Brunch at Bittersweet Café Read online

Justin’s mouth pursed into a low whistle. “I’m sorry, Melody. That’s . . .”

  “That’s my mother.” She cleared her throat. “I really can’t blame her for being angry. Had I realized my passion for baking earlier, I could have saved all of us a lot of time and money.”

  Justin’s brow furrowed. “You said you graduated ten years ago. You’re what? Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”

  “Thirty.”

  He seemed to be doing calculations in his head. “But that would make you sixteen when you started college.”

  Melody shrugged. “Homeschooled, remember?”

  “Yeah, but you were a kid. At sixteen no one knows what they want to do for a living.”

  “You did.”

  “That’s different. I was raised by a pilot and I’ve always been excellent at math, but I’m not brilliant like you. What else was I going to do?”

  A flush heated her cheeks. “I’m not brilliant.”

  “You started college at sixteen.”

  “You flew a plane at sixteen. I just read books.”

  Justin paused. “Okay, you’re right. We’re both brilliant.”

  His matter-of-fact tone caught her off guard. She started laughing and continued laughing hard enough that she missed the turn to the restaurant and had to follow the GPS’s rather testy-sounding instructions to return her to the parking lot.

  She switched off the ignition. “Well, while we’re showing off, I might as well tell you that my restaurant experience has given me the ability to order five whole things in Spanish.”

  “I’m very impressed. I can basically order a cerveza and salsa.”

  “Don’t worry; I’ve got your back as long as you like tamales, tacos, or enchiladas.”

  “You said five.”

  “That included the salsa and beer.”

  He laughed too, and as they went inside, the melancholy she’d felt at her grandmother’s house ebbed away. As it turned out, neither of them had the opportunity to use their Spanish even if they’d wanted to, because the server was a pale Irish-looking girl even blonder than Melody. The food, however, was some of the most authentic she’d ever had. They gorged themselves on nopales and sopapillas and enough hot salsa to turn their tongues numb.

  Melody pushed away her decimated plate and fixed her attention on Justin. “So I’m curious. How does this pilot thing work that you get entire weeks off at a time?”

  “Jealous, are we?” Humor sparkled in his eyes, and she couldn’t help but smile in return.

  “Maybe a little. But mostly I’m curious.”

  He folded his napkin and tossed it on the table. “The FAA has all sorts of rules on how many consecutive duty hours we can perform and how many flights we’re allowed a year. Different companies offer different schedules. I’m on an eighteen-day fixed. I know which eighteen days a month I’m on duty, but I don’t get my actual schedule until the night before.”

  “So you have no idea where you’re going to be at any given time?”

  “Nope. And it could be one long flight or a bunch of short ones depending on scheduling. But that’s what makes it fun. Last tour, I flew into nineteen different cities, ten of which I haven’t been to this year. I went to the top of the arch in St. Louis for kicks. Lost twenty bucks on a riverboat casino in New Orleans just to say I did it. Of course, there were also overnights in Omaha, Nebraska, and Riverside, California. They can’t all be glamorous.”

  “I admit, I am jealous,” Melody said. “I love to travel, but it’s been a long time since I’ve even been out of Denver city limits.”

  His expression turned serious, legitimately curious. “Why don’t you?”

  “Money, for one thing. My schedule, for another. I work every night but Sunday. Until someone invents a Star Trek transporter thingy that can zap me to Europe and back in a single day, I think I’m out of luck.”

  “Is that where you’d go? Europe?”

  “I went with my mom on a world tour when I was nine. Four continents in sixty days. My favorite, of course, was Paris. I got back there as soon as I could. Lived there for almost a year, in fact, staging at some excellent patisseries. Would have stayed longer if I could have.” She didn’t say that the reason she’d made a hasty departure back to the US had blue eyes almost as brilliant as Justin’s and a sexy French accent. To be fair, Luc hadn’t promised her anything; she’d read into that herself thanks to his natural Gallic romanticism and her shaky grasp on the French language.

  “Hey, where’d you go?”

  Melody snapped back to the present, somehow having fallen into that memory like it was yesterday. “Sorry. Just reminiscing.”

  He cocked his head to study her, an indication her casual tone hadn’t been completely successful. “Good memories or bad ones?”

  “Depends on the day.” She tossed her own napkin on the table and began to scoot out of the booth. “Shall we go? I’ve got to work tonight, and traffic is bound to be awful.”

  Justin didn’t seem perturbed by her slip of attention, just settled comfortably into the passenger seat of her Jeep like he belonged there. She stole a quick look at him as she backed out of the parking lot. If she were being honest, her initial interest in him had been almost wholly physical. She made no apologies for enjoying that pull of attraction even when it threw up warning flags. But today had proven that she actually liked him. He was funny, intelligent, perceptive. Surprisingly humble, which was not a trait she’d have associated with a guy who was practically the template for a romance novel hero.

  “What?” His head turned in her direction, and she flushed, realizing she’d been staring. A dumb idea, especially considering she was supposed to be watching the road.

  “Nothing.” She searched for something to fill the suddenly awkward space between them. “You said your dad is a pilot. What about the rest of your family? Do you have siblings?”

  It was the right thing to ask, apparently. She learned that his parents had divorced relatively amicably. He had an older sister, who was married to his good friend, and a niece and nephew. Once he got on the subject of Abby and Andrew, it was pretty clear he adored them.

  As if the guy wasn’t appealing enough before, he liked kids. How was he still single? Not that she could ask that question without seeming like a crazy woman on the hunt for a husband. And she wasn’t crazy. Not really.

  Forty-five minutes of stop-and-go traffic later, Melody pulled up in front of Justin’s apartment complex and shifted to neutral, letting the engine idle. “Thank you, Justin. That was fun, and it could have been really hard.”

  “It’s my pleasure.” He smiled and reached for the door handle. “Let me know when you can have the car towed over and I’ll text you the address. I leave on my next tour Monday.”

  “I’ll do that.” Melody smiled back, but disappointment sparked in her faster than she could quash it. What was she expecting anyway, a good-night kiss? It had been a surprisingly enjoyable day, but never had he given her any indication he thought of it as more than a favor. Maybe the attraction was one-sided. Considering how many women he must have fawning over him, a literature-loving baker probably wasn’t high on his list.

  And then he turned back, bracing a forearm against the Jeep’s doorframe. “Would you like to go out to dinner with me sometime this week?”

  Her thoughts had spooled out so far along the “never gonna happen” lines that it took a second to reel them back in. “Uh, sure. But my only night off is Sunday.”

  “Sunday works for me. Should I pick you up at your place?”

  She nodded, transfixed by his direct aquamarine stare. “I’ll message you my address. Say six?”

  “Six it is.” That knee-weakening smile flashed. “I’ll see you soon.”

  “Yeah, you too.” Her brain stumbled over itself in a pathetic attempt at coherent speech, but before she could redeem herself, he slammed the door and turned up the walk to his building.

  Melody glanced at the clock. Two hours until her dinner with
Rachel and Alex. She couldn’t wait to tell her friend what had happened.

  She just didn’t know whether she meant about the car or Justin himself.

  Chapter Nine

  MELODY INTENDED TO use the time before she had to head to Rachel’s house to do . . . something productive. Instead, she found herself wandering aimlessly through her small apartment, fluffing pillows, rearranging tchotchkes on her living room side tables, sliding hangers around in her closet. She finally connected her phone to her Bluetooth speakers and selected her favorite old-school U2 album, letting the sounds of eighties rock fill the silence in her apartment while she scanned her bookshelf. Her fingertips touched her well-worn college edition of Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. She’d read it at least a dozen times, and she knew it so well she could probably recite passages by heart. Whenever she needed to escape reality, she could envelop herself in fictional Wessex, England. She’d never admit it aloud, but she’d thought it was a real place until her sophomore year in college.

  And yet even Bathsheba Everdene and her hapless attempts at romance couldn’t hold Melody’s attention for long. Maybe it was because she didn’t know how to cast Justin in this melodrama of her life. She didn’t want to believe he was yet another Sergeant Troy, dashing and handsome but ultimately unreliable, but she couldn’t picture him as a long-suffering Farmer Oak, either. Justin was unquestionably a man who knew what he wanted and went after it.

  Then again, Melody knew even less about sheep farming than she did about aviation, so it was far from a perfect analogy.

  No, things couldn’t be so simple. She’d have to go on real-world experience here, not literary advice. In her experience, the smoothest, best-looking guys were the least trustworthy. Add the pilot career and the classic cars, and he was almost too good to be true. Which meant he was absolutely too good to be true.

  And yet she hadn’t been able to keep herself from accepting his invitation to take her out on Sunday. She was, in fact, breathless just thinking about seeing him again.

  Melody sighed and set down her book, instead wandering into her kitchen. Fine. Literature might have failed her, but baking never did. She began pulling buckets of ingredients from the cupboards while she considered.

  She had an arsenal of fancy French desserts at her disposal, ones that she made frequently as an attempt to keep up her pastry skills while she languished in a commissary bakery. Crème brûlée. Croquembouche. Any number of elegant desserts that required tempered chocolate, a particularly precise operation at high altitude.

  And yet none of those called to her today, the marks of mastery of her profession. After being in her grandmother’s house, she was craving memories. Which meant her version of Grandma Bev’s butterscotch bars.

  Just because they were homey didn’t mean they were ordinary. Most versions of this recipe relied on butterscotch chips, waxy little chunks of hydrogenated oil and synthetic butterscotch flavor. Bev’s used malted milk powder and a truckload of butter, relying on the interaction between the oven’s heat and the milk powder to give that toasty, caramelized flavor that suggested rather than screamed butterscotch. Melody’s version also subbed brown sugar for some of the white with a healthy shot of molasses to add a deep, earthy note. At the last moment, she added some chopped hazelnuts from a little glass jar in the cabinet for extra texture and flavor.

  Thoughts of Justin faded as she mixed and spread the batter, then slid the shallow jelly roll pan into the oven where it would bake into a sheet of butterscotchy, nutty deliciousness. When it came out dozens of minutes later, fragrant and golden brown, she inhaled the aroma, basking in her sense of accomplishment at a perfect result. There was nothing like taking basic ingredients and transforming them into something both beautiful and tasty. As soon as they were cool enough to cut, she carefully portioned the bars into even squares and loaded them into a pastry box, a supply of which she kept in the space between her cabinet and refrigerator.

  Melody packed the dessert into the Jeep with twenty minutes to spare and began the short drive across town to Rachel’s house. She let out a sigh of relief when she saw that Alex’s car was nowhere in sight. Maybe that meant she would have a few minutes with her friend before they got down to business.

  “What’s this?” Rachel asked as soon as she opened the door. “You didn’t have to bring dessert.”

  “I was bored.” Melody handed over the box and shrugged off her down parka. She shut the door behind her and followed Rachel into the kitchen. “Where’s Alex?”

  “He’ll be here in a bit. I asked him to pick up a bottle of wine on the way, but knowing him, he’ll come back with six.”

  Melody smiled. Alex was a perfectionist, and if Rachel didn’t give him very specific instructions, he’d return with multiple options just to make sure one worked. “What are we having?”

  “Chicken primavera pizza. I’m going to grill it on the barbecue on the back porch.”

  “That sounds amazing. Apparently we were both going for comfort food, because I made Bev’s butterscotch bars.”

  “Alex is in for a treat, then. He’s never had the famous butterscotch bars.” Rachel maneuvered herself over to her cutting board, where she was in the middle of slicing paper-thin rounds of vegetables to go on top of the pizza. “What would you think about doing some rustic pizzas for the café? I always wanted to put them on the menu at Paisley, but Dan and Maurice thought they were too lowbrow.”

  “I love that idea. And now we might even be able to afford a pizza oven.”

  Rachel caught the leading tone in her voice and raised an eyebrow.

  “Justin thinks Grandma Bev’s old Hornet is worth about twenty thousand dollars.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I guess it’s rare. He says he can do the minor restoration for a thousand and then help me find a buyer. Though I should probably use it for living expenses while the bakery gets underway, not a pizza oven.”

  Rachel just stared, as if she wasn’t sure how to respond. Then she set down her knife and threw her arms around Melody. It was such an uncharacteristic show of enthusiasm that Melody laughed out loud.

  “I’m so excited!” Rachel squealed. “Does this mean we can get started for real?”

  “That’s exactly what it means.”

  “I’ve got so many ideas rattling around my head, you have no idea.” Rachel went back to her slicing. “Don’t think I missed the part about Justin.”

  “I didn’t think you did.”

  Rachel’s knife never wavered, but she was clearly waiting.

  “He went to Longmont with me today to look at the car. We had lunch on the way back.”

  “And?”

  “And we’re going out on Sunday night.” Melody held her breath, waiting for the warning.

  But Rachel just nodded. “I want to hear all about it, after.”

  “You’re not going to tell me to be careful? I mean, you of all people have seen what I’ve gone through with guys.”

  “I don’t need to tell you to be careful. You’ve been doing that for the last year. Ever since Micah.”

  “Micah.” Melody almost snarled his name. “Please don’t remind me.”

  “Maybe it’s time to take a chance. But you have a type, and you know I don’t mean hair color.”

  “Right. Why do I even keep trying when my track record is so bad?”

  “Because you know that not all men are like that,” Rachel said. “Just . . . be careful.”

  “There it is.” Melody laughed. “I knew you couldn’t resist.”

  The front door rattled and then creaked open. “Rachel, I’m here.” Alex appeared in the kitchen, carrying a box under his arm.

  “Did I tell you?” Rachel shot a meaningful look toward the bottle tops sticking above the cardboard. “And I don’t even drink.”

  “You just said dry white. That covers a huge amount of ground.” Alex glanced Melody’s way and smiled. “How are you? Want a glass?”

  �
��I’d love a glass.”

  A quick discussion with Rachel on the wine pairing ensued, and Alex went in search of a corkscrew. He seated himself across from Melody and began to work the cork out of the bottle. “Did you bring the photos with you? Rachel says you want to rent instead of sell.”

  “I do. I went there today and it’s in pretty good shape.”

  “I looked it up, and it’s a good area for an income property. You still may want to fix it up to command a higher rent. If that doesn’t feel too sacrilegious.”

  “No, I think Grandma Bev would be fine with it.” Melody pulled up the photos she’d taken and passed her phone across the table to Alex.

  “Five minutes!” Rachel called as she swept by them to the gas grill standing at the back door. A warning not to get too deep into discussion. Food never waited in this house; it was always the main event.

  Alex swiped through the photos, nodding slowly. “It’s a cute little place. Perfect for a young family. Does everything seem structurally sound?”

  “Oh yeah. She took care of it. It’s just a little outdated. Everyone likes new, modern kitchens and open floor plans.”

  “They do, but they also like character.” Alex’s mouth tipped up into a wry smile. “Or so I’m told.”

  Melody chuckled. Alex’s penthouse condo was a showplace of contemporary architecture; “full of character” didn’t describe it as much as “stylish and spectacular.” He’d overseen the renovations of two units on his floor himself, renting out one so he could live in the other. Maybe he wasn’t quite the hands-on construction type, but she’d take his contact list any day.

  “So what do you think?”

  “Honestly, Mel, from what I know of you and how you feel about this house, I’d just do a new coat of paint, refinish the hardwood floors, sink some money into granite or quartz countertops in the kitchen, and call it good. Anyone looking for an eight-hundred-square-foot house in Old Town is looking to live small and leave a light footprint. Play up all the original features; fix what’s broken. Otherwise it’s just another soulless gut job and you’ll never forgive yourself for it.”