smile. Especially when Shane hesitated a moment as if unsure what to do, and finally gave her fingertips a slight squeeze. “Very nice to meet you.”
“You’re obviously not from St. Michel,” Pepper said.
“Pepper!” AJ said. Despite having been through finishing school and having made her debut into polite society, sometimes her friend didn’t realize how off-putting her words could sound.
“What?” she asked, her expression all wide-eyed innocence.
AJ gave her a look.
“What I meant, AJ, was judging by his accent, I gather that he is an American.”
She turned her attention back to Shane, suddenly all smiles and Southern sweetness. “How do you know Maya?”
Shane gave her the short version of how he’d been passing through St. Michel on his way back to the States, and Maya had asked him to bring chocolate to AJ when she learned that he was stationed at Fort Hood.
“AJ, you got chocolates from Maya and you didn’t share them with me?”
“Hey! What kind of burgers are you cooking up?” asked a man who had just walked up to the table.
AJ smiled at Pepper and with an almost imperceptible nod of her head, she silently asked Pepper to tend to the customer, which she did graciously.
“Hey, Syd, how are the onion straws coming along?” AJ asked.
The pretty brunette lifted the metal basket out of the deep fryer. “I have a fresh batch right here,” she said, her British accent upbeat and melodic.
For most of the morning, AJ had been cooking, and Pepper and Sydney had been expediting and greeting the potential customers who stopped by. That’s why AJ felt comfortable giving Shane her full attention now, while Sydney tended to the makeshift kitchen, and Pepper answered questions.
A few seconds later, Sydney gave AJ a who’s-the-hunk? look as she set a basket of onion straws on the table. Again, AJ made introductions and then put a healthy heap of onion straws on Shane’s plate. Sydney uttered a polite, “Very nice to meet you,” and returned to frying the onion straws.
Shane tasted the Tailgater slider first. AJ watched him bite into it. She got enormous pleasure from feeding people. Rapt, she watched Shane as he chewed and swallowed.
“What do you think?” she asked, not even trying to stifle the eagerness in her voice.
He nodded. “It’s delicious, but didn’t you say it had barbecue sauce with it?”
“Oh. Yes, it does.” She glanced at the crowded contents of the table and saw that the barbecue sauce was, indeed, missing.
AJ got the sauce and turned around to find herself staring into the ice-blue eyes of the one person she’d hoped not to see today: her grandmother, Agnes Jane Sherwood. Grandmother’s steely gaze assessed AJ. Judging by the way the matriarch frowned down her aquiline nose, AJ knew her grandmother found her lacking.
No big surprise. She always had. The only thing AJ could do was shake it off.
This was the woman for whom AJ was named—her mother’s feeble attempt to get back into her estranged mother’s good graces after AJ’s mother had eloped with Joey Antonelli. A plumber. A man Agnes had considered so far beneath her daughter that she couldn’t even see that far down the social food chain. When her daughter came back married, Agnes quit speaking to her for years.
Even though her mother and grandmother were on better terms today, Agnes still liked to grouse, “What was I supposed to say? When my friends’ daughters were marrying into families such as the Connecticut Collinses or the Dallas Dashwoods, my daughter has married into the Antonelli Plumbing Antonellis. It was mortifying.”
Apparently, it had been a huge disgrace. One so grave that even after the young bride had saddled her innocent first born with a name like Agnes Jane Sherwood-Antonelli, grandmother hadn’t let AJ’s mother back into her good graces.
It was no help, either, that Agnes Jane Sherwood’s namesake had decided to become a chef. Cooking was a chore the hired help quietly took care of. Not something a Sherwood fretted over and certainly not something they found enjoyable. Grandmother said, “Obviously AJ has inherited her father’s working-class DNA.”
Today, what made matters worse was that Grandmother was the chair of A Taste of Celebration. Obviously, the chair in name only, because she seemed just as surprised to find her granddaughter part of the festival.
“Flipping burgers? Really, Agnes Jane, how could you embarrass me— How could you embarrass yourself like this?”
A sudden hush seemed to settle over the square as the eye of Hurricane Agnes settled under the Celebrations, Inc. tent. As ever, her grandmother’s energy was harsh and commanding, a presence that seemed to vibrate. Or maybe the vibration was simply the sound of blood rushing through AJ’s ears as she stood there mortified, watching Shane watch this embarrassing confrontation.
“Have you been reduced to serving fast food?” Agnes continued.
Pepper came up behind AJ and put a supportive hand on her shoulder. Something in that kind show of I’ve-got-your-back loyalty made AJ snap out of her stupor.
“Grandmother, I am test-marketing options for a football season tailgating menu that my company is going to offer.”
It was her company.
She hadn’t asked the woman for a penny of her millions to get Celebrations, Inc. off the ground. AJ had laid a careful plan, worked hard, scrimped and saved with the intention of gathering enough seed money to open her doors.
The opening had been put on a faster track after AJ’s fiancé died, naming her the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. But not until after the money sat in a savings account for a little over three years. At first, AJ couldn’t fathom spending a penny of it, paralyzed by the thought that Danny was gone and money was all she had left of him. It hadn’t seemed right. It hadn’t seemed fair that he’d had to die, and she was left here to try and go on without him.
For three years, AJ had lived in a daze, going through life’s motions—getting up, working long hours, coming home, sleeping only to get up and do it all over again. Sleep was the only place where she found peace... At night, when her head hit the pillow, she could lose herself in dreams where Danny was alive, her family accepted him and she was happy. As a result, during the waking hours, she shut down, living in her head. This didn’t escape her friends.
That’s when it had hit her. He would never have wanted her to sit idle. She needed to invest that money in making her career dreams come true—something Danny had been so supportive of.
After she’d done that, it was as if Danny were right there with her every step of the way.
So, even if she were “flipping burgers,” she’d rather be doing that, relying on herself and her own creativity to make or break her than living on her grandmother’s terms.
AJ knew it galled her grandmother that she was that solvent. Thanks to Danny, a man Grandmother had deemed beneath her namesake, AJ was free, and her grandmother didn’t have an ounce of control over her.
Her grandmother didn’t dignify the justification of AJ’s burger flipping with a comment. She just stood there with an expression so sour, AJ feared the old woman would suck on her cheeks hard enough to suck herself inside out.
As AJ stifled a smile, she realized she was still holding the bowl of homemade barbecue sauce she’d promised Shane. Why did he have to witness this ugly scene?
She turned away from her grandmother to set the bowl of sauce in front of Shane. As she did, the toe of her hot pink Dr. Martens caught on an exposed tree root. As if in slow motion, she lurched forward, splattering sauce down the front of Shane’s white polo shirt.
* * *
Shane knew the barbecue sauce mishap wasn’t intentional,