Sugared (Misfit Brides #4)

by Jamie Farrell

  Modern medicine hadn’t saved Kimmie’s dad.

  General Mom didn’t talk much about him. She wore her wedding band and the diamond earrings he’d given her, and their wedding photo hung prominently above the fireplace, but Kimmie had only the haziest of hazy memories of him. She’d heard more stories about him from her friends’ parents than she had from Mom herself.

  It wasn’t often she wondered why, but hearing Esme talk about Clayton made Kimmie wonder if she’d overlooked something.

  If General Mom were General Mom instead of Plain Mom because she hadn’t been able to handle what she’d lost.

  “Oh, look, it’s Sharlene.” Esme waved, and another woman in a white tennis outfit waved back. “Her son dropped out of Harvard. And she called Josh a terribly unflattering word last week.”

  Kimmie had a few unflattering words for Josh as well. “I had a dream I was changing light bulbs in the ceiling of Wrigley Field, which was weird because Wrigley Field doesn’t have a roof, but then I was actually in a skating rink for the Olympics and I had to speed-race on brooms to qualify for the spelling bee.”

  Esme blinked at her. “Oh, dear. You are too precious.” She waved at the other woman again, who had been joined by a second, shorter woman. “Sharlene, Trish, come meet Josh’s girlfriend. She’s darling.” She lowered her voice. “How about a doubles round, Kimmie? I do believe we can take them.”

  “Oh, I don’t—”

  “Dear, Trish needs a lesson in keeping her hands to herself. That cougar has been showing her claws where they do not belong, if you know what I mean.”

  Kimmie squinted at the shorter woman standing beside Sharlene. Her hair was platinum blond, her nails blood red, and she was skinny as a broomstick.

  Josh’s normal type.

  Suddenly Trish’s nails weren’t the only things red.

  “My last fortune cookie said tragedy and comedy would collide in my personal life,” Kimmie whispered.

  Esme smiled. “Then let’s hand these ladies a tragic loss, shall we?”

  Trish swept a look up and down Kimmie. She smirked, and her nose lifted.

  As if Kimmie’s purple yoga pants and her bright yellow cupcake shirt made her less of a woman. Or perhaps as if Kimmie’s breasts and hips made her too much of a woman.

  Kimmie squared her shoulders. Why not? She’d never be here again in her life. And wouldn’t it be fun to leave Josh’s personal life with a bang? “Do you really think we can win?” Kimmie asked.

  “Win or lose, they’ll get the message.” The competitive gleam in Esme’s eyes was almost as scary as General Mom’s during Cake Readiness Condition Four drills. “I’ll make sure of it.”

  Maybe it was Esme’s confidence rubbing off, but it almost felt natural for Kimmie to twirl her tennis racket and find her mean face. “Let’s be winners.”

  “I knew I liked you.”

  She wouldn’t for long, but Kimmie would make the most of it for now.

  If she couldn’t beat Josh, she might as well do her best against these women.

  * * *

  Josh’s head was about to split in two, and his parents’ fancy country club wasn’t helping. But he needed to talk to his dad.

  He found Clayton Kincaid in his business suit, straddling a lounge chair on the deck overlooking the tennis courts. Wasn’t hard to locate Kimmie—she was the only color amidst the white tennis outfits on the green surface. Josh paused longer than he meant to, watching Kimmie dash across the court, working together with Mom in a doubles game.

  Josh wouldn’t have pegged her for the tennis type, but then, how much did he know about Kimmie?

  “She’s good,” Dad said. “Your mom likes her.”

  Everyone liked her.

  Except maybe Ralph, but then, Ralph didn’t like anyone.

  Josh lowered himself to the lounge chair beside Dad. “Been thinking.”

  Dad’s left hand flexed. His business suit was impeccable, but his poker face wasn’t. “You planning on proposing already? Your mother would love that.”

  “Thinking about Sweet Dreams,” Josh clarified. He wasn’t touching the idea of proposing until he had to. Given what had gone down on Kimmie’s tour, this ruse wouldn’t go that far. “Figure if I’m going to inherit the company, I should take a bigger interest in all the operations. Have an idea to run past you.”

  Dad’s expression shuttered.

  Because he was reading between the lines and guessed Josh knew, or because he was afraid Sweet Dreams wouldn’t be around for Josh to inherit?

  “What’s that?” Dad said.

  “There’s a market we’ve overlooked.” He kept his tone quiet, casual, the way Dad used to when he was talking Josh out of his shell twenty years ago. The nobody’s-at-fault, we’ll-come-out-on-top tone. But Josh would do this, regardless of what Dad thought. Josh would make Sweet Dreams grand again. “Our competitors have overlooked it too, honestly, which gives us an edge. Few simple changes and additions, and we can ease in and build up a new domination in the industry in a matter of months. Going to take a new product line, though.”

  Dad tilted his head and made eye contact. “Trained you well, didn’t I?”

  “You had a good student. Smart. Highly motivated.”

  “Cocky.”

  “Charming.”

  “Your mother’s not convinced your new lady-friend agrees.”

  Josh didn’t break eye contact. “I love a challenge.”

  “She’s your plan.” Not a question. A statement.

  “We could work well together, if that’s what she wants. But I have options. Wouldn’t want her thinking I’m only interested in her cupcakes.”

  Dad looked back at the tennis game. Mom and Kimmie high-fived, and then Kimmie headed to take her turn to serve.

  “Don’t know, Josh. You got figures? Recipes? Equipment need modifications, or can it run on the configuration we’ve got? What’s the lead time? Need any fancy ingredients? If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about—”

  “I’ll cover start-up costs.”

  Dad harrumphed. “That’s ridiculous. You’re not touching your trust fund for Sweet Dreams business.”

  “You saved my life. You don’t have to give me anything else,” Josh said quietly. “I’m doing this. With or without your support. Appreciate if I had it though.”

  Dad studied him a minute before turning back to watch the game. “Buying that bakery was a fool move. That much money for a place none of us had ever seen? Thought you’d lost your mind.”

  Josh smiled. “Birdie liked it.”

  “She told your mother it was the best present anyone ever gave her.” Dad harrumphed again. “Damn well should’ve been, given what it cost.”

  “Profitable little place,” Josh said.

  Kimmie bounced the tennis ball. For all her random talk of weird dreams and fortune cookies, she had solid focus. More determination than Josh would’ve given her credit for.

  If he hadn’t been focused on getting her help to save Sweet Dreams, he might’ve taken the time to enjoy her company. Appreciate how funny she was. How loyal she was. How annoyingly nice she was.

  “Get the feeling Birdie knew what she was doing,” Dad said. “Probably good to have this girl of yours in our lives.”

  Kimmie tossed the ball in the air, racket poised.

  “Told you,” Josh said. “I’m smart.”

  Dad chuckled while Kimmie swung her racket up to connect with the ball. She moved in a perfect arc, the sun shining down on her golden hair still tucked up in braids that swung when she moved. She heaved out a grunt when her racket hit the ball, sending it rocketing straight to—

  Straight to Mom’s head.

  Mom’s head jerked sideways, her racket dropped, and she collapsed to the ground.

  Josh shot to his feet and took off for the stairs. He hit the gate to the courts and yanked it open, then flew across the court to Mom’s crumpled figure. Kimmie bent over her, muttering, gingerly touchin
g Mom’s shoulder. “Esme? I am so sorry, Esme. Oh, frogs. Oh, frogs and frosting, please say something. Please, please say something.”

  Josh dropped to his knees. “Move!” He shoved Kimmie aside.

  Mom’s pupils were unfocused. A red welt was already rising on her cheek. “Mom? Mom, can you hear me?”

  His heart was trying to beat out of his chest, and he couldn’t catch his breath.

  Not Mom. Not Mom.

  He couldn’t lose Mom.

  “Mom.” He felt a pulse, could see her chest moving, her eyes blinking. He put a hand to her shoulder and squeezed. “Mom?”

  His lungs shrank. His skin itched everywhere—his arms, his knees, his scalp—and his legs and arms felt too heavy for his body.

  He was nine years old again. Watching his mother—his first mother—get weaker and weaker until she disappeared, fading into nothingness, and left him alone, terrified, hungry—“Mom!”

  “Holy hell,” she whooshed out. She blinked, then winced and rolled onto her back. “Sign that girl up for my team. She’s got an arm.”

  “Mom?” Josh’s voice cracked. A punctuated, prepubescent kind of crack.

  She found his hand and squeezed it. “I’m okay, honey.” Her eyes shut, her eyelids wrinkled. “Just a little accident. I’ll be okay.”

  “Mom? Mom, don’t go to sleep.”

  More bodies crowded around them.

  “Esme?” someone said.

  “Oh, Josh, what can we do to help?” another voice said.

  “Get the hell out of my way, that’s my wife,” Dad boomed.

  “Oh, good gracious,” Mom muttered. She heaved a body-moving sigh, then tightened her grip on Josh’s hand and opened her eyes. “Help me up, sweetheart.”

  “Your neck—”

  “Is fine,” she said. She pulled on his hand, and soon she was sitting.

  Dad squatted beside them. “Esme? Sweetheart, how many fingers am I holding up?”

  “Four. Have you been running? Clayton, I was at your checkup last week, and the doctor specifically told you to build up slowly with the exercise plan. I’m fine, but you’re going to give me a heart attack if you don’t start listening to your doctors. And your wife. Who do you think has taken care of you all these years?”

  Josh leaned on his heels and pressed his palms into his eye sockets.

  If Mom was harping, she was fine.

  “Back up and let a woman breathe,” she said. “Oh! Oh, dear. Where’s Kimmie?”

  Josh lifted his head.

  She was gone.

  He stood, swept a look around the tennis courts, then at the club windows and the deck where he and Dad had been a minute ago.

  “Dammit,” he muttered.

  “Oh, no.” Mom was pushing to her feet. She winced, putting a tentative finger to the growing welt on her face. “Oh, Josh, she won’t think I’m angry, will she?”

  Who the hell knew what Kimmie ever thought?

  “Where did she go?” Mom said.

  And again, with Kimmie, who the hell knew? “She’ll be fine, Mom. But you should see a doctor.”

  Mom’s expression narrowed to a displeased Mom-squint. “Joshua Nathaniel Kincaid, do you care about that girl at all?”

  Josh’s lungs opened up, but his face gathered an unusual heat. “Of the two of you, she wasn’t the one who almost broke her head on the tennis courts,” he said. “I’ll find her, but not until you promise to go get checked out.”

  “You should do what Josh says,” one of the women in tennis skirts said.

  Right. Trish.

  Josh remembered Trish.

  “He’s super smart,” Trish added.

  And he was disgusted with the Josh who had sat in the bar and had drinks with Trish last year before Christmas.

  She was as boring as a blank book and she only wanted his money.

  “Let’s go, Esme,” Dad said. “Josh has a girl to chase and work to do.”

  “Mrs. Kincaid.” The club manager arrived. “Are you okay? Your companion was quite upset. Said there had been an accident?”

  “I’m fine,” Mom said again. “That poor girl. She’s sweet but quite nervous, isn’t she?” She gave Josh a pained smile. “No wonder you’re taken with her. She reminds me of you.”

  “Oh, Esme,” Trish said with a laugh, “you really did get hit hard.”

  Ice washed through Josh’s veins, followed by a shot of fire.

  Kimmie was like him. The him he’d been when he’d come to live with the Kincaids.

  Nervous. Flighty. Unpredictable.

  Emotionally scarred.

  Dammit.

  “Get my mother an ambulance,” Josh said to the manager.

  “Already on its way, sir.”

  He pointed to Dad, then to Mom. “I’ll be back, and I expect both of you to be in one piece. Understood?”

  Mom beamed at him. Dad nodded grimly.

  Josh was wrong.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Kimmie wasn’t a weird, miniature version of her mother. She was the product of being raised by that horrific bully of a woman.

  And Josh had done the same to Kimmie—intentionally—that foster care had done to him.

  He’d made it worse.

  He couldn’t solve the Marilyn problem, but he could solve the Josh problem.

  As soon as he found her.

  10

  Tweeted @ChiTownGossip: Trouble for #Joshmie? Friends Hint At A Family Feud!

  Kimmie had done some fairly reprehensible things in her life, but running away from the club after what she’d done to Esme had to be the worst.

  It definitely topped the time she’d put curdled milk in her mother’s birthday cake when she was eight and mad about having to have cake lessons instead of ballet lessons. Or the time in high school when she’d lied and told Max Gregory that she’d dreamed he had three penises and none of them worked, instead of admitting that she’d dreamed he took her to the Kimmie-dream version of Homecoming.

  But instead of being punished by the universe for her cowardice and general bad person-ness, Kimmie was trailing Lindsey into a private suite at Wrigley Field. “I shouldn’t be here,” she whispered.

  “No, you shouldn’t,” Lindsey agreed. “You should be in Bliss, baking cake, without the stress of your mother insisting that you fix her bad business decisions.”

  After Kimmie had run out of the fancy country club, she’d hidden behind a gas station outside the club’s entrance and called Lindsey for a getaway car. She’d wanted to go get her own car from Sweet Dreams and drive home—she’d let Esme drive her to the club—but Lindsey had taken one look at Kimmie and declared she needed an afternoon at the baseball game instead.

  Being coddled was annoying. “You know what? Baking is a great plan. I’ll go call a cab, and I’ll—”

  “Sit.”

  Lindsey pulled Kimmie over the plush carpet to a high-top table overlooking the crowd on the first-base line. Will was on the other side of the room, surrounded by kids of all sizes and a few adults, guitar in his lap. He nodded to Lindsey and Kimmie, then resumed talking to the kids and strumming his guitar.

  “New friends from his trip to the children’s hospital this morning,” Lindsey said. A glowy, in-love smile warmed her whole expression. “Some days, I don’t know what that man sees in me.”

  Probably a woman who would do anything for the people she cared about, from quietly supporting Bliss as an outsider for years, to creating her own charity to help families in crisis, to braving Chicago traffic to rescue a mess of a friend when she would’ve rather been watching her fiancé sing the National Anthem at a baseball game. “I think he likes your smile,” Kimmie said.

  Lindsey laughed. “Hush.” She held up two fingers to someone behind Kimmie, then switched effortlessly into shark-lawyer mode with a lifted brow. “You have thirty seconds to tell me anything you don’t want my dad to hear.”

  “Your dad’s here?” Kimmie squeaked. “Pumplegunker. Does he know? About my
mom? And her plan for him?”

  “Twenty-eight seconds,” Lindsey murmured.

  “I had a dream I was an antelope except I was dressed as a walrus, but I knew I was an antelope because I had a cave in Iowa. But my cousin was a walrus who knew a mermaid. He wrote me letters.”

  “Kimmie.”

  “I might’ve killed Josh’s mom,” Kimmie whispered.

  Perhaps a little too loudly. Several guys nearby turned to stare. Kimmie recognized most of them from the BillyVision videos she watched every week.

  “I probably didn’t,” she said quickly. “She was breathing and her eyes were open. And the ambulance had its lights on when it went past, but not the sirens, and they wouldn’t have done that if she was dead, right? Plus, Josh would’ve texted me or called to chew me out or called my mother or—”

  “Kimmie,” Lindsey said again.

  “I accidentally hit her with a tennis ball, and she dropped like a sack of flour, and then Josh yelled at me to go away, and so I… I did.”

  Her eyeballs stung the way they had when she’d raced out of the country club and across the parking lot, looking for somewhere, anywhere, to get away from her mistakes. A flaming cake sat in her stomach. “I think he’s being nice to me because he wants to incorporate Heaven’s Bakery into the Sweet Dreams empire,” she whispered to Lindsey. “He wants cupcake recipes, and he was acting like Sweet Dreams was the next best thing to Hershey’s Chocolate World or Willy Wonka’s factory. Like he was trying to sell me on working there. Or like he was trying to sell me on all the reasons to take Heaven’s Bakery’s cupcakes or wedding cakes to a mass-production level.”

  Lindsey’s brows crinkled, and her lips quirked to the side. “Your mother would never allow that. And while she’s not God, she could definitely stop him if you’re right. I don’t know the particulars of their contract, but it seems highly unlikely that it would give him that kind of power without her authorization.”

  “Yes, but she’s not actually going to live to four hundred and seventy-eight before she deigns to take a trip to the great bakery in the sky. And he has plenty of money. Why else would he hang on to a little bakery in Bliss unless he had long-term plans for it?”