Somebody's Baby (15 page)

A week ago he’d been a “Stray Dawg” who had both bark and bite. Now?

Now he knew how to play the game.

“Hey, I was just following orders.” He raised his shoulders and dropped them.

“Someone give you orders to go slopping sugar on our Sweetie Pie?” Warren studied the crowd as if the guilty party might just step forward and save him the trouble of having to sniff him out.

“Yeah.” Adam folded his arms over his chest. “You did.”

“Me?”

“You told me to take special care of my precious cargo. I did just that. And here she is, signed, sealed and delivered.”

“You said that, Warren?”

And if he needed more proof that he was, indeed, a stray in this town no longer, Adam brought the joke home. “He did. But then he also said that I shouldn’t tell you that you look fi-
i
-ne in that outfit.”

It wasn’t a lie. But Adam did feel a twinge of guilt that drawing out the word
fine
like that did give it a bit of a different spin, implying he thought she looked great instead of merely suitable.

“You don’t like this outfit?” She turned on Warren.

“No. I never said—”

“No?” She pulled out the fluff of pink holding her hair up on top of her head. “I knew I shouldn’t have changed out of the patriotic one.”

“No, I meant yes.”

“Trap,” Jed muttered.

“Yes?” Josie worked her fingers through her hair trying to get it to…well, no telling what she wanted it to do. What it
was
doing was falling around her shoulders and sticking to her cheeks. “Yes what? That I should have changed?”

“No.” Warren shot Adam a look that would have melted butter.

It didn’t affect Adam, of course, especially when he caught a glimpse of a short black haircut darting through the clusters of picnickers at Dora Hoag speed. “If y’all will excuse me, I’ll be right back.”

With that he took off after the woman, trying his best not to appear to have just taken off after anyone, least of all a woman. Didn’t want to give the town anything to gab about tonight over pie.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Josie, who kept bobbing up and down on her toes, trying to peer over people to find him.

Correction. He didn’t want to give the town anything
else
to gab about over pie and coffee tonight.

“Ms. Hoag?” Somehow he managed to shout out her name without getting his voice beyond a stage whisper.

It must have worked because the woman whirled around just as he came up to her and practically jumped out of her skin. “Burdett. You’re here.”

“Of course I’m here. I’m the guest of, um, honor.”

“Not to hear your brother tell it.” She smiled slow and sly.

Adam had no idea his boss was capable of that kind of smile, or of making a joke. Or dressing as if she truly belonged at a Carolina barbecue. “You look, uh…”

“Hold the small talk, Burdett.” She flashed her palm outward to keep him from making a fool of himself trying to keep his compliment businesslike. “I know what you want.”

“You do?” Adam snorted out a hard laugh. “Wish you had told me that months ago. Would have saved me a whole world of heartache.”

“What? I don’t…”

Adam dropped the jest and became all business again. “You’re talking about your recommendation, of course.”

“Yes, I’ve…I’ve gone over the preliminaries and—”

“Maybe we should go somewhere more private for this.” He looked around them. They stood in the shade of a tree that Adam had remembered being big enough for climbing even when he was a kid. It was huge now, but somehow it seemed smaller than it did back then. And while it offered cool, pleasant shade, the soothing rustle of thick leaves and the smell of earth and bark mingled with the tangy smoke from the barbecue, it also seemed too casual a place to hear this kind of news. Besides, between the tree and the passing knots of family and friends, it seemed too out in the open. A place where they could be too easily spotted, too easily overheard.

“We don’t need to go anywhere.”

“But—”

“Because I am meeting your brother here any minute and because there is nowhere on these grounds that are going to make this any easier to say.”

Adam’s heart leaped. What was the expression, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure? Dora Hoag thought she was delivering bad news but that “bad news” was exactly what Adam had been hoping for. “You are going to recommend Global pass on the Carolina Crumble Pattie, lock, stock and lousy building.”

“Just the opposite.”

Adam froze halfway to high-fiving his very proper boss. “What?”

“I am going to recommend that Global buy the Carolina Crumble Pattie lock, stock and lousy building. Then tear it down.”

“Tear it…what?”

“Down. To the ground.” She jabbed one finger in the direction of the roots of the old tree. “Take the recipe and put it in a vault and leave it there while we try to come up with a cost-effective alternative. And in a few years, when people get nostalgic for the old snack cake, we will bring it back with a fanfare and sell it internationally.”

“Cost effective? Meaning inferior?”

“We can’t go on using the best ingredients, Burdett. If we did, we’d have to charge as much for a single patty as we normally charge for a whole box of snack cakes.”

“Have you ever tasted a Carolina Crumble Pattie? They are worth a dozen boxes of those flavorless globs of chemicals Wholesome Hearth calls snacks.”

“I know.” She shifted her feet, twisted her hands together, then craned her neck, all signs she wished Burke would show up and rescue her from having to talk to Adam about this. “That’s why I’m saying we have to vault the recipe and give it some time before we come out with our version.”

“Under the Carolina Crumble Pattie name?” Adam kept his gaze trained in hers even though out of the corner of his eyes he could see his oldest brother approaching.

“Of course. We need to own the name. It has thirty years of great marketing behind it.”

“It has a lot more than marketing behind it, and that’s the part you can’t buy or keep in a vault.”

“A family’s life work? A product made with care, the pride of a whole community? A standard of excellence?”

“And more,” Adam said.

“We don’t want those things.” Dora batted her eyes and waved her hand. “We just want the perception of having those things. And that’s what we get by buying your family out and using their reputation and product branding.”

Adam sighed. He’d been through this before with other products and had always convinced himself that, as Dora had often reminded him, it wasn’t personal.

But this? This
was
personal. “What about modernizing the facilities? Adding new snack lines? Giving stock to employees? Given enough time, work and money, I could make the Carolina Crumble Pattie an international moneymaker.”

“Of that I have no doubt.”

“But?”

“But you don’t work for Carolina Crumble Pattie, Burdett. You work for the Wholesome Hearth Country Fresh Bakery.”

“I’d gladly step down and take on a different position in order to oversee this project.”

“You would?” She tipped her head to one side, clearly not sure what to make of that.

“You would?” Burke rounded the old tree. His tone was far more disbelieving than that of Adam’s boss.

“Yes, I would.” Even Adam hadn’t known he was going to say that until it was out of his mouth. But now that it was out there…“Gladly.”

Dora acknowledged Burke’s arrival with nothing more than a shift of her head. Her focus remained on Adam. “That’s all well and good and perhaps even leans slightly to the noble, Burdett.”

“Thank you.” Adam puffed his chest up a bit.

She put her hands on her slender hips. “But we don’t need nobility at Global.”

“What?” He exhaled and leaned against the tree.

“We need you. We need your sharklike instincts. We need you to ferret out small places like this so we can move in and do whatever we have to do to help keep Wholesome Hearth at the top of Global’s international food chain.”

Adam replayed that message in his head once, then twice, each time gleaning new bits of information that led him to conclude, “First I’m a shark. Then I’m a weasel. Finally I’m just something at the bottom of the food chain?”

“Up to you.” Dora shrugged. “You can be whoever you want to be.”

Be whoever he wanted to be? In his whole life no one had ever believed that of him.

From somewhere in the crowd he heard Josie’s laughter.

His whole life no one had ever believed he could be whoever he wanted to be: that he could be more than a stray dog; that he could be a better Christian; a better businessman; a better citizen; and Nathan’s daddy.

Except…

“There’s just one thing I have to ask you, Dora.”

She arched a pencil-thin eyebrow, though Adam didn’t know if the subtle but slightly spooky affectation was in reaction to his demand to ask her something or to his using her first name so casually.

“I’m listening,” she said, finally.

“When we first came out here, you said business is nothing personal.”

“Uh-huh.”

“But then you also let it be known that you didn’t think it wasn’t such a bad thing for a business to be based on Biblical principles.”

“I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

“I want to know which method you used to arrive at your recommendation? The nothing personal or the Biblical?”

She smiled slowly. “I did what Global pays me to do.”

“And Global was founded on Biblical principles?”

“
Was
founded. Global has changed.”

He thought as much. If she had said she had come to this decision through prayer and an understanding of guiding principles, he would have needed to hear more. But given this information, he knew what he had to say and what he had to do. “Global
has
changed. But then, so have I.”

“Which means?”

“I quit.”

“Y
ou what?” Josie tried to make the words Adam had just spoken make sense.

“Quit.”

“Quit what?” She darted her gaze to the people and things surrounding them. “Quit your family? Quit the barbecue? Quit…on me?”

“No. No.” He took her by the upper arms and bent slightly to put them in a direct line of vision. “I would never quit on you, Josie.”

“Then…?”

“I quit my job.”

“Your factory job?”

“My…” He didn’t have to say another word for Josie to know how wrong the speculation that he had blown his inheritance and had to take a job in a rival food factory.

“You don’t have a factory job, do you?”

“Not unless Global moved the office of vice president of acquisitions and mergers for Wholesome Hearth Country Fresh Bakery into the factory, no, I don’t.”

“Vice President?”

“It’s not as big a deal as you might think. Global has VPs by the dozens.”

“But now they have one less?”

“Yeah. Now they have one less.” He practically beamed with the news.

“Why?”

“Because I just quit.”

“Why did you quit?”

“Oh.” His whole expression fell.

Josie had been too busy to eat today and yet she suddenly felt as if her stomach was filled with stones. “Adam?”

He groaned and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. He scrunched his eyes shut tight. His usually smooth skin creased into faint crow’s feet. His shoulders went rigid.

It made her think of the image Conner Burdett had spoken of, of the little boy with his hands perpetually in fists. She ventured a touch on his forearm, trying to encourage him to unclench and trust her, though she wasn’t sure he would. He had never come to trust his father, why would she be any different. “Adam?”

“Josie, I’ve…I’ve kept so much from you.”

“I’ve kept something from you, as well.”

“What?”

“My secret ingredient.” She knew it was not on the same scale. Whatever Adam had kept from her, and probably others in town and in his family, had led him to a point where he found relief and pride in having quit a very high-powered and fancy-titled job. She had said it, though, to try to lighten the mood. And, to try to shore up the connection between them, she quickly added, “Remember when you said you’d tell me your secret if I’d tell you mine?”

He dropped his hand to his side, and the creases in his face relaxed, just a little. He even managed a hint of a smile, but only a hint. And he looked as if it could thin out to a scowl without much provocation. “I remember.”

“Well then, I’ll make it easier for you to tell me what’s going on with you.” She curled her fingers into the soft fabric of his orange-and-blue striped baseball shirt and stepped close enough to shut the people around them out. “I’ll tell you my secret ingredient, then you can tell me about your secret, um, life.”

“Doesn’t sound like a fair exchange.” He gazed deeply into her eyes, his gratitude at the way she had taken all this evident.

“Are you kidding? You’ve tasted my pies. I’ve seen the mess you have made in your life. Who do you really think is getting the bigger secret here?” She laughed. It rang a bit hollow, but not phony. “Are you ready?”

“Anytime,” he whispered.

“My secret ingredient is…”

She actually felt people inching close to them as she spoke those words. She gave them a backward glance, her eyes narrowed in warning.

Not a person retreated.

She cleared her throat and went up on tiptoe, cupping her hand to shield her mouth as she leaned close and whispered in Adam’s ear. “I pulverize a Carolina Crumble Pattie into the mix for the top crust, then brush it with butter and my own mix of spices the last few minutes of browning.”

Adam pulled back, his face a blank.

Suddenly Josie felt those stones she had imagined in her stomach grow ice cold and begin to tumble around.

“So if the Crumble closed…” Adam said.

“The Crumble is closing?” A man standing near them asked in a voice that carried across the gathering.

Adam shook his head. He held up his hand. “No!”

“Stray Dawg says the Crumble is closing,” the man repeated louder this time.

“I knew his coming here was suspicious,” Elvie chimed in straight away. “You know he works for a competitor, don’t you? I heard he and his brother are in on this—courting an exec from Wholesome Hearth—”

“Please. Stop. Wait. Listen. Burke is not a part of this.” Adam tried to take it back, to stop the remark from turning into a wild rumor that would spread like fire through the closely knit community.

And who knew who would get singed by the flames?

Josie could already feel the heat. “If the Crumble closes, Adam? You want to know what would happen to me? I’d not just be out of an ingredient, I would be out of my livelihood.”

“Josie—”

The murmuring around them grew louder and louder.

“Belly-up and bankrupt because I’d have no way to pay back my small-business loan.” Josie swallowed to keep the cold lump of fear from rising and strangling her. “So, you see, you have to do everything you can to make sure that does not happen.”

“It’s not. It won’t.” He gave her a shake and a look that said he meant that with all his heart. “Not if I can do anything to stop it, it won’t.”

“Those words would mean a bit more if you weren’t the one that started the ball rolling on this whole thing.” Adam’s older brother loomed behind him, seeming to have shown up from out of nowhere.

“You? You are the one responsible for closing the Crumble?” Josie still could not make it all fit together. She searched Adam’s face, but found no comfort in his pinched and pained expression.

“Ya-ya-ya.” From a few feet away she heard her baby babbling. She whipped around to find him in Jed’s arms, blissfully alternating between chewing on a cookie and slobbering on Jed’s shirt. The older man didn’t even seem to notice as he smiled at her and nodded.

Warren stood beside him, and Warren’s wife. She took her husband’s hand and all of them smiled at her as if to tell her that they were there to support her no matter what.

That’s when it hit Josie. No matter what happened with the factory or the town, she had the thing she had always wished for. She had a family. Not in the conventional sense but a very real one nonetheless. She had people who cared for her and her son. She had a place to go in a time of need. She had the love of the Lord and she had hope. She always had hope.

“The Crumble is not closing,” Adam said, drawing her attention back to him.

“You don’t have any say in that anymore,” Burke reminded his brother.

“Stray Dawg is the one closing the place down,” Elvie announced to the people who had shown up late.

“I knowed there was something sneaky about his coming back to town,” one of the newcomers yelled.

“Don’t go talking about my big brother Adam like that.” Jason, Lucky Dawg, came forward and took his place beside Burke. “He’s not sneaky. He’s right here in the open.”

“Would everybody calm down here? This is all rumor and speculation. Nothing productive can come from that.” Cody joined his other brothers, hand in hand with his wife, Carol. “Now, I know all of you folks and I minister to a good deal of you. I’m not saying you don’t have a right to your feelings. I’m just here to say that Adam is not just my brother but he’s yours as well. A brother in the Lord. We need to think about that before we go throwing stones.”

“If the Crumble does close, I want you all to know, it won’t be my doing.” Adam snagged Josie by the wrist. “I did not foresee this. I did not want it.”

“You still don’t get it, do you?” Burke planted his feet shoulder-width apart and crossed his arms. His very stance spoke of holding his ground and challenging his brother. “You think Dad is throwing you this shindig because he suddenly cares about all these people? Because you coming back made him a new man and helped him see the error of his ways?”

“I, uh…” Adam glanced at Josie, then at the faces of the crowd. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Maybe not because of me, no, but I do think people can change.”

“Amen, brother,” Cody said, moving around so that he and Carol seemed to be on Adam’s side now.

“People change, but Conner Burdett?” Burke scoffed.

“Hey. Show some respect,” Jason barked. “You may be Top Dawg in the wolf pack but he is still our daddy.”

“Yeah, well, our
daddy
is throwing this big deal, inviting out the town for the first and last time, to celebrate what you’ve done for him.”

“Given him a grandson?” Adam asked.

“Brought Global here with an offer to buy out the Crumble. He doesn’t know the offer will close us down and maybe be an end to the Carolina Crumble Pattie forever, but I don’t think that would matter to him one bit. The old man plans to sell out first chance he gets and retire.”

“That offer hasn’t been formally extended.” Adam went toe-to-toe with his older brother, but because of their heights it did not bring them eye to eye, literally or figuratively. “It’s just one person’s recommendation. The old man doesn’t know for sure how it will all play out.”

“He doesn’t have to know how it will all play out. He knows Global is prepared to come in with a lot of money, and if it’s not enough, he is prepared to ask for what he wants. He knows they want to make some kind of deal and what it could mean for us.”

“Us?” Adam motioned to the people surrounding them. “Or us?” He gestured to Jason, Cody, Carol, himself then Burke, but not Josie or Nathan. She tried not to take that as a sign of his feelings.

“What it could mean to the family,” he said.

Mt. Knott is my family,
Josie tried to remind herself. Still, it hurt a bit to have been so obviously excluded. Whatever comfort she found in her friends and neighbors, she still longed for something more.

“What it could mean to
him,
” Burke clarified.

“What about Mt. Knott?” a man in the crowd demanded.

While another raised his voice to ask, “What about the people who still have work at the factory?”

Burke just shook his head.

“Now, wait one minute here. When I started all this I never intended…” Adam cut himself off. Again he looked at the faces of those around him, this time ending with Josie. He reached out and took her by the hand. “Actually, I never thought it through that far. I expected to blow in and out of town and not really even know the results of my efforts until I was safely back in my office.”

“But you
expected
the best, right?” With her eyes, Josie begged him to confirm it. She wanted something more, both as a family and from Adam, and that had to be built on knowing that deep down, he was a good, caring man.

“I guess
best
is a relative term,” he said softly.

“Not when you’re talking about my relatives,” Burke chimed in and not softly at all.

A few people laughed.

Josie was not one of them. “Adam, you said that after this picnic I might not want you to kiss me, but you wouldn’t say why.”

“Maybe he planned on putting a lot of onions on his burger.” Jed’s attempt to throw a little levity into the tense situation only made things worse.

People murmured.

Feet shifted in the dry grass.

Burke cocked his head and hooked his thumbs in his belt loops. To Josie it had all the earmarks of a man deciding if he wanted to take a swing at another man.

“Adam, I have to ask this.” Josie took a step forward, placing herself alone with Adam in the circle created by the bystanders. “Did you want to hurt your father and family so badly that you cooked up a plan that would take down the Crumble and Mt. Knott in the process?”

“No.”

“Huh.” Burke’s shoulders eased slightly.

“I believe you,” she said.

“You do?” More than one person around them asked it out loud, but it was Adam’s hoarse whisper that she answered.

“I believe that you had acted on high emotion and out of old anger and fear, and did not think through the consequences of your actions. It’s not the first time you’ve done that.”

“Ya-ya-ya.”

Adam lifted his chin and narrowed his eyes in Nathan’s direction.

Josie put her hand on his cheek and turned him to face her again. “That’s what stray dogs do. They growl and snap at anything that seems a threat to them. And everything seems a threat to them.”

He lowered his gaze and nodded.

“But you are not a stray dog.”

Burke opened his mouth.

Josie glared at him.

He shut it.

“You are a man who has come to take his place in the community and be a father to his son.” Josie stroked her hand along the side of his face, feeling the beginnings of late-afternoon bristle on her palm. “And no matter what happens with this business or any other in town, I know you have found your place. You have come home.”

“Home.” He could hardly get the word out.

“Sure. He’s going to have a home no matter what. But that don’t necessarily apply to the rest of us here today,” came a gruff voice from the back of the crowd.

Adam looked at Burke. “I never meant for it to go this way.”

“I know. And to be honest, well, it was only a matter of time until some big corporation moved in and made an offer, or came up with a competitive product that would run us out of the market, or even just waited until we put ourselves out of business.” Burked took a step forward, his hand extended to his younger brother. “At least this way we may come away with enough bankroll money and what’s left of our reputation to get the ball rolling on some new project.”

Adam took his brother’s hand, shook it once, then used it to yank the larger man off balance and into a bear hug.

“Hey, wait a minute. I’m the hug-your-fellow-man preacher-type. Quit horning in on my territory.” And with that Cody joined his brothers in the embrace.

Jason stood back a moment.

“Well, what you waiting for?” A grouchy old man’s voice asked what everyone was thinking.

At first Josie thought it was Jed but when she looked, Nathan had shoved the cookie in Jed’s mouth. He couldn’t make a sound.