The Bad Luck Wedding Cake (8 page)

“You do? What things?”

She halted abruptly. Her eyes flashed fire, and she drew a deep breath that lifted her bosom in an enticing manner. “It’s none of your business, Mr. McBride. Allow me to say this bluntly. Go. Away.”

Seeing her snit and hearing her temper lightened his own mood. Would a wicked woman be so defensive? He wouldn’t think so.

“What?” she demanded, peering up at him. “What’s put that gleam in your eyes?” Not bothering to wait for an answer, she resumed her march.

“I’m not gleaming,” he explained, starting after her. “I’m smiling. I’ve found it works better than sobbing when problems get you down.”

“Sobbing at your problems, McBride?” Her expression turned wry. “What problems do you have? Too many pounds of pound cake perched on your front porch?”

“I do like a woman who alliterates. But you’re right. I do have pound cake problems. And you should have seen me carrying that turkey upstairs this morning. I was a blubbering fool.”

“A fool, maybe.” After a moment’s hesitation, she added, “Lord McBride.”

He grimaced and gave a long-suffering sigh. “Isn’t that the silliest thing? I have enough sweets in my kitchen to keep a dentist flush in the pockets for years. Can you believe the parades of ladies? I’m almost afraid to go back home. No telling what I might find on my doorstep.”

“Two more cakes, three more pies, and another dish I couldn’t quite identify. I do hope you’ll get this situation settled before The Confectionary opens for business. Not that I’m frightened of competition, but I’d just as soon not have ladies lined up at my door giving sweets away when I’m trying to sell them.”

They’d reached the corner of Fourth and Main, and Tye took her elbow to escort her across the street. “I understand your concern. I don’t know how I’m going to fix the problem yet, but I do understand.” He waited until they’d walked a half block down Fourth to add, “What about you? How are you going to take care of your trouble?”

“What makes you think I have trouble?”

He snorted. “You just kissed a fella good-bye with tears in your eyes. Who was he, Claire?”

Claire tilted her head back and lifted her face toward the sky. “You are like a dog with a bone. I can’t believe I’m discussing this. I can’t believe I’m even talking to you. This is private, personal business, and I barely know you. Besides, only minutes ago you had me cross-eyed furious.”

“You’re not discussing it, Claire. You’re dodging the question.”

“Fine. His name is Lars.”

Tye waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t. Stubborn, frustrating woman. He opened his mouth to ask more, but before he could get the question out he was hailed by a loud woman in a big hat. Across the narrow dirt street Wilhemina Peters waved a hand in the air. “Lord McBride! Oh, Lord McBri-ide.” She picked up her petticoats and dashed out in front of a buckboard. The driver lifted a fist in anger.

“Now
there
is a dedicated newspaper reporter,” Claire observed.

“She’s a busybody gossip columnist that’s what she is. You know, she’s the one who named my nieces the Menaces.”

“Lord McBride,” Wilhemina said, fanning her flushed face with her hand as she drew near. “Here you are. Finally. I’ve been looking for you all day!”

Tye tipped his hat and tried his best to keep his smile from sliding into a more sickly expression. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Peters. Have you met Miss Donovan? She’s opening a bakery in my brother’s building.”

Wilhemina and Claire exchanged pleasantries. Then, as the reporter launched into her inescapable interview, Claire made her excuses, finger-waving good-bye as she threw an amused grin over her shoulder. Tye eyed the retreating sway of her hips, his blood shooting straight to his loins.

Hell, and I didn’t even eat a damned cookie.

Distracted, he answered Mrs. Peters’s questions more frankly than he would have wished. By the time Wilhemina pattered off toward the paper and Tye headed back to the apartment, he felt as if he’d gone three rounds with a Spanish Inquisition priest.

All thought of the gossipy columnist disappeared as he stepped into the Rankin Building’s vestibule. Foodstuffs lay piled against the wall, a few gaily wrapped packages interspersed among them. But the gifts weren’t what made him grimace; the girls managed that.

Emma, Maribeth, and Katrina McBride sat in three chairs lined up just inside Claire Donovan’s shop. Covered in flour, smeared in butter—with suspicious red stains dribbling across their bodices and globs of what might have been egg yolk in their hair—the girls each offered him a timid smile.

Behind them, arms folded and eyes narrowed, stood Claire.

Tye cleared his throat and, having drawn a blank on anything intelligent to say, sallied forth with the age-old masculine question, “So, ladies, what’s for dinner?”

For her answer, Claire scooped a dish from a nearby table piled high with even more matchmaking offerings. Before he realized her intent she sent it sailing toward his face.

Eat frog legs for breakfast for a week to cure a case of bad luck

CHAPTER 6

TYE TUGGED A HANDKERCHIEF from his pocket and slowly wiped the pudding off his face, Claire fully expected him to spew a few angry words in her direction. She wished he would. Throwing a single container of pudding hadn’t come close to dealing with all the temper she had churning through her at the moment, and she had plenty of ammunition yet to launch. Sally Randolph’s custard cake looked like it would fit her hand just right.

But instead of flailing into her like either of her brothers would have done, Tye calmly hung his hat on the tree beside the door, then turned his attention to his nieces. “I want to hear the story in no more than three sentences each. Emma, you start.”

The girl’s shoulders rose with a deep breath. “You seemed to like the food, if not the ladies, and you said you wished one of them had brought you a chocolate cake, and we felt bad for what happened at Miss Loretta’s, and Mrs. Wilson likes to say that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and we thought—”

Tye held up his hand, palm out. “I said three sentences.”

“But that was only one, Uncle Tye.”

“It was long enough for a full paragraph. Mari, your turn.”

The middle girl dragged a hand across her mouth and said, “We-ell…You see…we, uh…It’s like this, Uncle Tye.”

Katrina’s thumb popped from her mouth. “That’s three, Mari. My turn.” She beamed a practiced smile at her uncle and said, “We’re ‘pologizing for misbehaving at Miss Loretta’s house. We knew we might make a little mess, so we thought we’d be good and use Miss Donovan’s kitchen.”

“Little mess!” Claire exclaimed. “You call the disaster in my kitchen a little mess?”

“It did get a teeny bit out of hand,” Maribeth agreed, wincing. “Everything was fine until we let Ralph inside.”

“That danged dog again,” Tye muttered. “I’m beginning to think I made a big mistake bringing him home after all. Where is Ralph now?”

Emma answered. “He’s upstairs shut in our room. We asked him to watch out for Spike.”

“Good,” Tye replied, nodding.

Katrina tossed a frown toward Claire. “You said you were going home. Why did you come back?”

“Home? I didn’t tell you I was going home.”

The youngster whipped a hand up and pointed toward the ceiling. “You told that pretty man. We were watching you through the spy hole.”

Claire stood speechless, her mouth bobbing open and closed like a fish. Tye grinned sheepishly and explained, “From what I understand it’s an old family tradition.”

“That’s right,” Emma said. “Sometimes Papa says it was love at first sight when he sneaked a peak at Mama.”

Her voice lowered confidentially, Katrina added, “That spy hole looked into the dressing room at Fortune’s Design.”

Trace McBride’s own children naming him as a Peeping Tom? Claire threw Tye a scandalized look.

“At least you’re not naked when you bake,” he said, as if that made spying on her acceptable. A teasing twinkle flashed in his eyes as he added, “Are you?”

She gritted her teeth against the curses waiting on her tongue. One didn’t grow up with brothers without learning a few good cuss words. Drawing a deep, calming breath, she said, “I want my kitchen put back to rights.”

Tye rolled his tongue around his cheek and glanced toward the doorway leading into the kitchen. “Maybe I’d better take a little look.”

“Maybe you’d better not, Uncle Tye,” Emma suggested. “We’ve already told Miss Donovan we’d clean it up. You don’t need to waste your time checking it out.”

Maribeth shot Claire a narrow-eyed glare before adding, “That’s right. We said we’d take care of this ourselves, and we weren’t lying. She shouldn’t have dragged you into it. We didn’t need to sit here like this.”

Why, the snotty little thing
. It was all Claire could do not to stick her tongue out at the child.

“Button your lips, girls.” Tye pivoted and headed for the kitchen. Claire folded her arms and waited for his response. While she didn’t expect his reaction to equal hers—she couldn’t quite picture him screaming at the sight—she did expect more than a grunt.

A grunt was all she got.

He sauntered back toward them, wincing and rubbing his eyes. “Girls, here’s what we’re going to do. The three of you are going to march upstairs and get cleaned up. Then I want you to track down your teacher and get the assignments you missed today when you skipped school.”

“How do you know about that?” Katrina asked, wonder in her voice.

Maribeth nudged her in the ribs. “ ‘Cause you told him we spied on Miss Donovan and that man, dummy. That happened during the big middle of the schoolday.”

“After that,” Tye continued, “I expect you to shut yourselves in your room and read every word, write every sentence, and work every arithmetic problem your teacher gives you. Y’all understand?”

“Yessir, Uncle Tye.”

“Then scram.”

The McBride Menaces jumped from their seats and darted out the door, Emma pausing long enough to give her uncle a hug, a kiss on the cheek, and a declaration of love. He was grinning when he turned to Claire.

She wanted to kill him. Her fingers itched to let sail a handy custard cake. In a voice that bordered on shrill, she demanded, “What about my kitchen?”

His smile drained from his face like ale from a new tap. “I’ll clean it up.”

“Sure you will.” Claire shot him a scathing look. If he cleaned as well as he disciplined those children, it wouldn’t be safe to boil water in her kitchen. She eyed the cake, seriously considering the idea of making him wear it. “Why in the world didn’t you have the girls clean up their own mess?”

He rolled up his sleeves. “You’ve never seen them clean. Since I have to go in behind them anyway, I might as well do it myself the first time.”

Claire’s attention snagged on his muscular forearms and she absently wondered what physical work he had done to develop those muscles. When he headed for her kitchen, she gave her head a shake and redirected her attention to the matter at hand. “But think of the lesson you are teaching them that way. It’s wrong.”

He halted abruptly and twisted his head. His deep green eyes bore into hers as he flatly stated, “It’s not my job to teach them lessons. My job is to keep them safe until Trace and Jenny get home.”

Claire leaned against the doorjamb, her arms folded. Watching him dip a rag into a pan of sudsy water, it was all she could do not to shoo him away and tackle the cleanup herself. But principle glued her shoes to the floor, and she remained standing in the doorway secretly impressed by the attention he paid to scraping every bit of goo from her worktable.

A banging noise out in the alley caught her attention, and when she crossed to the window to investigate she spied a smear of what appeared to be strawberry preserves on her brand new curtain. Slowly, she shook her head. “You aren’t doing your brother and his wife any favors by spoiling the girls in the meantime, McBride.”

“I know.” His tone was unrepentant “I don’t like getting after them. None of their…mishaps are malicious. They just seem to have noses for trouble.”

“Bloodhound noses,” she grumbled. That’s what her father had always said to her. That Claire had a bloodhound’s nose for trouble. She knew the girls’ antics— the mess in her kitchen included—weren’t malicious. Watching those girls was like watching herself years ago.

The Menaces’ current mess didn’t compare to the one she’d made when she’d attempted to bake her first cake unsupervised. But she had managed the cleanup all by herself. Took her an entire day. She’d had to miss the barbecue out at Riverrun Plantation. But she’d been better for the lesson, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she benefitted from the discipline in the long run?

Claire filled a pan with cool water, then removed the curtains from their rod and put them to soak. “They skipped school and destroyed my kitchen, and all you do is make them see to their missed assignments. That’s not enough, McBride. Children need to learn that actions have consequences.”

“Maybe so, but I don’t have to be the one to teach them.” Finished with the worktable, he filled a basin with warm water off the stove, added soap flakes, then piled in some of the dirty dishes lying around the room. He lifted Claire’s favorite ruffled apron from a peg on the wall and, to her amazement, tied it on. When he plunged his hands into the sudsy water, he added honestly, “I want them to like me.”

That stopped her completely. She gawked at him. Tye McBride was big and broad and oozing masculinity. And wearing a frilly apron and washing dishes because he wanted his nieces to like him.

He glanced in her direction and smiled sheepishly.

In that exact moment, Claire fell just a little bit in love.

***

TYE GAWKED at her and wondered what had put that peculiar expression on her face. “Is it the apron? Is green not my color?”

“What?”

“You look like you just took a bite out of a lemon.”

“I…um…no.” She offered him a sickly smile. “Actually the green looks good on you. It matches your eyes.”

“Well I’m certainly relieved about that. I hate being poorly dressed in the kitchen.”

“At least you’re dressed this time.”

He remembered how he’d dashed into her kitchen wearing only Emma’s drawers. Thank God he had on pants this time around. That damned Magic was getting to him again.

He could smell it in the air. Magic. Like burning cedar chips that have been dipped in peppermint and sunshine—and sex. Despite his best intentions, his head lifted and his nostrils flared. It required a conscious effort not to take a step toward Claire as desire snaked through him.

He dropped a spoon back into the dishwater with a plop, and visually searched the area for a sign of the witches’ brew. There, on the floor beside her worktable, a cork. He scooped it off the ground and cautiously lifted it toward his nose. One little sniff. The scent melted through him. Cedar and sunshine and long, slow, deliriously sweet sex.
Oh, yeah
.

He pegged the cork across the room toward a basket of trash. The aroma didn’t fade. Glancing around the room, he finally spotted pieces of glass and a stain puddling out from beneath the worktable. When he hunkered down to retrieve the glass, he heard Claire exclaim, “Oh, no. It was a big bottle, too.”

To Tye’s discomfort, she joined him, kneeling on the floor just outside the mess. Their hands brushed as they both reached for the same shard of broken glass. Tye’s fingertips tingled, and he sucked in a breath through his teeth. Claire Donovan and her damned Magic. “I’ll get it,” he said gruffly. “Go on, Claire. In fact, why don’t you head home. I’ll see your kitchen put to rights again. You needn’t stay.”

When she shook her head a tendril of gold escaped its pins and brushed against her lips. Tye bit back a groan as she said, “No, I can’t leave. I have work to do. I lost half a day because of Lars, and if I’m going to open the shop on time, I need to work.”

When she stretched her hand toward another shard, the bodice of her gown pulling tight across her bosom, Tye’s instincts went to war. Self-preservation finally won out over lust, and he backed away. Slowly, he pulled off the apron and set it aside. “This has been a stressful day. What you really need, Miss Donovan, is a little time to relax. You’re strung tight as a two-dollar fiddle.”

Of course, Tye was really talking about himself.

She blew a small, disgusted puff of air. “I can’t relax. I have too much to do. Too many problems to solve.”

Her fingers closed around the ragged edges of the glass. When she flinched, Tye realized she’d cut herself. He mouthed a curse and reached for her hand. “Lemme see.”

Blood pearled in a thin line along her palm and smeared the surface of the shard. “Ouch,” he said, appropriating the glass. He tossed it into the trash, then took hold of Claire’s wrist and helped her to her feet. He reached for his handkerchief, frowned when he found it soiled with chocolate pudding, then discarded it in favor of one of Claire’s embroidered tea towels.

His touch was gentle as he dipped a corner in water and dabbed at the cut, frowning as the bright red stain spread across the pristine cloth. “You should have listened to me, Claire. It’s not deep, but you’ll feel it every time you move your hands the next couple of days.”

Out of habit developed from weeks of tending to children, he lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to her palm just beside the cut. Then, because he’d lost his mind under the influence of Magic, he placed another pair of kisses at her wrist. Slow, experimenting kisses. Learning her texture and her taste. He licked her skin, and sweetness exploded across his tongue. His eyes drifted shut as he gloried in the flavor.

Claire made a small sound of distress, jerked her hand from his grip, and clasped it to her breast, her eyes wide and clouded with confusion. Sweetness soured in his mouth as the subtle scent of her fear sliced through the Magic like broken glass.

Tye took a vital step back. He shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to calm the pounding in his chest. What the hell was the matter with him? “Claire, I, uh…”

Color flushed her cheeks, and her voice sounded breathless. “You were right. I’ll go. It’s been a long day. Please lock up for me when you’re finished cleaning.” Turning, she fled from the kitchen and a moment later he heard the outer door bang shut with a rattle of window glass.

Tye muttered an oath and gazed around the small, messy room. He’d scared her with his kisses. Hell, he’d scared himself with those kisses. Another few minutes of that, and he’d have had her on the floor.

What had gotten into him? Had the pudding knocked the brains right out of his head? His gaze drifted to the puddle of Magic at his feet and he scowled. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

As soon as he saw the girls settled in upstairs, he would track down a cleaning lady and pay her double-time—triple-time—to clean the Blessings’ mess here at The Confectionary. After that, he’d order supper. The Green Parrot Saloon had a Mexican cook who made chili hot enough to melt diamonds.

Tye tossed down the tea towel he had flung over his shoulder and headed for the door. Pausing beside Claire’s produce bins, he snagged a pair of habañero peppers he’d noticed earlier. He’d ask the cook to toss these fiery beauties into the chili pot, too.