“Right, warns you that Tess takes care of my entire life, but it’s not true. Yes, I’ve learned to play dumb so she does the work—she is a workhorse if there ever was one—but there are many aspects about me that she knows nothing about. And you are at the head of that list. I’m sure this has to do with my having heard about you since I was a kid, and I know this is early, but, Jocelyn, I like you a great deal. You’re smart and funny, and I enjoy being with you. You make me feel good. Is that enough to base something between us on?”
“Yes.” Every word he said made her feel better. She didn’t want to think she’d been jealous of Tess, but it was nice to be reassured that there was no reason to be.
She sat up on the quilt and looked in the basket. “Did you eat all of that pâté?”
“Every bite of it.” He turned onto his side, his head on his hand; his eyes on her were warm.
She had to make herself look away from him. Too soon, she thought. Much, much too soon. Miss Edi said that women who attached themselves to one man right away spent their lives regretting that there’d been no courtship. She said that David had courted her “ardently.” “It was a long time before I agreed to…to be his girlfriend.” When she said the word, she always blushed.
Jocelyn didn’t like to think how that “ardent” courtship had turned out. Miss Edi had come home from World War II, her legs a mass of scars, and found her beloved David married to another woman.
“So tell me about the cupcakes,” Jocelyn said again as she spread cheese on a cracker.
“I don’t know the details. You’ll get a call from somebody, probably my sister and probably tonight, and she’ll ask if you know how to make a cupcake.”
“This will be the children’s party you invited me to?”
Ramsey took the cracker she handed him. “Yes.”
“Have you seen my kitchen?”
“Sure,” he said, chewing. “It’s—” He looked at her. “It’s bare. So how do you make cupcakes without…without whatever it takes to make cupcakes?”
“I thought you could cook.”
“My sister taught me how to make that pasta dish. It’s the only thing I can cook.”
Jocelyn made a cheese cracker for herself and ate it while she thought. “I guess your sister’s doing this to get her poor unmarried brother hitched with the woman she thinks is rich and lives in the biggest, oldest house in town.”
“Sure. My mother has despaired of my ever marrying, and it looks like my sister is also about to give up on me.”
“So I’m your last chance.”
“Very last.” He was smiling bigger by the minute. “I’m getting the idea that you have something in mind.”
“Do you know what the latest thing in children’s food is?”
“Dying it purple?”
“That’s so old school,” she said. “No, the latest thing is to dump a batch of puréed spinach in with the chocolate.”
Ramsey gave her a look of such horror that she laughed. “It just sounds bad. Actually, it tastes good. You put squash in their mac and cheese, zucchini in their hot dogs. Of course the kids grow up never having actually eaten broccoli, but that’s neither here nor there. The thing is to get them big and strong. When they go to college, they’re on their own.”
“A whole generation of children is going to grow up not knowing what real chocolate tastes like,” Ramsey said, still looking as though this were the worst idea he’d ever heard.
“Does your sister have any money? If she’s part of your family, then she must be rich.”
“What?” Ramsey looked at her as though he couldn’t believe what she was saying.
“If your sister had called me this morning and asked me to bake a few dozen cupcakes for a kids’ party, I would have made them for her for free. But then, I’d been led to believe that I’d inherited a fortune with the house, not just a money pit that’s going to take everything I earn just to keep the termites at bay. What I want to know is if your sister can afford to pay me
for the cupcakes.”
“Yeah, she can afford them. Her husband works at Busch, and he makes good money.”
“And of course there’s the trust fund from your grandfather.”
“And there’s the trust fund from my grandfather,” Ramsey said, smiling. “What’s going on in that pretty little mind of yours?”