Just Desserts (10 page)

“Why wait?”

“Because this whole after-party thing was your idea. We've committed to it. Let's go through with the plan.”

Tommy was an easygoing, hang-loose kind of guy, but when he got serious, he had a way of commanding your attention that was second to none. “You were right before when you said the after-party idea was ridiculous. Let's cancel the contract and tell her what's going on.”

“Have you tried to contact her mother yet?”

Tommy looked at him blankly. “No.”

“Anybody show up to draw blood or take a DNA sample?”

“I see where this is going.”

“First things first. You want to meet her? You'll meet her next week at the party. We should know more by then, have a game plan in place. Once you've seen her and talked to her, we can decide on the next step.”

“Why the change of heart?” Tommy asked, looking at him with open curiosity. “Two days ago you thought I was an asshole for pushing the party; now you think it's a great idea.”

“Because she needs it.” Shit. He hadn't meant to say that. “What I'm saying is, this is important to her, to the bakery. To Lizzie. Whatever happens or doesn't happen between the two of you, she'll have the after-party and the publicity and maybe a chance to really build that business and buy out her son of a bitch ex-husband and find a place to live that isn't over a bakery that starts cranking out rye bread at four in the morning.”

Tommy studied him for a moment. “Sounds like I'm not the only one who read through the folder.”

He tried to brush it off. “You wanted me to go down there and scope things out and I did. That's what you pay me for.”

“A word of advice,” Tommy said as he turned back toward the ocean. “Next week when we're down in Atlantic City, don't play poker.”

“This is Finn Rafferty. Leave a message.”

“Hi, Finn. This is Hayley Goldstein. I—uh, well, it's almost nine p.m. and the fax still isn't here and I was wondering if maybe there's a problem. Give me a call on my cell when you can.”

She glanced over at Lizzie, who was munching on a PB and J and hanging on every word.

“Too needy?”

Lizzie nodded. “A little.”

“I was trying for nonchalant.”

“Maybe the famous guy changed his mind.”

“Tommy Stiles,” she reminded her daughter, “and wouldn't you think Finn would call and let us know?”

“Maybe he's embarrassed.”

“He's a lawyer,” Hayley retorted. “Lawyers don't get embarrassed.”

“They signed the contract,” Lizzie said, wiping her hands on a square of paper towel. “At least we can keep the deposit.”

“That's not right.”

“It's in the contract, Mom. It's perfectly legal.”

“If they back out, we return the money.”

“Sometimes you scare me,” Lizzie said. “I'm fourteen and even I know that's not the way you do business.”

Hayley bent down and kissed the top of her daughter's golden blond head. “Then I'm very lucky to have you around to keep things running smoothly.”

“What about when I'm not here anymore? You're going to have to think ahead. Maybe take a business course or two at the Y or something.”

Hayley was working on a suitable retort when her cell phone rang.

“You didn't get the fax?”

It's Finn,
she mouthed to Lizzie. “No, I didn't,” she said. “I was wondering if you changed your mind.”

“Why would I change my mind?”

“What I mean is, I was wondering if your boss didn't like the new design and he decided to back out.”

“I would have called you.”

She felt like a two-ton rock had just been lifted from her shoulders. “So he liked the new design.”

“Everything's fine,” Finn said.

“But did he like the new design?”

Lizzie groaned and Hayley shot her a quelling look.

“What was that noise?” Finn asked.

“That was my daughter. She thinks I talk too much.”

“Mom!”

“Say hi to Lizzie for me. Tell her Tommy was impressed by that contract.”

“I'm glad he liked the contract, but how about my cakes?” She wasn't feeling the love and it was making her nervous.

Silence.

By now she was accustomed to their awkward pauses and she waited it out.

“I didn't show the design to him.”

“You're kidding!” She started pacing the kitchen. “How could you not show it to him?”

“Tommy's not a detail kind of guy,” Finn explained. “He knows your rep. He saw some of your other work. He trusts you.”

“The president of the Cumberland County Association of Female Realtors has known me practically since I was in utero and even she didn't trust me that much. What's with you people anyway?”

“Rock stars are different.”

“You're not a rock star. You're a lawyer.”

“Hey, what's the problem? We're not backing out. The deal is still on. I sent you the fax.”

“I didn't get it.”

“But I sent it. We're debating a problem that doesn't exist.”

“We're not debating anything. I just wanted to know why you didn't show your boss the new design sketches.”

Poor Lizzie was pretending to bang her head against the kitchen table. She aimed a fierce look in her daughter's direction.

“Why don't I fax it to you again and—sorry, hold on a second.”

She heard the muffled sounds of conversation in the background.

“Hello, Hayley.” A different voice, more tenor than baritone, with a touch of New Jersey thrown in for good measure. “This is Tom.”

She tried to speak but nothing came out. She leaned back against the refrigerator and tried to remember how to breathe.

“Mom?” Lizzie jumped up and ran to her. “Are you okay?”

Oh my God!
she mouthed to Lizzie.
It's Tommy Stiles!
She was sharing an awkward silence with a rock star!

Lizzie nudged her in the ribs. “Say something!” she hissed.

“Hello?” Tommy Stiles said into the phone. “Did we lose the connection?”

She couldn't just stand there breathing into the mouthpiece. That wasn't how an almost-forty-year-old adult businesswoman was supposed to act.

“S-sorry,” she managed as Mr. G the parrot flew down the hallway toward the back bedroom. “A parrot just flew by.”

“A parrot?”

“Mr. G,” she said. “A yellow-naped Amazon we adopted after his first owner died. Actually his first owner was my late father-in-law, Stan. He was a great guy. He had trouble adjusting the first two years—not Stan, I'm talking about Mr G. Stan was already dead. I—” She stifled a groan and Lizzie giggled. “Sorry. I talk too much. Next thing you know I'll be telling you about pilling the cats.”

Tommy Stiles started to laugh. “Mr. G? Did you name him after that Philly weatherman from the eighties?”

“You remember Mr. G?” she said, laughing with him. “I didn't know you kept up with South Jersey television.”

“I'm a Jersey boy,” he said. “Some things never change.”

Lizzie was hanging on to Hayley's arm, trying to hear the other half of the conversation. “Actually I'm a TV Land fan. Mr. G was named for Lou Grant from the old
Mary Tyler Moore Show
—”

“Tell him about Murray and—”

“Lizzie!”

“Is that your daughter?” Tommy asked.

“Yes,” Hayley said. “My very nosy fourteen-year-old-daughter.”

“Put her on. Finn says she's an incredibly impressive young woman. I want to congratulate her on that contract.”

She waited, fully expecting the maternal worry vibe to kick in, but to her surprise it didn't. “Hold on.” She covered the mouthpiece. “He wants to talk to you.”

Her gregarious, self-confident daughter went a whiter shade of pale and looked like she wanted to bolt for anywhere but there. Hayley was about to make her apologies to Tommy Stiles when Lizzie drew in a breath and reached for the cell.

“Hello?…Yes…Thanks…I used a vetted contract as a prototype…Fourteen…No, not really…Okay…Yeah…Wow, thanks…Here's my mom.”

Wide-eyed, she handed the phone back to Hayley, who by now was reasonably sure the powdered sugar on the two doughnuts she ate for supper was having an hallucinatory effect on her. “He's sending us backstage passes to see the concert!” Lizzie stage-whispered.

Clearly this wasn't the moment to inform her daughter that there was no way on the face of God's green earth that she would ever let her go. Setting a beautiful fourteen-year-old girl loose in a sea of leather and testosterone was like setting a match to gasoline. It wasn't about to happen while she still had breath in her body.

“This is Hayley again,” she said into the receiver, wondering how she would strike a balance between the protective mother and ambitious businesswoman without alienating the man who held her future in his guitar-plucking hands.

“I'm back,” Finn said. “Tommy had to take another call.”

“I wish I'd had a little warning,” she said. “It isn't every day you talk to a rock-and-roll legend.”

“I'm sorry,” Finn said. “He realized I was talking to you and he grabbed my cell.”

It was hard to imagine a skinny, sixty-something musician muscling in on a guy with a linebacker's build. “Did you tell him to say those things?”

“You don't tell rock stars to say anything. He likes your work. I told you he did.”

He sounded uncomfortable. Maybe a little bit guilty? She didn't want to think about it. Maybe it was time to try focusing on the fact that professionally this was the biggest thing that would probably ever happen to her.

“You know what?” Hayley said. “I'm not going to take us down that long, dark road again. You didn't back out on the deal. That's good enough for me.”

“Still waiting for that other shoe to drop?”

“Sooner or later the other shoe always drops,” she said as he laughed. “It's just a matter of time.”

 

You're right,
Finn thought as they said good-bye.

It was just a matter of time.

 

Three weeks short of his thirtieth birthday, Tommy's girlfriend Sherri told him she was pregnant. Up until that moment he had managed to dodge the reproductive bullet. Marriage, kids, the whole family thing had been back-burnered throughout his twenties and he had pretty much assumed it would be back-burnered throughout his thirties too.

Fame didn't leave a whole lot of room for anything else.

When Sherri gave him the news the only thing he could remember was the rush of white noise that filled his head with sound. Everything he knew about family, about being a good father, he had learned from the Raffertys. He and Jack had grown up together, next-door neighbors who became best friends.

Best friends who had managed to become famous before they turned twenty-one.

Finn was sixteen when it happened. A happy, good-natured kid who worshipped the ground his old man walked on. Who could blame him? Jack was Tommy's best friend but he was his role model as well. The guy was a great rocker but an even better father. The kid was lucky to have him there to guide him to adulthood.

“I'm not asking anything from you,” Sherri had said to him, her voice low, her words measured. “I'm going to keep the baby and I'm not going to ask anything from you. It's my decision and if you want to walk right now, that's okay. But if you want to stick around and be a father to him, then—”

That was when he kissed her.

Forty-eight hours later they were married in the Little Chapel of Dreams on the Vegas Strip. Amber was born eight months later. The next year Beryl joined the family. Four years later Topaz arrived but by then it was too late.

Sherri filed for divorce a few weeks before Topaz's first birthday.

When a marriage breaks up it takes a family down with it. Once the smoke clears and the hearts start to mend, alliances shift, and when it's over a man can find himself on the outside looking in. And the ugly truth was you could only stay out there with your nose pressed up against the window just so long before it got old and you turned and walked away.

Except that he didn't. He stayed where he was, he stayed plugged in, he stayed there at the center of his family and somehow what was bad between Sherri and him wasn't bad any longer. She still didn't want to be married to him but she wanted him in her life, in their children's lives, and he was glad to be there.

It had been the same with LeeLee, who gave him Zach and Winston, and then again with Margaux and the unexpected baby of the group, Gigi.

And now there was Willow. He knew the odds were against them.
Won't make it past the first anniversary…She's too young…he's too old…another kid…What the hell is he thinking?

He had heard it all. He even agreed with some of it. But he loved her and he believed she loved him and they had made a baby together and maybe, just maybe, this time it would all work out the way it was supposed to.

This time last week he didn't know Hayley Goldstein and her daughter, Lizzie, existed. Now they had claimed a piece of his heart. Hayley was warm and funny and charming. Lizzie was an outspoken delight. They were his blood. He didn't need any fancy blood work or DNA tests to prove what he knew in his gut.

They were family.

His family.

The circle was about to widen yet again.

“There you are.” Willow's breath tickled the side of his neck. “I've been looking all over for you.”

He slipped an arm around her waist and drew her closer. “You knew where to find me.”

“The beach,” she said, resting her head against his shoulder. “Where else?”

They had been together over a year but her beauty still had the power to take his breath away. The moonlight slid along the planes of her perfect face like a caress.

It wasn't that she made him feel young; she made him feel whole.

“Did your nap help?” he asked.

“Pretty much.” She stifled a yawn. “Everyone warned me all I'd want to do is sleep the first three months. I thought they were kidding.”

“A few more weeks,” he reminded her, “then it will pass. You'll have more energy than ever before.”