Just Desserts (4 page)

Quinn’s brain, even the one located beneath his belt, scoffed at his bald-faced lie. He still smelled raspberries and wanted to taste Sadie’s lips again.

He shrugged at Lindy and gave her one of his best poker faces. “I’m almost finished with the Wrigley job, and don’t have time, or need any more delays getting back to Chicago. So I won’t be consorting with your BFF.” He sounded so cool he almost convinced himself. Glancing at his Rolex, he saw it was near four o’clock. “Don’t you have to be getting to the diner?”

Lindy’s sharp observations set him on edge and he needed to focus on Ms. Katie’s.

“Quinn, you add class to manure but it’s still just bullshit. Here’s Sadie’s address.” She scribbled on a neon orange Post-it and stuck it to his forehead. “I don’t know why but I’m going to trust those baby blues of yours.” Lindy patted him on his cheek and spun around on the heel of her garden Croc. “My man or I will come find you, Quinn. Sadie is our town’s valedictorian. Anyone who messes with her will ride out of Lake Geneva on the end of a pitchfork.”

He unpeeled the Post-it from his forehead and gave her one of his most disarming smiles. “Message received, Lindy, but don’t forget this devil already has a collection of tridents in Lincoln Park.”

“If I really believed your rumored bad-ass reputation, I wouldn’t have given you her number.”

Quinn heard Lindy laugh as she pulled the van out from under the market tent and crept away on the vehicle utility road. It was easy to mess around with Lindy, but there was no need for her to worry. Quinn wanted the diner. And Sadie’s heat wouldn’t sway him; he knew better than to mix work and play. His bachelor standing was full proof. He operated alone and liked it. Women didn’t bother with him when they found that out. Sadie wouldn’t be any different.

A picture of Sadie’s hair popped in his mind. The way it was wrapped in a ball on top of her head and the sticks that kept it in place. It reminded him of needles in a ball of silky red yarn. He wanted to pluck out each stick and let her hair cascade down her shoulders—better yet, onto his chest, then stomach, then lower.

He started to jog, and then picked up the pace to get to his Jeep. It was parked on Lake Geneva’s main street infested with touristy tchotchke shops so he brushed past the few window shoppers. Quinn punched Sadie’s address into his GPS. He’d forgotten to put the bikini top on, to cover the Jeep’s interior from the blasted sun. His steering wheel scalded his hands. He chuckled. “Yeah, I’m a devil all right.”

***

After Sadie’s descent into hell with Bryan at the market, she had ridden her bike home so fast that her legs ached. She soaked in the tub for almost an hour before her thighs stopped throbbing. But she could still feel the exact spot where Quinn touched her leg. Warmth tingled up along her inner thigh to her Brazilian.

She tried to shake it off by throwing the mini skirt in the wicker hamper and tugging on one of her oldest sundresses. A sleeveless floor-length cotton thing, so long and black that all she needed was a white collar around the neck to make it look like a nun’s habit. Whatever sexy sorcery of Quinn’s affected her, she wanted to purge it. Convent-style garb might do the trick.

As an icing to cool her overheated madness, she found a pair of tacky black silk boxers that she had bought as a joke for Bryan. She never had the chance to give them to him.

An STD and Bridget
.

Barefooted, she padded downstairs to the kitchen. She wanted to finish planning all of the diner’s desserts for the week and jot a list of the ingredients. Out of the blue, she had a taste for her mother’s peanut butter cookies, rolled in a thick crust of rock sugar.

The cookies were her favorite, but her mom had stopped baking them because of an increase in customers who suffered from peanut allergies. Kate Maxon had been vigilant of health trends, which made the diner renowned as a health foodie choice, but Sadie felt it sometimes smothered classic old-fashioned cooking.

She found the recipe stuck on the bottom of an old tin lock box. It was on a three-by-five notecard with a
K
monogrammed in the corner and buried under her mother’s scads of newspaper clippings and old disused recipes.

Opening and slamming shut the knotty-pine cabinets of her parents’ farmhouse kitchen, the cupboards were like old Mother Hubbard’s—mostly empty with a couple of imaginary spiders. The box of Weetabix and cans of tuna made Sadie roll her eyes. Had they really survived on diner meals since she had died?

It was as though she and her father had signed a treaty to only dine out. To eat in her mother’s kitchen was like an admission of truth that she would never be back. Sadie trudged over to the refrigerator and landed gold. She found a couple jars of East Wind peanut butter, rock sugar, and some flour and butter all in the freezer. “Woot. Too bad I don’t have any almond milk.”

She dug out the stainless measuring cups, slammed the drawer shut, and dusted off the Kitchen-aid mixer. After she froze the dough for a couple hours, she would bake the best damn cookies and eat every one of them…until her stomach ached. She wasn’t going to worry about her dad or the diner and the sweet cookies would banish Bryan from her brain.

The mixing bowl was glued onto the base from something sticky and ancient. She didn’t want to think too hard about it. Sadie wet a towel, wrapped it around the hardened crust, and let it soak to soften it up. After a tug, the bowl clicked and just as she freed it, she heard the crunch of gravel as a car pulled into the front drive.

Since her bath, Sadie hadn’t bothered to turn on any lights in the rest of the house. She crept into the darkened family room and pulled the edge of the bamboo shade from the window. Peeking out, she saw a bronze-colored Jeep. Sadie stepped back and almost lost her footing. She righted herself by grabbing her dad’s game table and knocked over his Asian spirit chess pieces. What the hell was Quinn doing here?

She opened the door, but not the decrepit wood screen door. Crossing her arms, she stayed out of his sight thanks to the expanse of the wrap around porch between the house and the drive. She watched as he cut the Jeep’s engine and glanced at himself in the review mirror.

Vain.

He tugged off his baseball hat and combed his fingers through his hair. When Quinn hopped out of the Jeep and laid eyes on her, she quivered.

Quinn sauntered up the porch stairs. “Hi.”

“What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“I wanted to make sure psychedelic sunshine-boy hadn’t come to drag you out and into the dark side. However—” He stopped and scrutinized her dress, “—you look ready for a retreat at Mother Superior’s evil lair.”

“I’m baking.”

“Baking what? Black pudding?”

“Ha. No.” She opened the screen door and ushered him in. “I’m making peanut butter cookies. Please tell me you’re not allergic to peanuts.”

“Uh, no, only cashews,” he said teasingly. His abundance of wheat-colored lashes didn’t hide his eyes when he glanced at the snuggly elasticized top of her dress where a bit of breast showed. He averted his gaze and looked at the limestone fireplace in the family room. “Nice.”

“Thank you.”

“The hearth. I mean the fireplace.”

A blush spread under his freckles. Sadie disabled her grin before it turned into a smile. “If you’re satisfied that I’m not going to follow my pseudo ex-boyfriend into a padded white cell or a hash house, you’re more than welcome to take your leave. Or you can stay and roll balls of peanut butter cookie dough in sugar.”

“Rolling balls in sugar sounds kinky. I’ll stay.”

“You’re a
per-vert.
”

***

To Quinn, Sadie looked like one of the porcelain dolls his sister collected when they were kids. He conjured up the name, Madame Alexander, to lasso in his baser instincts. His mind kept wondering about positions and games. What could he play with Sadie to get under her black dress and peel it off? “No perversion. I’m a contractor. Bricks and mortar kind of guy.”

“Really? I’ve heard that you’re more than a brick layer.”

“I have my strengths. What have Lindy and Eddie told you?” Quinn spotted a smudge of flour on the back of Sadie’s matronly dress, right above her left cheek.

As they walked toward the kitchen, he couldn’t remember what he had decided. Was Sadie off limits or not?

“That bricks aren’t the only things that you like to lay.” She turned and smirked at him.

Her oceanic green eyes locked onto his.

Quinn broke free from the momentary trance and perused Sadie’s house. The sectional sofa, placed around the giant stone hearth, was covered with faded orange and pink fabric. He couldn’t tell if the design was of flowers or popsicles. Stacked on the sofa’s back cushions were quilts that looked artsy enough to be hand-stitched. Actually, the room wasn’t as country cliché as he’d expected. When he’d driven up to the clapboard farmhouse, he’d actually glanced into the review mirror to see if the shed was a shed or an outhouse.

“Love your ceiling. And the patina copper tiles.” He tried hard not to sound like he was at work, or worse, that he had to schmoose the client’s daughter.

Sadie held the one side of swinging saloon doors open for him. “This house has a lot of charm, but the kitchen is truly the heart.”

When he stepped past Sadie, Quinn felt as though he entered the private sanctum of Ms. Katie’s Diner. Quinn understood quickly that Sadie would fight him to the death to hang on to the diner.

An oak and walnut striped cutting block with gashes marred in the surface from years of use grounded the kitchen. The honey-stained cork floor looked warmer than the gargantuan hearth in the front room. A pantry door in the corner had been painted with black chalkboard paint. A list of the diner’s daily desserts, in girly-curly lettering with pink chalk, filled the blackboard.

Mon-Peaches w/basil cream

Tues-Strawberry rhubarb pie

Wed-figs drizzled w/raspberry sauce

Thurs-vanilla ice cream with tart cherries

Fri-Ginger lime shortbread

Saturday- Dad?

A large smile face was drawn next to it with red chalk.

As Sadie went to wash her hands at the farmhouse sink, her dress swirled around her legs. Quinn admired her bare feet and tangerine-color painted toenails. The tattoo bracelet around her left ankle, a ring of ivy, stuck out from her pale skin. He leaned against the door jam and forced himself to look about the kitchen, not gawk at her beautiful legs like a creep.

“Hey! Heads up.”

Quinn turned and a ball of dough, layered in cling wrap dusted in flour, flew at him. He caught it just in time.

“Sit down and start rolling it into one-inch balls.” Sadie started up the mixer on the marble countertop. “I’m going to mix up some more dough.”

He dropped the dough on the stainless jelly roll sheet and went to the sink to scrub his hands, never one to be completely comfortable in a kitchen unless he installed cabinets or tiled countertops, but he definitely didn’t want to be accused of dirty fingernails.

“Are you always a drill sergeant in the kitchen?”

She scraped the side of the mixing bowl and turned to him. Her brows lifted. “I guess no. Not until after my mom died did I even feel the need to even be in here. Her domain I suppose. And now that she’s gone I’m a shadow, fade in and out. My dad and I eat at the diner most of the time.”

Quinn sat down on a bench beside the long Ash wood table. He set about the laborious task of turning one giant ball of sticky peanut butter dough into many one-inch babies. He pinched off a bit to try and make it into a ball. Sadie giggled, so he stopped.

“What? Is there some secret? Please enlighten me, black damselfly.”

She sat next to him, snuggly, and took his hands between her delicate fingers to guide him. Rolling the dough in circles, his rough calloused hands felt like Shrek’s.

He watched her face as she concentrated wholeheartedly on his hands to manipulate them into making a ball of dough. Sadie’s beautiful grassy green eyes, so focused on helping him, swallowed him up. His breath quickened, and just like in the diner with her father, he felt like a randy teenager. And then the diner…a picture of the neon sign at Ms. Katie’s Diner burst like a firework in his head. He retreated like a Catholic schoolboy caught masturbating and jerked his hands away from hers.

“What? Did I hurt you?” She smiled mischievously, grabbed his hands back, and steeled them in a grid-iron lock he’d never expect from such dainty fingers.

“I’m not the greedy asshole you think I am, Sadie.”

She dropped his hands. “Oh, I know that. But you’re a player. And losing isn’t in your game plan. I can tell you want my mother’s place, but I won’t let you woo my dad into selling it to you. Don’t even think of discussing it with him.”

He didn’t say anything.

She straddled the bench lifting the hem of her long dress to expose the miles of her gorgeous legs. Then she clasped her knees and leaned close—face-to-face. “You son of a bitch. You made an offer already, didn’t you? That ‘party planning and catering’ was a load of crap, wasn’t it?”

Quinn deliberated. He took a deep breath, bore down and faced her sultry eyes. “If I’ve spoken to your father about purchasing the diner, it’s a deal between us. He’ll need to give you that information. I’m not in any position to discuss the details.”

“You are…” She gulped down her insult and slapped his cheek.

Astonished at how her slender fingers could cause such a zinger, he clutched her hand in a careful restraint. He shifted closer toward her and pressed his other hand down on her knee. He inhaled a delicious mix of berries and dipped down to brush his lips across her bare shoulder for a taste. Like a starving madman, he had to try more.

Just this once.

She sucked in her breath, but didn’t move away from him.

He couldn’t chance losing control so he didn’t dare look into her incredible eyes. If
she
invited him, then he’d still get the diner without acrimony. No harm, no foul.