“That’s not true.”
“How do you know?”
“Let’s just say it was my lack of innovation that…heralded my job change.”
“Meaning?”
He leaned on one elbow. “It was because I wouldn’t get creative that I lost my job. And I didn’t lose it, by the way,” he corrected himself. “I merely agreed with the management that it would be best for all concerned if I left immediately.”
“Honey, in this neck of the woods, that’s called getting fired. Best own up to it now, so you can move on.” She walked back into the apartment despite the dark look he gave her. “What kind of ‘creative,’ anyway? You mean cheating?”
“It has a nicer term in real estate. Alternative accounting. Although that’s not the name I’d put to it. I wouldn’t look the other way when some guy started skimming off the sales when apartment buildings were made into condos. Unfortunately that process has a lot of convenient little places to hide some cheating—if no one is looking. But I was, and when they started really putting the pressure on me, I had no choice but to go to the local authorities. I just couldn’t sit by and watch them steal from people.” He sighed and got up from the table. “But, as you can see, it didn’t exactly go well for me.”
Cameron had told himself over and over that he wouldn’t go into his situation for his first couple of weeks in Kentucky. He had a set of polite but evasive answers for all questions about his sudden move. All of which left his skull in the presence of this relentless redhead. Why on earth was he getting into this with her? Already?
She blinked at him. “You’re a whistle-blower?”
There had to be a more noble term for it than that. If only he could remember it. “Let’s just say I’m a guy paying a very high price for doing the right thing at the wrong time.”
She scratched her chin and he noticed it left a smear of flour on her cheek. Brown eyes were a very normal color—so why did they stand out on a redhead like that? And that red hair—did that come from God or a salon? He looked at her, standing in his kitchen with a bright pink potholder tucked into her back jean pocket, and thought there wasn’t a single subtle thing about this woman. She narrowed her eyes and he wondered if he’d been staring too long. “Are you in the witness protection program or something?” she asked.
“Using my real name? Buying real estate? Here? With loudmouth Aunt Sandy?” There wasn’t a more ridiculous notion in the world. Although, based on the last couple of days, perhaps a phone call to the FBI might be in order. Disappearing into thin air looked like an attractive option at the moment.
“Well, yeah, that’d hardly do the trick, would it?” she laughed. He expected her to have a high, musical laugh, but instead the low notes of her silky chuckle tickled him somewhere under his ribs. “But really, is that what happened? You called the cops on some guys so your own company fired you? Can they do that, legally? I mean, that’s gangster stuff.”
Cameron laughed. “My old boss would tell you that’s simply a highly competitive marketplace. Everybody’s scratching everyone else’s back. Especially in a place like New York.”
She shifted her weight. “Are you sorry you did it?” she asked in a tone so sincere it caught him off guard. “With all it cost you, would you do it again?”
Funny how no one had asked him that before now. Which was odd, because it really was the question of the hour, wasn’t it? Was it all worth the cost? Would he have been able to sleep at night if he’d kept his mouth shut?
“You know,” he said quite honestly, “I thought I’d know that for sure by now.” Again, the prepared “noble guy” answer he’d crafted for the world just wouldn’t come. “I keep waiting for that great big atta boy of peace to come down from God and, well, I’m still waiting.”
A warm tone softened in her eyes. It looked far too much like pity and that sprouted a hard spot in the pit of his stomach. He really didn’t know what he wanted from all this, but he knew for certain he didn’t want pity. And for some reason, especially not from her. He shuffled his papers, suddenly wanting this conversation over.
“This isn’t one of those black-and-white morality tales, Miss Hopkins. There’s no hero, there’s no wicked witch. I made the best choice I could at the time and I’ll just deal with what comes.”
Her face told him his tone had been sharper than he would have liked, but she seemed able to irk him with a single look. Not even his boss…ahem, his old boss—could get to him so quickly.
“Hey, you don’t have to prove anything to me.” She yanked the potholder from her pocket and huffed back toward the door. He slumped in his seat, half glad to be rid of her, half contrite for being such a beast.
“For what it’s worth,” he heard her call out from the hall as she pulled the door shut, “it sounds like you got a lousy deal.”
When the door clicked shut behind her, he tossed his pencil down and thought, here or there?
Dinah stared at the envelope now opened on her bakery’s kitchen counter. Last time I checked, Lord, You were still in control. But can You see how I feel like the world’s ganging up on me? Did she have to send this card? Now?
A perfectly good morning—including the installation of Taste and See’s new oven—had been ruined by a single piece of mail. All her euphoria over having an oven that actually obeyed the temperature she set on the dial—Dinah’s math skills never really were up to speed when it came to compensating for Old Ironsides being 27 degrees too hot—was lost in the contents of one pale blue envelope.
Mom.
Dinah stared at the final two words of the card: “Come home.” Suddenly she was eight years old and being told to come in from the thrilling Jersey seashore waves to wash up for dinner. To Dinah, “come home” never had any of those “welcome back” warm, fuzzy connotations. “Come home” was a command putting an end to anything fun or anything she called her own.
A command, in this particular instance, to “stop all this Kentucky nonsense and come back to your family where you belong.” Dinah poured herself another cup of coffee and winced at the concept. She couldn’t think of any place she felt like she belonged less than that manicured Jersey suburb. “All this Kentucky nonsense” felt more like “home” or “where she belonged” than anything on the East Coast. Back home she was a square peg being continually squashed into a round hole. Here, those things her mother delicately called her “eccentricities” were welcomed, if not outright celebrated. Her craving to do something so pedestrian as baking, something so manual chafed at the academic and scientific values of her parents. Dinah knew God had brought her to Middleburg as sure as she knew anything in this world.
Middleburg is my home, Lord. How will I ever get her to understand that? Why can’t she let me be who You made me to be? Why can’t she let me be, period?
Dinah tucked the offending card into her back pocket as she heard the bakery’s front door chime. She walked out of the kitchen to find Emily Montague coming into the bakery. The woman was grinning from ear to ear and it reminded Dinah of all the reasons she did what she did. She’d been looking forward to this appointment all week—how on earth could she have forgotten it was this morning? Thanks, Lord, for sending me the reminder I needed, Dinah prayed silently as she reached for the file of sketches she had ready for her friend.
“I’m here,” Emily called out. “This is going to be so much fun.”
Dinah motioned to the little corner table that sat by the bakery’s front windows while she reached for a second mug and some hot water. “Tea for you, coffee for me.”
Emily ran the West of Paris bath shop down the street and was in the middle of planning her February wedding to a local horse farmer named Gil Sorrent. Dinah was happy to see her friend so madly in love and even happier to bake her