Bluegrass Blessings

“I have folks tell me it’s endearing.” Dinah lifted the towel off a batch of whole wheat dough that was rising on the shelf beside her. “A unique combination.” She noticed he hadn’t yet answered her question. The man’s verbal dexterity told her he spent a lot of time in negotiations.

“Oh, unique is the word. I can tell you I’ve never heard anything like it ever before. How long have you been out here?”

“About a year and a half.”

Rollings practically choked on his coffee. “That short?”

Are you saying I look old enough to have been here a decade? “I have a highly adaptive personality,” she said defensively. “I can be at home in any situation.”

“Or any kitchen.” He reached into his pocket and removed a bottle of red sparkle nail polish, which he placed on her counter. “You left this on my kitchen table. Aunt Sandy had a field day when she found it. She didn’t believe it was yours—she says redheads don’t wear red.”

Nobody told Dinah Hopkins what to do. She raised one leg and pointed to her toes, which were a delightfully sparkly crimson that matched the shade on the bottle. “It depends where.” She snatched back the bottle of polish and tucked it behind the counter.

Cameron finished his coffee and tossed the paper cup into the trash can by the door. “And by the way, yes, I am a churchgoin’ man. Can’t wait for Sunday, as a matter of fact. I gotta see what kind of church can handle you and Aunt Sandy in the same congregation.” With the closest thing to a grin she’d seen out of him yet, he pulled open the door and headed off down the street.

“Well, well, I do declare,” Dinah drawled as she put the Back in a Minute sign on her door and hoisted the tray of dough for a trip to the apartment oven. “What hath the Good Lord brought unto Middleburg?”

Cameron was beyond annoyed.

Served him right for buying a piece of property sight unseen. He, of all people, ought to know better. Then again, who’d have thought to not trust a family member? Aunt Sandy didn’t seem to have a deceptive bone in her body. And in truth, she hadn’t lied. It was good property.

She’d just left out a large chunk of the truth.

“The what?” A man in thick glasses had stared blankly at him when he went to town hall for the legal history of the Route 26 extension. The extension was the short street on which he’d purchased not only the land that would hold his new house, but three other eventual large-lot homes as well. A little bluegrass subdivision. His little corner of the world. A street to call his own.

A street that evidently didn’t go by the perfectly normal name of Route 26. The perfectly legal, perfectly acceptable name of Route 26.

“That stretch out over by the Wentworths’ farm?” the clerk had said. “You mean Lullaby Lane?”

“Pardon me?”

“Lullaby Lane. I can’t remember the last person that ever wanted to know anything about Lullaby Lane.” He looked as if that query called Cameron’s sense of good judgment into question.

Cameron pulled out his paperwork. “All my documents refer to that parcel of land as ‘the Route 26 extension.’”

“Well, it is the Route 26 extension all right, but ain’t nobody here ever called it that. It’s been Lullaby Lane for as long as I’ve been here and I’ve been here a long time. All that property you bought is Lullaby Lane, mister, no matter what your piece of paper says.”

Cameron immediately drove out to the land in question. He stopped his car in front of the rusted old street sign, leaning precariously to the right against a falling-down stone wall. His new empire, his future, was indeed Lullaby Lane.

Lord God, You’re kidding. Lullaby Lane? Aunt Sandy and Uncle George sold me something called Lullaby Lane? I know land is land is land and it’s only a detail, but could You just cut me a break here? It’s salt in the wound, Lord. I used to be the smart guy at the office. Now I feel like the biggest fool in the county.

“She went through with it?” Dinah balked when Cameron returned to the bakery. “Sandy said George had an idea to finally sell Lullaby Lane by getting someone from out of town to invest in it by its legal name—the something-something extension. And it’s you.” She got a look on her face that was half shock, half amusement. “You bought Lullaby Lane. Man, I thought I was having a bad week.”

Cameron stared around the bakery. His bakery, actually. He now owned cupcakes and lullabies. It’d be hard to think of anything farther from real estate empires and high finance. “I bought a parcel of land called the Route 26 extension. The ‘Lullaby’ part was conveniently omitted.”

Dinah hopped up on the counter and swung her legs over to slide off on the other side. “It’s just a silly name. You look like the kind of guy who can handle a challenge like that. Oh, the oven’s dead. Thanks for asking.”

He stared at her. She was just this side of crazy.

“I reckon you’ll be fine.” She had a completely fake, completely unconvincing look on her face.

He glared until she dissolved into a cascade of giggles.

“Okay, okay, everyone knows it by Lullaby Lane. It’s too sissy a name for all those horsemen and so nobody lives there.”

He widened his stance. “Street names get changed all the time.”

She shook her head, one unruly curl spilling out across her forehead. “Not in this town. Middleburg’s as anti-change as it gets. You have no idea what you’re dealing with here.”

“You have no idea who you’re dealing with here.” He pointed to his chest. “I’ll find a way.”

She pulled some napkins out of a box and started stuffing them into a holder on a table. “Well, suit yourself, but that will take some serious leverage, and y’all only been here—what—two days?”

Cameron walked up and planted his hands on the table. “Well, then it’s a good thing I’ll have resourceful help.” He looked her in the eye. “You can’t afford a new oven, can you?”

“Well,” she replied slowly, “I admit it’s a bit of a cash flow challenge, but the money I was saving up to buy my building has surprisingly freed up.” She gave him a pointed look.

So she had designs on owning the building. No wonder she’d bristled when he’d told her who he was. “Have you got enough to replace the oven?”

She stopped stuffing napkins, slowly moving her gaze up to meet his. “Almost.”

He felt the first grin in days creep across his face. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll loan you the money for the oven if you help me get my name change.”

“It’s just a name. You’re getting all crazy over nothing.”

“A sissy name according to you. As for the crazy, it sounds like I’ll fit right in.”

“I knew you would, honey,” Aunt Sandy’s voice came from behind him. He hadn’t even heard the bakery door open. “I’m so glad to have you out here instead of squeezed into a stuffy suit back there in New York.”

Cameron couldn’t think of a moment when the word “impossible” didn’t describe his Aunt Sandy. The one his mother called “loony Aunt Sandy.” The “black sheep” sister of his mother’s well-groomed Massachusetts family—although looking at the woman, “blond sheep” would have been a better metaphor. “Aunt Sandy, I’m thinking I should haul you in for fraud. And I know enough attorneys that I might just do it. Lullaby Lane?”

Sandy actually managed a look of remorse. “I did not lie. It is the Route 26 extension. That is its legal name. And I knew that my nephew Cameron was just the type of real estate mogul to take on a challenge like Lullaby Lane.”

“A challenge is something you know about in advance and accept. As in willingly take on. This is more like an ambush. Dangerously close to a con job, if you ask me.”

“Well, then,” Aunt Sandy said with an indulgent grin, “I suppose I should thank the Good Lord I’m not askin’.”

She pointed a pink fingernail at Cameron. “You just think about one thing, son. There’s a reason you said yes. Maybe you know it somewhere inside, maybe only God knows it yet, but there’s a reason a detail-focused, suit-wearin’ planning type like you said yes to buying a hunk o’ land sight unseen. You think about that, hon.”

She sauntered out of the bakery as if that were an acceptable explanation. It was annoyingly true that what Sandy had done was legal, but it was not especially ethical in Cameron’s book. And not at all the kind of stuff he’d expect out of a woman who claimed to have as much faith as Aunt Sandy did.

Cameron thought perhaps he should just point his BMW east—toward civilization—and start driving. Somewhere between here and the Atlantic Ocean, somebody needed a commercial real estate broker. God just wasn’t cruel enough to make him stay here.

Chapter Three

Dinah glanced up from her cookie dough while Cameron negotiated—again—with the oven man. At first she was glad to have Cameron offer to take care of dealing with the repair man—dashing between the bakery and her apartment oven all day was keeping her running—but the minute a dollar sign got involved the man couldn’t seem to turn off the big city tycoon persona.

“You can’t give me another fifty for the old one? You could get more than that for the scrap metal alone.”

The repairman, a nice guy from a company that had been more than amiable to her in the past, looked up at Dinah as if to say where’d you find this guy? He pointed to a page on his clipboard. “I got a chart here says what I can give you. This is what I can give you. That’s it.”

Cameron looked up from the knob he was twisting. “No leeway?”

The poor man pushed his cap back on his head and exhaled. “Mister, if I had leeway I’d have given it to you the first time you asked. Asking three times ain’t gonna make things any different, okay?”

“Okay.” Cameron sounded as if he’d lost some kind of battle instead of gotten her one hundred dollars more than she expected for Old Ironsides. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t even thought to ask them about buying the old one—she’d completely forgotten it could be sold as scrap. And that made a whole load of sense—the thing weighed a ton and she was pretty sure they sold scrap by the pound. Still, she thought Cameron was coming on a bit strong.

“Did you have to go for the jugular?” she asked the minute the repairman left to get his dolly out of his truck. “It’s an oven, not a peace treaty.”

“It’s not the best deal until the other guy says ‘no.’”

Dinah cut out another cookie. “He said ‘no’ twenty minutes ago.”

“Reluctance is not refusal.” Cameron pulled a towel off her counter and wiped the grease from his hands.

“Is that what you do for a living? Beat other people down until you get what you want? The real estate brokers on television are all smiling guys eager to help families find the home of their dreams. You, you look like you’re going to snarl any second.”

“My job is to get the best deal between buyer and seller. That’s good for everyone.”

“Okay, you’re not the bad guy,” she said, holding up her hand. “You’re the good guy. But you have to admit,” she looked straight at him, “you’re mighty tightly strung for a good guy.”

“You got your oven, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah, but I didn’t need it to be the high-level negotiation you made it. I mean, I’m grateful, but you can take it down a notch here, okay?”

Cameron fiddled with the knob he’d removed from the oven. Even though he had a game face that could scare those with weaker constitutions, Dinah could tell in his body language that he was giving in. Reminding himself to turn off—or at least tone down—the New York biz demeanor.

“Okay,” he said after a pause.

She had to give him credit; he was still doing pretty good for a guy who’d uprooted himself and dived head-first into a whole new culture. She’d come here of her own free will (which somehow she knew he hadn’t—or thought he hadn’t), and it had still taken her a while to find her footing. The guy hadn’t even been here half a week. As she loaded a second cookie sheet to take upstairs, Dinah said a quick prayer for rest and peace to visit Cameron Rollings—and maybe a little for herself, too.

The conversation lulled while the repairman and his buddy went through the huge task of getting the ancient oven out the bakery’s back door. The thing was a behemoth—it astounded Dinah how big a space it left in the kitchen when they hauled it out. Installation of the new one would begin at nine o’clock tomorrow morning and after that, life might tilt back toward normal. Dinah hoped. Although part of her thought “normal” wasn’t really on the radar anymore with Cameron Rollings next door.

“These are for you. Oven rent.” Dinah appeared at his door thirty minutes later with a batch of macadamia nut white chocolate chip cookies. A stack of large, blueprint-like papers lay strewn out on his kitchen table. The display made it easy to picture him in the corner office of some Manhattan high-rise.

“Thanks,” Cameron said, taking the cookies and putting them next to the papers. He had an elegant look about him that made him seem so foreign here, even in jeans. There was something in the set of his shoulders, the way he carried himself. A sleekness that came from always having the upper hand.

An upper hand she was pretty sure he felt he no longer had. That was pure intuition, but Dinah was a mighty intuitive gal and prided herself on her ability to read people. All that carefully crafted city confidence was coming unraveled in a few corners. She saw it in the way he’d overly defended his negotiation. In how he always tapped his left foot. There was a story there, all right. Even Sandy had alluded as much, although Dinah certainly had no idea what it was.

“I’m warning you,” Dinah pointed to the cookies, “don’t put those within easy reach. If you haven’t eaten lunch, you’re in trouble.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said.

“Willpower is no match for the smell of my macadamia nut white chocolate chip cookies. Don’t get cocky or I might come back up here to find you hiding an empty plate behind your back.”

He didn’t even laugh at the joke. “Baked goods don’t scare me.” He sat back down at the table, all business.

Dinah headed toward the door, but stopped before leaving. “So, why’d you leave New York, anyway?”

That made him look up. She knew it would. “To get away from people asking personal questions.”

If he thought she’d be put off by a few snarky replies, he had a think or two coming. “No, really. What made you come all the way out here?”

Cameron pulled off his glasses and wiped his hands down his face. “Let’s just say ‘employment issues.’”

Dinah leaned against the open door. “You got canned?”

“Are you always this diplomatic?”

“I’ll take that as a yes. I heard some famous guy say all truly innovative people get fired at least once in their careers.”

“That’s not true.”

“How do you know?”

“Let’s just say it was my lack of innovation that…heralded my job change.”

“Meaning?”

He leaned on one elbow. “It was because I wouldn’t get creative that I lost my job. And I didn’t lose it, by the way,” he corrected himself. “I merely agreed with the management that it would be best for all concerned if I left immediately.”

“Honey, in this neck of the woods, that’s called getting fired. Best own up to it now, so you can move on.” She walked back into the apartment despite the dark look he gave her. “What kind of ‘creative,’ anyway? You mean cheating?”

“It has a nicer term in real estate. Alternative accounting. Although that’s not the name I’d put to it. I wouldn’t look the other way when some guy started skimming off the sales when apartment buildings were made into condos. Unfortunately that process has a lot of convenient little places to hide some cheating—if no one is looking. But I was, and when they started really putting the pressure on me, I had no choice but to go to the local authorities. I just couldn’t sit by and watch them steal from people.” He sighed and got up from the table. “But, as you can see, it didn’t exactly go well for me.”

Cameron had told himself over and over that he wouldn’t go into his situation for his first couple of weeks in Kentucky. He had a set of polite but evasive answers for all questions about his sudden move. All of which left his skull in the presence of this relentless redhead. Why on earth was he getting into this with her? Already?

She blinked at him. “You’re a whistle-blower?”

There had to be a more noble term for it than that. If only he could remember it. “Let’s just say I’m a guy paying a very high price for doing the right thing at the wrong time.”

She scratched her chin and he noticed it left a smear of flour on her cheek. Brown eyes were a very normal color—so why did they stand out on a redhead like that? And that red hair—did that come from God or a salon? He looked at her, standing in his kitchen with a bright pink potholder tucked into her back jean pocket, and thought there wasn’t a single subtle thing about this woman. She narrowed her eyes and he wondered if he’d been staring too long. “Are you in the witness protection program or something?” she asked.

“Using my real name? Buying real estate? Here? With loudmouth Aunt Sandy?” There wasn’t a more ridiculous notion in the world. Although, based on the last couple of days, perhaps a phone call to the FBI might be in order. Disappearing into thin air looked like an attractive option at the moment.

“Well, yeah, that’d hardly do the trick, would it?” she laughed. He expected her to have a high, musical laugh, but instead the low notes of her silky chuckle tickled him somewhere under his ribs. “But really, is that what happened? You called the cops on some guys so your own company fired you? Can they do that, legally? I mean, that’s gangster stuff.”

Cameron laughed. “My old boss would tell you that’s simply a highly competitive marketplace. Everybody’s scratching everyone else’s back. Especially in a place like New York.”

She shifted her weight. “Are you sorry you did it?” she asked in a tone so sincere it caught him off guard. “With all it cost you, would you do it again?”

Funny how no one had asked him that before now. Which was odd, because it really was the question of the hour, wasn’t it? Was it all worth the cost? Would he have been able to sleep at night if he’d kept his mouth shut?

“You know,” he said quite honestly, “I thought I’d know that for sure by now.” Again, the prepared “noble guy” answer he’d crafted for the world just wouldn’t come. “I keep waiting for that great big atta boy of peace to come down from God and, well, I’m still waiting.”

A warm tone softened in her eyes. It looked far too much like pity and that sprouted a hard spot in the pit of his stomach. He really didn’t know what he wanted from all this, but he knew for certain he didn’t want pity. And for some reason, especially not from her. He shuffled his papers, suddenly wanting this conversation over.

“This isn’t one of those black-and-white morality tales, Miss Hopkins. There’s no hero, there’s no wicked witch. I made the best choice I could at the time and I’ll just deal with what comes.”

Her face told him his tone had been sharper than he would have liked, but she seemed able to irk him with a single look. Not even his boss…ahem, his old boss—could get to him so quickly.

“Hey, you don’t have to prove anything to me.” She yanked the potholder from her pocket and huffed back toward the door. He slumped in his seat, half glad to be rid of her, half contrite for being such a beast.

“For what it’s worth,” he heard her call out from the hall as she pulled the door shut, “it sounds like you got a lousy deal.”

When the door clicked shut behind her, he tossed his pencil down and thought, here or there?

Dinah stared at the envelope now opened on her bakery’s kitchen counter. Last time I checked, Lord, You were still in control. But can You see how I feel like the world’s ganging up on me? Did she have to send this card? Now?

A perfectly good morning—including the installation of Taste and See’s new oven—had been ruined by a single piece of mail. All her euphoria over having an oven that actually obeyed the temperature she set on the dial—Dinah’s math skills never really were up to speed when it came to compensating for Old Ironsides being 27 degrees too hot—was lost in the contents of one pale blue envelope.

Mom.

Dinah stared at the final two words of the card: “Come home.” Suddenly she was eight years old and being told to come in from the thrilling Jersey seashore waves to wash up for dinner. To Dinah, “come home” never had any of those “welcome back” warm, fuzzy connotations. “Come home” was a command putting an end to anything fun or anything she called her own.

A command, in this particular instance, to “stop all this Kentucky nonsense and come back to your family where you belong.” Dinah poured herself another cup of coffee and winced at the concept. She couldn’t think of any place she felt like she belonged less than that manicured Jersey suburb. “All this Kentucky nonsense” felt more like “home” or “where she belonged” than anything on the East Coast. Back home she was a square peg being continually squashed into a round hole. Here, those things her mother delicately called her “eccentricities” were welcomed, if not outright celebrated. Her craving to do something so pedestrian as baking, something so manual chafed at the academic and scientific values of her parents. Dinah knew God had brought her to Middleburg as sure as she knew anything in this world.

Middleburg is my home, Lord. How will I ever get her to understand that? Why can’t she let me be who You made me to be? Why can’t she let me be, period?

Dinah tucked the offending card into her back pocket as she heard the bakery’s front door chime. She walked out of the kitchen to find Emily Montague coming into the bakery. The woman was grinning from ear to ear and it reminded Dinah of all the reasons she did what she did. She’d been looking forward to this appointment all week—how on earth could she have forgotten it was this morning? Thanks, Lord, for sending me the reminder I needed, Dinah prayed silently as she reached for the file of sketches she had ready for her friend.

“I’m here,” Emily called out. “This is going to be so much fun.”

Dinah motioned to the little corner table that sat by the bakery’s front windows while she reached for a second mug and some hot water. “Tea for you, coffee for me.”

Emily ran the West of Paris bath shop down the street and was in the middle of planning her February wedding to a local horse farmer named Gil Sorrent. Dinah was happy to see her friend so madly in love and even happier to bake her the wedding cake of her dreams. Even if it meant a little extra work around an already-busy time.

“You’re sure you can do this? I just heard you’ll be doing all the cookies for that new fund-raiser.”

Dinah sat upright in her chair and hoisted her coffee mug. “That’s right. You’re looking at the Middleburg Community Fund’s official Cookiegram baker. Complete with a fancy new oven thanks to the untimely but welcome death of Old Ironsides back there.”

“Right,” said Emily, “Sandy Burnside told me your oven died.”

“I choose to believe God was simply better equipping me for the surge of business ahead. And no amount of cookies could put me off baking my friend’s spectacular wedding cake.” Dinah opened the file. “I took a look at the handkerchiefs you showed me and made a few sketches.” Emily loved all things vintage and had given Dinah an assortment of delicate antique handkerchiefs with embroidered pastel borders as motifs to incorporate into the cake decoration. Emily was nothing if not a woman who knew what she wanted and Dinah liked her for that.

“You’re sure you’ll have time?” Emily was also a first-class control freak, although love had softened her edges.

“Honey, for you I’ll make time. You’re my top February priority. Cookies are easy. Wedding cakes—those are the stuff of bakers’ dreams.” All the more reason not to crawl back to New Jersey, Dinah thought as she poured Emily’s tea. You’ve got a bustling bakery business to run.