Carter leaned back against the door, smiling. “So what did you do? Hot-wire a car? Threaten someone with a gun? Lewd sexual behavior?” On the last one he looked hopeful.
“I borrowed some tart pans! There. Now will you let me out?”
Carter, intrigued, unlocked the door and followed Kelli into the grocery. The last time he’d been in one had been with Sophie. He leaned on the basket and guided it as Kelli tossed produce into it. They were silent for a while.
“Did this preacher, Russell, bail you out?”
“More or less,” Kelli said.
He moved along the aisle. “So why did you steal the pans?”
“You’re a pest, you know that?”
“Sophie thinks so and my father would agree wholeheartedly, but my mother rather liked me. So why’d you steal the pans?”
“Because my boyfriend ran over mine with his motorcycle and I had to bake six tarts to try to get a job as a pastry chef at a major hotel.”
Carter waited for her to continue.
“I’d been working for a jerk of a chef who took credit for everything I did and I wanted to get away from him. Two days before I was to show up with examples of what I can do, my boyfriend and I had a fight. The next day while I was at work he cleaned out my bank account and ran his bike over every piece of cooking equipment I owned.”
“So you ‘borrowed’ some more.”
“That’s right. That’s what I did.”
“But you got caught?”
“He was stalking me,” she said.
“The boyfriend or the mean chef boss?”
“Boyfriend. He followed me, saw what I was doing, and called the cops. The mean chef pressed charges. The judge thought it was all ridiculous, so he sent me to help at a homeless shelter.”
“And that’s where the Edilean pastor met you.”
“Yes, he did, and he called me for this job, even bought my bus ticket.”
“You’re a pastry chef but you came all the way from Chicago to take a job in a sandwich shop?”
When Kelli didn’t answer, he stopped and stared at her. “If you want me to help you, you need to tell me the whole story.”
“What else is there to tell?” They were in the spice aisle and she was buying the biggest, cheapest containers she could find.
Carter didn’t reply but picked up a ten-pound bag of King Arthur flour. “When I started working for Treeborne Foods three years ago I suggested that we branch out into baked goods. Give Sara Lee a run for her money. In front of everyone my father told me to sit down and shut up.”
Kelli seemed to be deciding whether to tell the real reason why she’d come to Edilean. “Russell said that the sandwich shop used to sell pastries and that there’s an empty building next door.”
Carter instantly saw what she was getting at. “You want to tear through the wall to make a work area.”
Kelli nodded.
Carter’s eyes lit up. “I can get all the baking equipment you need, including hundreds of tart pans, from a rock bottom wholesaler.”
“Just mention the Treeborne name?”
Carter grinned. “Just mention the Treeborne name.”
Understanding passed between them. Maybe, just possibly, Carter was seeing a way around his father’s rule. If he could come up with a line of pastries, things that could be frozen . . . He’d do something labeled as healthy, as that’s what sold. Healthy, high fiber, low carb. All the catch words of the industry.