Soft Spot: A Hale Street Novella
Page 12
The vanilla cupcakes, surrounded by silver wrappers, were topped with white frosting puffed upward to impossible heights and finished off with a pink rosette. Violet carefully pulled off the wrapper. She hadn’t eaten since early morning, and that had been… She thought about that. A cereal bar. The salad her assistant procured for lunch had sat on her desk until the lettuce shriveled at the edges and the dressing congealed into a thick paste. Looking forward to the taste, Violet bit big and promptly grimaced. Ew.
Ivy thrust a napkin in her direction, and Violet, glancing around for her mother and not seeing her, spit the dry, crusty cupcake out.
“So,” Kennedy said, raising her eyebrows, “the cupcakes are as inedible as the crab cakes?”
Ivy slipped her Fireball shot in front of Violet, and Violet threw it back, desperate to get the dry, stale aftertaste out of her mouth. The cinnamon liquid burned a hot, slow path down her throat, and she coughed, hard.
“How hard is it to make an edible cupcake?” Kennedy bent forward to sniff suspiciously at the tower of largely untouched goodies.
Violet swallowed back a gasp as the whiskey continued to burn right down to her stomach, and Kennedy poured a glass of water.
“Ivy made something better than that in my Easy Bake when she was three,” Violet said, but it was hard to do anything but sputter with a burning tongue.
“I might have been four.”
“Ivy is a pastry chef in Atlanta,” Violet said.
“Actually…”
Violet closed her eyes, took a large sip of water. Not again, Ivy.
“…not anymore.”
“Flight Risk,” Violet muttered, dredging up the old nickname, resigned to the fact that her cousin had, once again, given up on something and moved on, probably without thinking through the consequences.
“It was time for a new adventure,” Ivy said, and Violet pushed back on that little part of her that kind of admired her cousin for walking away from the things that made her unhappy without a second thought. Ivy inherited her gypsy ways from her parents — even now they were traveling through South America — and while Ivy had called all parts of the country home while she was growing up, there was always a place for her in Nashville. Long summers had been spent splitting time between the lake house Mickey had left to Ivy in his will and the house in Belle Meade. The connection she shared with Ivy came in part from missing Ivy’s sister, Iris, who had died when the girls were all very young.
As adults, Ivy and Violet made an effort to see each other as often as possible, but it wasn’t enough. Violet wanted her cousin in Nashville. Ivy needed a home. Violet always thought of Ivy’s time in Nashville as healing, but she wasn’t so sure Ivy saw it that way.
Kennedy poured a new shot and placed it in front of Ivy. “So, you bake for a living?”
“I create for a living,” Ivy corrected and shrugged. “When I have a job.”
“You should find something here,” Violet said, like she always did when Ivy found herself at loose ends. “You can stay with me.”
“The catering market is wide open. These” — Kennedy paused — “ladies need competition. And an attitude adjustment.”
Violet eyed the table stacked high with cupcakes. “The caterers were a compromise.”
Burke had insisted on hosting the engagement party at Clayborne’s, determined to drum up some interest for Hale Street. Serena agreed eventually, although not gracefully, because Daisy had added her vote. She’d insisted on making all other arrangements, including double vellum invitations, the setup by her favored interior designer, Thora, and appetizers and desserts by one of Nashville’s elite and highly coveted catering services.
The service wasn’t known for much other than ridiculously expensive tastes and snotty attitudes.
“Were they rude to you?” she asked Kennedy anxiously. Mr. Clayborne had given over the bar for the night at no expense, and she hated to think that one of his servers had been treated poorly.
Kennedy grabbed her long red braid and, pulling it over one shoulder, shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter,” she mumbled and then looked at Ivy. “So what are you going to do?”
“I’m leaving it up to the Fates. I can be happy anywhere as long as the jerk quotient is low.”
The catering service people were jerks, Violet thought. And she hadn’t been to a function lately with really exceptional desserts. Kennedy was right, edible wasn’t hard. And the things Ivy could do to a cupcake were amazing. She’d once made an entire pink princess dress that stood four feet high of just cupcakes, pink icing, and edible seed pearls for a niece’s birthday party.
“What if you could open your own bakery?” Violet asked, and a vision of a warm, cozy bakery filled with yummy smells and good company flashed to mind. A place that felt safe, a place to gather. A community. The catering could come later…
Ivy frowned. “It might be fun for a little while.”
“Flight Risk?” Kennedy asked with a slight, sympathetic smile in Ivy’s direction.
“I like to keep my options open,” Ivy began, but Violet tuned them out, her mind spinning.
It could work. The building across the street was completely empty. It had two floors and a fully operating apartment on the top. Mickey had had the living quarters on the second floor refurnished immediately upon acquiring the building. She’d found that out from Burke after her dad had died. The bottom was just one long, cavernous room with hideous, molding tiles and puke-green paint haphazardly splattered across the walls. But the light was good with a big bow window in front and a line of windows marching down one side.
And Mickey. Mickey’s letter was still in her pocket telling her to make something of what she’d been given.
“I mean,” Ivy was saying to Kennedy, “how much do you love this job?”
“It pays the bills,” Kennedy said evenly. “And the Claybornes are good people.”
Down at the end of the bar, Hunter gathered up empty glasses and carted them to the sink.
“And not bad to look at,” Ivy murmured.
Violet followed both Ivy’s and Kennedy’s gazes and had to agree. On the tall side, with thick, dark hair and clear, friendly eyes, he crinkled them at the girls now when he smiled. He eased up behind Kennedy, reached for two tall beer steins, and pulled the lever, his arm brushing Kennedy’s side. Kennedy went still, stock-still, and her eyes widened, then slid to the side to watch the large hands.
“Double fisting, Hunter?” Violet asked easily because Ivy was eying Kennedy eying Hunter.
Hunter grinned. “This is actually for the man of the hour.”
“For Burke?” Ivy asked, swiveling around on her stool, her eyes landing on Burke with one hand on Daisy’s elbow. “He could probably use a whiskey chaser to loosen up too.”
“Daisy likes him and Mother really loves him,” Violet said, gently nudging her cousin as Hunter walked away. “So anyway. A bakery. Let’s open one.”
“Are you insane?” Ivy gaped at her and Kennedy actually smiled.
“Perfectly sane,” Violet assured her cousin as the decision settled over her with clarity. Her cousin needed something to ground her, and Violet needed to fulfill a promise. “We can call it Sugar Babies.”
Ivy closed her mouth and then opened it to say, “What Uncle Mickey called us.”
Violet smiled. “It’ll be phenomenal.”
Character Guide
Jackson Lowell: President and CEO of Tech Horse Software. Older brother of Kennedy and Sierra Lowell.
Asia Knowles: Assistant manager at Clayborne’s on the Corner. Older sister of Vegas and daughter of Frannie Knowles.
Burke Wentworth: Real estate developer and owner of the Wentworth Hotel. Love interest of Ivy Gibson. (Sweet Nothings)
Frannie Knowles: Asia and Vegas’s mother.
Galileo: Jackson Lowell’s horse-sized dog, a Newfoundland.
Hayden Henry: Interior designer and owner of inte
rior design/refurnishings store on Hale Street.
Hudson Bennett: Lawyer recently relocated from California. Friends of Burke Wentworth and Hunter Clayborne.
Hunter Clayborne: Operator of Clayborne’s on the Corner. Love interest of Kennedy Lowell. (Sweet Spot)
Ivy Gibson: Cousin of Violet Calloway and head pastry chef at Sugar Babies Sweet Shop. Love interest of Burke Wentworth. (Sweet Nothings)
Keaton Hayes: Friend of Jackson Lowell and vice-president and partner of Tech Horse Software.
Kennedy Lowell: Marketing expert for Sugar Babies Sweet Shop. Sister of Sierra and Jackson Lowell. Love interest of Hunter Clayborne. (Sweet Spot)
Lurlene Williams: Hale Street resident and all-around busybody. Often accompanied by her pet ferret, Snowball.
Nessa Paxton: Dress designer and owner of Pincushions, a wedding dress and couture gown shop.
Nick Morello: Carpenter for Morello Construction and Carpentry. Love interest of Violet Calloway. (Sweet Thing)
Rebel: Kennedy Lowell’s gray cat.
Ryan Yates: Best friend of Jackson Lowell and vice-president/partner of Tech Horse Software.
Sierra Lowell: Younger sibling of Jackson and Kennedy Lowell.
Violet Calloway: Owner and operator of Sugar Babies Sweet Shop. Love interest of Nick Morello. (Sweet Thing)
About the Author
Amy Knupp is an author of contemporary romance, a freelance copy editor for Blue Otter Editing, a freelance technical writer, and a marketing consultant for a local start-up company. While the collection of hats she wears sounds a bit scattered and broad, the common thread among all of them (perhaps the little ball on top of each hat) is the written word. She loves words and grammar and meaty, engrossing stories with complex characters.
Amy lives in Wisconsin with her husband, two teenage sons, four cats, and two box turtles. She graduated from the University of Kansas with degrees in French and journalism. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling, breaking up cat fights, watching college hoops, and annoying her family by correcting their grammar.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblances to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Sweet Spot: © 2016 by Amy Knupp
Cover Design © Jaycee DeLorenzo