Babycakes Page 16

  She sent another sideways glance in his direction, only to find his gaze connecting with hers. He shot her a fast grin, and there was that look again . . . like he knew exactly what she’d been thinking. Had she been fidgeting in her seat, after all?

  She shifted her gaze out the front window as casually as possible, but no amount of casual kept the heat from warming her cheeks. Not to mention other, more sensitive parts of her body. Honestly, Katherine Mary Margaret Bellamy. Get a damn grip.

  All that made her think about his hands. She’d noticed them straight off, when he’d handled the kite. Big hands, but gentle when they protected Lilly during her shy phases and skilled when they hammered nails and hung bulletin boards. She knew what they’d felt like on her, too—on her arms anyway. And . . . she really needed to stop thinking about them or she would be doing more than shifting in her seat.

  “Do you have plans for the holiday?”

  His deep, smooth voice didn’t so much jerk her from her guilty thoughts as feed straight into them. “Thanksgiving?” she managed, though she had to discreetly clear her throat to get the sex kitten out of it. What was wrong with her? Alva’s preoccupation with her “dry spell” filtered through Kit’s mind. It has been a long time. A really long time. Dammit.

  Morgan sent a sideways smile her way. “That would be the one.”

  She smiled, too, feeling beyond ridiculous. What was she, sixteen? “We’re ah, we’re all having a group dinner.”

  “All?”

  “Oh, sorry. I mean the Cupcake Club.”

  He grinned outright at that, and it was infectious. “You have a club for cupcakes? Sounds like my kind of organization.”

  More relaxed and more stimulated, all at the same time, she laughed. “It’s a group of Lani’s friends and associates who get together every week and do some after-hours baking. Kind of like a quilting club or book club . . . only we—”

  “Commune over cupcakes.”

  “More or less. It’s a rather . . . eclectic group, but I like them a lot.” She grinned. “Okay, so maybe I fit right in. It’s nothing like Mamie Sue’s, but it fills a certain void, not working with the crews every day anymore.”

  “I think I’ve met a few of them. They seem like a nice bunch.” He laughed. “Though I admit, I had my reservations about Dre. Or she had them about me, or maybe both. She changed all that today, though.”

  “She’s like that, very unexpected, but you’d want her having your back.”

  “Definitely would rather that than the alternative.”

  Kit laughed. “Well, that, too. They’re very loyal. We haven’t known each other long, but with the shop and everyone in and out all the time, I feel like we’ve already become friends. It’s been nice. More than nice. Definitely unexpected.”

  “Sounds like a good entrée to island life.”

  “It has been. I’m thankful . . . and grateful for them.”

  “Sounds like a good reason to give thanks together, then.”

  She settled back more in her seat. “You know, you’re right, it certainly does. I didn’t know how I was going to deal with . . . well, everything, moving forward. Actually, the holidays coming made me a little sad—maybe a lot sad—but that was really the least of my worries, all things considered. Still, I can’t say I was looking forward to them. But now . . . well, I am. Very much.”

  “They’re always saying life moves in mysterious ways.”

  She laughed. “Exactly. So what about you? Are you and Miss Lilly heading home for the holidays?”

  Being part of a fractured family herself, she felt a connection to him she hadn’t anticipated. For family reasons—she missed hers and he was intentionally escaping his—they’d come to be in the same place at the same time, as part of a new life cycle. She wasn’t sure how she felt about having personal understanding of him. It was a lot like the road trip they were on . . . not exactly uncomfortable, but not simple, either.

  “We’re staying on Sugarberry,” he said. “We haven’t been here all that long yet, and I want to keep Lilly’s life and routine as steady and stable as possible before we bring family back into it. Well, my side of the family anyway.”

  “I hope this isn’t too personal, but—”

  “I’m pretty sure, given everything we know about one another already, that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about.”

  She smiled. “Yeah . . . maybe not. I was going to say that Alva mentioned the picnic with Birdie wasn’t as great as you’d hoped. I haven’t met Birdie, but I’ve heard Alva talk about her at length, and I know she’s so grateful that you’re trying.”

  “We are. We’ll get there. It will just take a little time.”

  “Understandable,” Kit said. “Poor thing has been through so much. You, too. I’m guessing this first round of holidays since . . . everything happened can’t be easy. I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it. I probably shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No, that’s okay. Actually, I haven’t talked about it with anyone and . . . it’s almost a relief.”

  Kit wasn’t sure what to say to that, or how she felt about him opening up to her, but she’d asked. Given how grateful she was to the cupcake crew for their friendship and support, she wouldn’t turn away from him if he needed the same. “How are you two coping? Is she doing okay? Do you think she’ll handle Christmas all right?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I haven’t spent the holidays at home in a very long time, but I miss Asher and Delilah, and I worry all the time whether I’m doing right by Lilly.

  “I’ve always made time for her throughout the year, ever since she was born. The holiday season is a very intense one at the Westlake household, and not in a good way, so I would come and visit her and the family at other times of the year. This is really our first Christmas together, and . . . I can’t make it not hurt and I can’t make it not hard, but I do want it to be as relaxed and as easy on both of us as I can. I want her to have sentimental traditions and goofy traditions and believe in Santa and all that . . . so, maybe not too much this year, but enough so it’s something she looks forward to next year.”

  “Didn’t you have those things? Growing up, I mean? I’d think a family as old and established as yours would have some really deeply rooted traditions.”

  “Oh, they do.” His tone was wry . . . and weary.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t want to stir up—”

  “No, that’s okay. My family.” He let out a humorless laugh. “God, where to begin? We had traditions, but I can’t say they were the kind that made you feel all warm and fuzzy. My mother isn’t really the warm and fuzzy type, but it goes much farther back than that. Let’s just say the Westlakes aren’t so much a sentimental bunch as a family that never fails to find a way to turn any occasion into a potential boon for the family business. The holidays are seen more for their usefulness in networking and making sure to impress all the right people with just the right social engagements than they are about family or . . . well, any of the things I always wished Christmas and Thanksgiving could be about.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, not in a pitying way, but simply meaning it. “Sounds . . . removed. And lonely, actually.”

  “Yes, it was. Fortunately, Lilly is young, so there’s still time to give her the kind of Christmas I always wished I’d had. Growing up, my friends would talk about their holidays, and since I’ve been in Colorado, I’ve experienced them firsthand like that.” He shrugged. “Let’s just say I know which way I prefer. And I want that for Lilly, too.”

  “Do you miss your friends out west?”

  “I do, yeah. A great deal. We’ve been keeping in touch, though, and I still do consultant work that keeps me connected out there, so it’s been okay. Better than I thought it would be, anyway.”

  “Did you consider taking Lilly back there? I mean, it was your home.”

  “When everything happened . . . it was so sudden. I’m Lilly’s godfather, and I knew Asher had wanted to nam
e me guardian in full, should anything happen. None of us thought it would ever be needed, but . . . now it has. And I love her so much, I’d do anything for her.”

  He slowed the truck as they bumped over the grids to another bridge and briefly glanced at Kit. “Our lives got turned inside out on that single night. So, nothing was going to be the same, anyway. I knew I wasn’t going to stay in Atlanta, at least not at the family estate. But I was never interested in taking Lilly away from my mother entirely, for either of their sakes. I don’t want her to ever forget her mother, her father, or her time in Atlanta. I want her to have all the family she has, around her.”

  “You mean Birdie.”

  He nodded. “I decided it was best to stay here—enough distance for me to take care of Lilly the way I want to take care of her, but pretty close to everyone.”

  “You want to give her a real home, and not a family compound.”

  He glanced at her again. “Exactly. Is that what you had?”

  “No.” She smiled. “We’re new money, and most of that went back into the company. We kept the house Mamie had during the war, which went way back in the family. As things grew, so did the house, with additions stuck on here and there, every which way, but . . . even as things changed, they stayed very much the same.” She sighed. “I loved that house. I used to spend hours looking through all the old photo albums Mamie kept. So much of what we had was pretty much what I saw in those photos, just updated and expanded. We had traditions, tons of them, but they were . . .” She paused, then let the sentence trail off.

  “Exactly what I’d want Lilly to have,” he finished quietly, but also with an easy smile.

  “Thank you. That’s really nice of you to say. They were everything to me. Let’s just say we’re both missing things from yesteryear this time around.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and she understood what he meant.

  “I am, too. You know, it’s funny, but for all that losing the company was devastating to me, because it was my life and my extended family all rolled into one, and because I felt like I’d ruined everything my family worked so hard to build—”

  “You didn’t ruin it, you—”

  “I let someone else ruin it, which is just as bad, maybe worse. It’d be one thing if I just couldn’t make a go of it, tough economy, whatever. I’d have gone down fighting, anyway.”

  “From what I read, you did fight. Hard.”

  “I did. I put everything I had into it, literally. But, as I said before, Teddy had deeper pockets than I did. And pricier lawyers.”

  Morgan shot her a glance, but she was smiling, albeit tightly. “If it hadn’t been your family firm, it would have been one equally cutthroat.” She winced. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. They are.”

  “The thing is, it should never have come to lawyers and lawsuits. I should have known, should have seen it coming, but I just—”

  “You trusted your brother-in-law, your family. It didn’t all rest on your shoulders; you didn’t have complete control. Your sister had half of it, didn’t she? I mean, she’s responsible for how she handled her part, and you’re—”

  “Trixie never had a clue about the business and didn’t want one. I think the reason I never saw it coming is that Teddy is from a family almost as old as yours, with easily as much money. I think that’s why my family welcomed him into the fold. Not because we liked him personally, all that much. He can be a bit . . . overbearing. But he honestly seemed to love my sister, and we knew he wasn’t after her money, because he had more than enough for several lifetimes. That’s what blinded me. Even though we became a successful family, we poured a lot of our earnings back into the business, and family always came first. The money was security. We lived very comfortably, but not ostentatiously.” She smiled. “We’re strong Irish stock and being frugal was also a big Bellamy tradition.”

  “Hence the twenty-four crayon pack.”

  She laughed outright. “Exactly.”

  “Nothing wrong with that.”

  “No, although my sister would beg to differ. But, see, even there, we thought, hey, this solves everything. Teddy could—and did—give her the life she’d always thought she deserved, and we didn’t have to worry about someone taking advantage of her, and by extension, us.

  “I just never saw it. Teddy was very aggressive in business. He wasn’t just a name on the letterhead; he had a part in continuing the growth of his family fortune. When Trixie turned over her share of our pie company to him to handle, rather than me, I was okay with it. He demonstrated very quickly that he understood what he was doing, and seemed truly and sincerely interested. In that regard, I actually respected him. He seemed devoted to his part in the company, to the family, and though we differed in some ways, especially where it came to tradition and not everything having to be bigger, better, faster, I honestly thought he understood what Mamie Sue’s was all about.”

  “If you respected his ideas, his decisions, it stands to reason you’d trust him.”

  “We had different goals, but I trusted his business acumen. He was all about Mamie Sue’s making more money and I was about keeping it grounded in what we believed in, why we were in business in the first place. We had our struggles, our boardroom debates, but there was always balance, and I always felt, when push came to shove, he deferred to my ideas and decisions. Ultimately, he worked for his family full-time, and his work for us was just a sideline, something he did for his wife, and because, frankly, he was good at it. I knew he equated success with the bottom line, but I never thought he’d actually undermine us.”

  “That’s because it was never about the money to you, so you don’t understand the mind-set,” Morgan said, not unkindly. “It’s hard for someone who is living well, doing well, who feels happy and successful to understand that not everyone is motivated by living well and being happy. Someone like Teddy—I don’t know the man, but I know many like him—sees growing a company as a contest, even if it’s just with himself.”

  “But we were a big, successful company already. He certainly didn’t need more money. We didn’t need more money. I mean, we wanted to keep growing, but we weren’t failing. We were doing well.”

  “It’s not about greed or saying you have x amount more money in your bank account than before,” Morgan said. “It’s about winning. Conquering. Owning, controlling. Not because you need to, but because you can. Because you’re good at it. It’s like a climber can’t look at a mountain and not want to climb it. Teddy looked at Mamie Sue’s and . . . couldn’t help himself. That’s how his mind works. Money and growing the bottom line is how the contest is measured. It’s not because he needed more or even wanted more.”

  You’re right. I don’t get that. I didn’t then and I don’t now. How can a well-educated, smart man destroy something that meant so much to so many people? It was his own family. Well, his wife’s family. Would he have done that to his own family business? I understand that he’s good at making companies make as much money as they possibly can, but he could and did do that in his own world. Why do it to ours? Why do it to ours if it meant dismantling what we’d worked so hard for? Tearing it apart meant nothing to him.”

  “You said your sister never wanted the business, maybe . . . well, I don’t want to say something out of line here, but—”

  “No. I know what you’re going to say, and I’ve asked myself the same thing. Did he sell off the family business because Trixie couldn’t be bothered with it? It wasn’t like Trixie actively wanted out, not that I knew about anyway. She was never in. She never had to lift a finger for the company. Teddy could have managed her shares hardly lifting a finger, if he’d chosen to. It’s not that I never felt overwhelmed by the responsibility that had been so suddenly thrust on us—well, on me. I did, all the time. But I was handling it, and would have continued to do so, single-handedly and gladly. He could have left all of that to me and kept his focus on his own damn job. But it was like—”

  “Crack to an
addict,” Morgan interjected.

  “Exactly!”

  “I know you don’t get it, Kit, and that’s a good thing. You’re not supposed to get it. I never got it. People like Teddy and my own mother are all about the game. That is life to them. That’s what makes it exciting and what feeds them. It’s not about people—never something as emotional and human as that. People are too challenging and emotions are messy. Better to rise above all that and stay in that place where you can control everything in your environment. Then it all becomes like an elaborate, wily chess game. For those people, the stakes of day-to-day life just aren’t high enough. They’re born into money and know they’re never going to lose everything. They’re always going to live a comfortable life. So, they have to get their thrills somewhere.”

  “You make it all sound so—”

  “Clinical? Cold? Unfeeling? It is. Or it certainly can be, if that’s your mind-set. If Teddy is as much like my mother as it sounds, I’m sure what he did wasn’t personal to him. He probably is as clueless about why this hurts you as you are to how he could do such a thing in the first place.”

  “Yes, he is completely clueless! You’re exactly right. He was utterly blown away that I was going to fight the sale to Tas-T-Snaks. He couldn’t fathom why I’d do that. My share of the buyout was quite healthy. I don’t know what the heck he thought I’d do with a pile of money and no family business, but—”

  “That’s just it. He never would have thought of it that way. He’d figure you’d either do like your sister and enjoy your new life of leisure, or turn around and jump into some new game.”

  She slumped back in her seat and sighed ruefully. “Well, I guess he was right on that score. I had to jump somewhere.”

  Morgan shot her a wide grin. “Yeah. You don’t strike me as a rest-on-her-big-buyout-payoff type.”

  She could have told him she wasn’t the rest-on-her-broke-ass type either, but that really wasn’t any of his business. After racking up legal bills that eclipsed her share of the buyout, she’d put her share of the family house up for collateral. In the end, she’d lost, and the lawyers had taken her buyout payoff and everything she had left, including her share of the house after Teddy and Trixie sold it.