Sweets Galore: The Sixth Samantha Sweet Mystery (The Samantha Sweet Mysteries) (7 page)

“Okay, we need to find our passports
so I can call Clinton Hardgate back first thing in the morning,” she said when
she and Beau got home. “If he can still get flights for us the day after the
wedding, I say let’s do it.”

Beau found his documents easily
enough in the very organized desk he kept in one corner of the great room. Sam
spent nearly an hour rummaging through the boxes that she hadn’t quite unpacked
yet, finally locating hers in a shoebox full of important papers that was
labeled ‘White Sandals.’

“Just think—Ireland—the Emerald
Isle. I picture white sheep grazing, stone walls and adorable little cottages,”
she told Beau as she placed the passports and letter on the kitchen counter
where she would see them in the morning. “I’m really getting excited about this
trip.”

He pulled her close and rested his
chin on top of her head. “Me too. But I’m more excited that we’re starting our
life together.”

“We’re good as a pair, aren’t we?”

“We are that.”

He kissed her hair, then her
temple, and was aiming for her mouth when her phone buzzed.

“Woo! Is that a vibrator in your
pocket or are you just happy—”

She laughed and checked the
readout. Kelly. “I better see what’s going on.”

“I’ll meet you in the bedroom,” he
said, giving her shoulders a gentle squeeze.

“
Kel
?
Everything okay?”

“Oh, god, Mom. What a disaster.”

Sam’s heart skipped. “What
happened? Did he hurt you?”

“No, no. I’m fine.” A huge sigh.
“It’s just . . . Are all men such jerks?” At least her tone was no longer
aloof.

“
Kel
,
you know they aren’t.” Sam settled into a corner of the sofa. “You want to talk
about it?”

Another sigh.

“Grab yourself a Coke or something
and tell me. Well, if you want to.”

Kelly mumbled something and then
Sam heard the metal tab on a soda can.

“First off, it was really a little
shocking to meet his date. Mom, she was younger than me!”

Evie. Sam remembered the slender
woman in her tight pink dress.

“She reminded me so much of all
those girls out in L.A. Gorgeous but just about intelligent enough to string
one sentence together. She hung on him as if I were competition. Ick! I
couldn’t believe it.”

“Well, to be fair, he’d already
brought her on the trip before he knew anything about you,” Sam offered.

“It doesn’t matter. He’s
fifty-something, she’s about twenty. It’s gross.”

“Yeah, I agree.”

“Then he was just rude, Mom.
Incredibly rude. This young guy showed up outside the hotel as we were leaving.
He was sort of a nutcase himself, really. Dressed in some sparkly suit and he
had a cake. It was a beautiful cake, and you probably made it because it was
nothing he would have found on the shelf somewhere. So, okay, he gets Jake’s
attention and hands him the cake, then he starts jumping around and dashing all
over the place while singing—and I use that word
very
loosely—singing some horrendous song.

“I found out later that Jake is
with some kind of talent show for TV and figured out that this guy wanted a
sort of advance audition, even though that definitely would not be the way to
impress a judge, okay? But Jake didn’t even have the grace to be kind about
rejecting the guy. He screamed at him to shut up, then he threw the cake down
on the ground. I mean, people were stopping on the sidewalk—cars squealed their
brakes. I felt humiliated. I can only imagine what that poor guy felt like.”
She took a deep breath. “It was awful.”

“So, did you go to dinner after
all that?”

“Jake linked arms with me and
Evie
and we went back inside the hotel
and went to the restaurant there.”

“So it got better after that?”

“No! God, that was the thing. Between
him bragging about all the people in Hollywood he knows and Evie practically
crawling in his lap, I took about three bites of the appetizer and half my wine
and said I wasn’t feeling very well. I got out. Was that awful of me?”

“Leaving behind half a glass of
expensive wine? What were you thinking?”

Kelly started to laugh. “Leave it
to Mom to put things in perspective. I’m better now. I came home and made
myself a peanut butter sandwich. I’m having a shower and then I’m giving up on
reality TV forever.”

“Oh, no, not that! How will you
live without it?” Sam dramatized her voice until Kelly began to howl.

“Okay, not
every
show. But I’ll tell you, you won’t catch me watching
You’re The Star
. Never, ever, ever!”

What was it with Jake Calendar?
Charming one minute and losing his temper the next. If he couldn’t go out of
his way just a little bit to make a special evening for his daughter, then
neither of them would miss him in their lives.

“Join us tomorrow night for steaks
out here at the house. Most of the aunts and some of the cousins will be here.
And, I’ll have an odd surprise to tell you about. Beau and I have changed our
honeymoon plans.”

Chapter
6

Sam woke up well before her alarm
went off, a vague dream of a small town in Ireland floating through her head
after she and Beau had talked about the trip late into the night. She wondered
how early Clinton Hardgate would arrive in his office.

Dressing in her usual bakery
attire—black slacks and a spotless white baker’s jacket with the store logo
embroidered in purple—she left Beau peacefully sleeping and made her way
downstairs. She started the coffee maker for him, gathered the passports and
the lawyer’s letter, and headed toward town.

Julio’s Harley sat outside the
back door to Sweet’s Sweets and the scent of cinnamon rolls greeted her when
she walked in.

“You really got in early,” she
said as she set the papers on her desk and reviewed the list of orders for the
day.

He nodded, murmured something
about hoping to get away early, and turned back to the mixer where muffin
batter was getting a good stir.

Sam pulled the layers for her own
cake out of the fridge, along with tinted fondant in creamy ivory and sunshine
yellow. The design called for four tiers, alternating between pale tones and
vivid autumn ones. The ivory fondant would cover the largest, bottom tier with
wide burnt-orange hatbox stripes to add a touch of class.

The next tier would be entirely
covered in the dark orange, with scrolls of old-fashioned piping for a slightly
Victorian flair. The third tier was to be a fantasy of sunny yellow with a
garland of beads and baubles in autumn colors, and the fourth would cap it with
a repeat of the striping—narrow pinstripes this time—and a cascade of autumn
sugar flowers and burgundy ribbons.

It was way too much cake for the
small gathering of fewer than twenty-five guests, but this was something Sam
had dreamed of for a long time and she wasn’t going to skimp with a tiny cake.

She ran the fondant through the
rolling machine and began placing and trimming it to fit the tiers. By the time
Becky arrived, Sam had inserted the support dowels and together they began to
stack tiers.

“We’ll let this set up until
tomorrow,” she told her assistant, “then we can do final assembly and still
have a day to spare.”

“Are you getting excited?” Becky
asked.

“I am. And wait ’til you hear the
best part,” Sam said. “Our honeymoon plans have changed. Which reminds me, I
need to make a call to the east coast and I’ll bet this would be a good time.”

They moved the cake into the
walk-in fridge and Sam pointed out a couple of projects that Becky should get
done soon, then she gathered the information she needed and placed the call to
the attorney.

“All set,” she told Beau on the
phone a little later. “Sunday morning we’re on a flight out of Albuquerque to
New York, then it’s direct to Shannon and we’ll be met by our own car and
driver for the ride to Galway.”

“I’m liking this being married to
an heiress,” he said. “First class travel
and
limo service. I could get used to that.”

She laughed. “Well, don’t get used
to it too soon. We still have no idea how far this will go.”

“Yeah, it’ll probably end up being
some huge, drafty old castle.”

“With heating bills that will
bankrupt us.”

She heard his intercom buzz in the
background and they ended the call. She’d no sooner stuck her phone in her
pocket than Kelly peeked in at the back door.

“Things are pretty slow next door
this morning,” she said. “Want to use the time to finish going over those
properties?”

Sam glanced around her. Julio and
Becky had things well under control and she couldn’t imagine things would get
any less busy in the next two days.

“Perfect,” she said. “Let me grab
my file.”

She pulled open a desk drawer and
picked out the folder listing her current USDA properties. Inside were details
Kelly might need to know: contact information for Delbert Crow, her contracting
officer, who’d already been notified that Sam would be away for two weeks;
addresses of the three houses under her care; a procedures checklist Sam had
written up, one she had planned to keep brief but which had grown each time she
thought of some new thing to add.

“You drive,” she said to Kelly.
“I’m leaving you the keys to my truck so you have all the tools and yard
maintenance gear. I doubt you’ll have to take on a new property. Delbert knows
that I’m leaving town and there’s usually nothing so urgent that it can’t wait
a little while. So, all you have to do is go by each of these three places
about once a week and check them over.”

Two of the houses on the list
still needed to be winterized and they decided to start with the one farther
away, a small house on a few acres of land south of town. Sam reviewed the
procedures and let Kelly do the work, pointing out certain notes on her
checklist.

“You doing better after that
little fiasco last night?” Sam asked as they walked through the empty house,
checking windows and doors.

“Yeah. Sorry I vented on you.”

“Has he tried to contact you
again?”

“He called once, right after I
left the restaurant. Said he was sorry if he embarrassed me with the cake
incident. He sounded sincere about that.”

Sorry for embarrassing Kelly, not
sorry for his own actions. That reminded her of the old Jake.

“Did he suggest getting together
again?”

“Vaguely. But I don’t know. It
wasn’t just the fact that he lost patience with the guy who tried to audition.
He probably gets that kind of thing a lot. And the guy really had no chance of
getting onto the show . . .”

“But?”

“Well, it was just the way he did
it. Two minutes earlier he’d been all smiles and politeness. I don’t trust
people whose moods change that fast. You know? It’s like he’s super polite when
there’s something in it for him, but to somebody unimportant he just blows them
off.”

Jake had always been a charmer.
Sam knew it so well, the way he’d lured her into his bed, even though there’d
been no talk of making plans or permanency about the relationship. Of course
she had herself to blame for that too.

“If he wants to try again for a
meal, I might go,” Kelly said. “I don’t know . . . there’s the whole young-Evie
thing too. I just . . . I haven’t seen much to admire about him, Mom. I should
probably give him more of a chance, but I really don’t get the feeling I’m
going to like him much.”

“Well, you’ll figure it out.” Down
inside, her heart was doing little leaps of joy. The last thing she needed was
Jake Calendar hanging around now that he knew where to find them.

Kelly pointed to a window latch
that didn’t seem secure and asked whether she should get it repaired. Sam gave
it a tug and was able to turn the latch to a better position. They finished
checking the place and left.

By the time they reached the
second property, a condo near the movie theater, Kelly had the steps down pat
for getting into the lockboxes and remembering to sign in on the sheet that
documented the work they were doing. Thirty minutes per house, per week should
be adequate considering there weren’t lawns to mow or shrubs to trim this time
of year. They headed back to the middle of town.

“Okay, now that everything is
ready for cold weather,” Sam said, “you should be able to handle it from here.
Drop me back at the bakery and go on to the Bowen Road place that we worked on
together the other day. Check it over. Pay special attention for any sign of
mice. They love to come indoors once the seasons change. Go ahead and scatter
some poison around. There’s a can of
Ratzout
in that
plastic supply bin in the back. Call me if you run into any snags but I want
you to get a feel for being there and making all the decisions on your own.”

“
Mom
, I’m not three.”

Sam glanced at her daughter.
“Sorry. I— I sounded just like my mother, didn’t I?”

“Pretty much.” Kelly’s eyes
twinkled. “Actually, a lot.”

“Oh, god.
So
sorry!”

Kelly pulled up in front of
Sweet’s Sweets. “It’s okay. Someday I’ll probably do that to my own kid.”

“Plan to come to dinner out at
Beau’s tonight. The rest of the aunts, uncles and cousins should be coming in
today and we’re going to grill steaks and give everyone an informal place to
visit all they want. And you
know
they all want to see you.” She got out of the truck and patted the door as
Kelly drove away.

Sam walked into her shop where Jen
had two customers and the phone was ringing. Within moments Sam became caught up
and the rest of the afternoon went by in a blur. At some point Beau called to
say that he would pick up the steaks if she didn’t have time. Her mother called
to let her know that Uncle Buster, Aunt Lily and her cousin Wilhelmina had
arrived in town.