his cheek. “Your secrets aren’t safe from me!” She was out the door before he could think up a retort.

  Amber tugged his hair in her familiar good-bye gesture then whispered in his ear, “Please, I beg you, do something about Willow before she asks us to call her Mom!”

  “I don’t think you have to worry,” Finn said. “Just be patient. This will all get sorted out.”

  He watched from the window in Tommy’s office as the two women dashed across the crushed shell driveway and climbed into the limo that had been transformed for the occasion into an oversized minivan crowded with kids, toys, suitcases, juice bottles, diaper bags.

  The driver beeped the horn twice and he saw Beryl waving from the open window as they rolled down the driveway. Topaz, the youngest of Tommy’s three daughters from his first marriage, was driving up from Virginia where she was studying for a master’s in music therapy.

  Winston and Zach had wanted to ride down on the bus with the band and the roadies but Tommy wasn’t having any of it. They had been ordered to take the jet down to A.C. with their father. Only the teenage sons of a rock star would deem that cruel and inhuman punishment. Little Gigi and her mother, Margaux, were in Philadelphia visiting Margaux’s parents. They would join the party Thursday morning at the hotel.

  Willow was threatening to boycott the benefit concert and sulk alone at Tommy’s Manhattan loft but Finn knew that the prospect of major press coverage rendered her threat moot.

  Once a supermodel, always a supermodel.

  If there was a camera within fifty yards, her face would be in the viewfinder. She would be working her pregnancy to its best advantage, angling for her own Demi Moore series of covers, while Hayley, who deserved the attention, worked fifteen-hour days and crossed her fingers that her Cinderella moment would last long enough to pay next month’s rent and keep Lizzie in private school.

  She hadn’t a clue that in a few days her worries would be over.

  He just wished he could feel happier about that fact.

  17

  Goldy’s Bakery—Tuesday Morning

  “You don’t have to bite my head off!” Maureen glared at Hayley across the kitchen. “All I did was ask if the new bricks of yeast are in yet.”

  “This is the third time you’ve asked today,” Hayley said, feeling both peevish and repentant. “I’m not holding the yeast hostage, Mo. You’ll be the first to know when it gets here. I promise.”

  “They don’t have this kind of trouble at Abruzzo’s in High Point.”

  It was all Hayley could do to keep from lobbing a ball of fondant at the woman. “Mo, you’ve been threatening to leave us for Abruzzo’s since Daddy Stan was alive. If you want to go, go. We’ll miss you but I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

  “Who said I was unhappy?” Maureen snapped. “All I said was where’s the yeast.”

  If it wasn’t the yeast, it was the starter for the sourdough or the vanilla extract imported from Madagascar. Maureen was a gifted baker whose pronounced diva tendencies sometimes turned the kitchen inside out. Her husband Frank coped with it by kneading bread dough with the kind of passion usually reserved for a heavyweight prizefight. The bread was great and so was his blood pressure.

  Which was more than could be said for Hayley’s that morning.

  She put down her whisk and walked over to where Maureen was glaring at an innocent carton of eggs.

  “I’m sorry, Mo. I’m a cranky bitch today. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to be the one to point it out but you’re definitely bitchy today. I told Frank you were probably PMSing.”

  She told herself not to dwell on the fact that her employees were discussing her menstrual cycle over their coffee break.

  “I’m not PMSing,” she said with the most nonhormonal smile she could muster. “Michie called in sick, Abbie is on a scheduled personal day, I forgot I was scheduled to speak at Career Day this afternoon at St. Barnabas, and if the rolled fondant doesn’t arrive by one o’clock, I just might be forced to drive up to Whippany and kick some serious supplier butt. I am not PMSing.” She paused for breath. “What I am is freaking out.”

  “Okay,” Maureen said in an uncharacteristically meek tone of voice. “That’s fine.”

  Frank gave the mound of dough in front of him on the workbench an extra hard punch with the heel of his hand.

  “Go ahead,” she said to Frank. “You can look at your wife. I know I sound like a crazy woman but I’m not dangerous and it isn’t personal. You can even roll your e
yes if you won’t. I don’t mind.”

  “I wasn’t going to roll my eyes,” Frank denied.

  “Yes, you were.” Maureen was all about contradicting her husband. As far as Hayley could see it was one of the cornerstones of their forty-plus-year marriage.

  They were so busy bickering they didn’t notice when Hayley stepped away. Escaped was probably a better word for it. What was with everyone? From the moment she flipped the CLOSED sign to OPEN yesterday morning, the questions and looks and whispers had been flying thick and fast. Let one nosy neighbor find you rolling around in the mud with a handsome stranger from New York and watch all hell break loose.

  Patsy Coletti wanted to know if he was one of Michael’s creditors who played a little rough.

  Frank O’Donnell told Jerry Weinstein that Marie DiFranco heard Hayley tell Finn she would see him Thursday in Atlantic City, which started a line of conjecture that reached all the way into Lizzie’s high school classroom.

  What could she do but tell the truth?

  Now the whole town knew she was making some special cakes for Tommy Stiles’s after-party and the clamor for tickets was almost deafening. “I’m baking for Tommy Stiles,” she told her neighbors, “not hanging with him. If you want a world-class chocolate mousse cake with a ganache to die for, call me. If you want tickets for the show, you’d better call the box office.”

  “Listen to Miss High and Mighty,” Joe Whetstone had said loud enough for her to hear. “She probably has a fistful of free passes. Remember the night her aunt Fiona found her in the backseat with Mikey G? She wasn’t such a big shot then.”

  And I remember the time your check for six dollars bounced and you refused to pay the bank charges on it, Joe Whetstone. One more Miss High and Mighty remark and I’m going to blow your cover.

  She didn’t remember anyone banging down her door for tickets to the Governor’s Reception last year or for the Moonlight Benefit Gala for the Medical Center at Princeton.

  But bring out a rock star and suddenly everyone’s your friend. Or at least they were your friend until you said no. Half the people in town were angry with her and the other half were disappointed. Even Mrs. Lonergan from church, a woman who had waved good-bye to seventy-five a long time ago, had muttered something unprintable when Hayley tried to explain the situation.