“That could be useful,” she said, but he didn’t smile.
“Look,” Ramsey said, “there’s going to be a trick played on you this afternoon.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You know?”
“Luke told me. He’s picking me up at two—or at least he’s supposed to pick me up then. He said you always took women to The Trellis restaurant for the second date, so he said he’d pick me up there.”
Ramsey snorted. “He’s trying to make you think I’m a stick-in-the-mud and that I have a routine for ‘my women.’ The truth is that I don’t have a set routine and I don’t have many dates. But Luke isn’t what I was talking about. A cupcake trick is going to be played on you.”
“A cupcake trick? It that some Southern slang that I don’t know about?”
“No, it’s my big mouth. After I left you on Saturday evening I went next door to Tess’s apartment.”
“And talked about me,” Jocelyn said. “You told me.”
Ramsey gave her a quick look, as though trying to figure out her tone. “I told her that…” He waved his hand in dismissal. “It doesn’t matter what and why, but I told her that you mentioned that you can make cupcakes, and she said I should make a ‘cupcake crisis.’”
“A cupcake crisis? What is that?”
“She meant I should get someone to pretend that he or she needs cupcakes more than life itself and you are the only one who can make them.”
Joce looked at him in consternation. “I think I’m missing the point here. Why would someone need for me to make cupcakes?”
“The truth?”
“That would be nice.”
“It started out as a way for me to get to know you better, a way for us to spend more time together. After our first date, I felt that we…”
“Ran out of things to talk about?”
“Exactly,” he said.
“So after you left me, you went to Tess to ask her female opinion about what to do to get you and me more involved with each other?”
“Yes,” he said sheepishly. “Sorry, I—”
She cut him off because she leaned across the quilt and kissed him on the lips. It wasn’t a kiss of great passion, but it was a kiss that let him know she wasn’t displeased with what he’d said.
“Wow,” he said, blinking at her. “Was that for…I mean, was that because I told the truth?”
She didn’t want to tell him why she’d kissed him. Maybe it was just relief that he really had gone to Tess to talk about her, Jocelyn. She knew it was stupid, but Miss Edi said that Ramsey was the perfect man for her, and in a way, she felt like he was hers.
She leaned back on the quilt and looked up at the leaves of the tree overhead. “So tell me about this cupcakes crisis.”
Ramsey moved toward her. “I’d rather talk about kissing.”
“No, not now,” she said as she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “I think I have other things in my life to resolve before serious kissing.”
Ramsey gave an ostentatious sigh and lay back on the quilt, the picnic basket between them. “Tess took care of it. The cupcake crisis, that is.”
“So even before she met me, she knew that I needed something to occupy myself.”
“Yes,” Ramsey said as he put his hands behind his head and looked at the tree leaves. “But she doesn’t know the truth about the money. Joce, I know that everyone probably tells you that Tess—”
“Warns me that Tess—”