Читать книгу Prodigal Prince Charming - Christine Flynn, Christine Flynn, Mary J. Forbes - Страница 9

“Madison O’Malley, this here’s the nicest thing anybody’s done for me all week.” Grinning like a young boy, the burly construction worker tipped back his hard hat and swiped a fingerful of frosting from the cupcake in his hand. The flame flickered and danced on the small candle stuck in the fluffy chocolate. “I can’t believe you remembered.”

“She remembers everybody’s birthday,” the rangy welder on his right informed him. “The cupcake she baked me for my birthday even had sprinkles on it.”

“Yeah? Did she put your name on it, like she did mine here?”

The shorter man nodded at the white icing loops that spelled out Tiny.

“She sure did. Didn’t you, Madison?”

“I sure did, Jake.” Madison’s smile came easily, her brown eyes sparkling with the pleasure it gave her to make one of her customer’s day just a little special. She baked birthday cupcakes for all the customers on her route, once she got to know them, and she always put their name and a candle on the little treat. “I just didn’t know if you liked chocolate or carrot cake better. If you’ll tell me, I’ll remember for next year.”

Tiny told her that what she’d given him was just fine, and walked off, still grinning.

The welder she knew only as Jake took a cellophane-wrapped muffin from the display on the side of the gleaming silver catering truck and handed her a dollar.

“Morning, Madison.” Another of the forty customers crowding toward her held out a five. “I’m taking two poppy seed and a banana.”

“I have coffee and a ham-and-cheese roll here,” a voice from behind him announced.

“Same here.” Another worker, this one unfamiliar, took Jake’s place. He handed her two five-dollar bills. “That’s for me and Sid back there.”

Madison glanced at the front of the newcomer’s white hard hat. Buzz was written in felt pen on the strip of masking tape centered above the brim.

“Thanks, Buzz.”

Having been acknowledged by name, the new guy smiled and stepped back to be swallowed by the forward surge of others wanting to make the most of their morning break.

“Hey, Madison! Do you have those carrot-cake muffins today?’

“She only does those on Tuesday and Friday,” someone replied for her. “Today is zucchini and poppy seed.” Another dirty hand bearing dollar bills appeared through the sea of worn denim and work shirts. “I took one of each.”

A machinist with a streak of grease on his cheek held out a ten. “Same. And orange juice.”

Taking the men’s money, she made change from the small black pack she wore around her waist. The carefully arranged rows of muffins and cheese rolls she had baked herself that morning were quickly disappearing, along with iced cartons of juice and milk and gallons of coffee from her catering truck’s built-in urn.

She didn’t mind the dirt on the men’s hands and clothes. Most of the welders, electricians, steelworkers and laborers at this construction site—like the stevedores and dock workers she would feed next on her route—were salt-of-the-earth, hardworking men who knew the value of even harder work. They were much like the people in the neighborhood where she’d been born, still lived and would probably die. Some were even from her neighborhood, the Ridge, as those who’d grown up in Bayridge, Virginia, called it. So were some of the guys on the dock. She was one of them. She knew the value of hard work, too. Day in and day out. She couldn’t imagine living her life any other way.

“Hey, Madison.” The deep, self-conscious voice came from beside her. “What are you doing this Friday night?”

Her smiled moved to the strapping steelworker who’d asked the same question three weeks running. Eddie Zwicki was tall, cute, built and probably only a year or two younger than her own twenty-eight years. “Going to bed early. I have to get up to shop and clean my truck on Saturday so I’m ready for you guys again next week.”

“Don’t you ever go out?”

“Not with my customers,” she replied, her tone kind as she repeated the rule she’d adopted to save face and feelings. She didn’t date anyone, actually. As hard as she was working to build her business, she simply didn’t have the time. “But, you know what?” she asked, because he really did seem like a nice guy and there seemed to be so few single ones like that around. “I think you and Tina Deluca would get along great. I told her about you. The kindergarten teacher? Do you want her number?”

“Can she cook?”

“Your favorite oatmeal cookies are her mother’s recipe.”

“Yeah, but can she bake them?”

The guy was quick. “She’s learning.”

Someone behind Eddie gave him a shove. But even as he turned to frown at the guy who’d just passed him, he became distracted from his consideration of Tina’s lack of culinary talent. As the rumble of quiet conversations around them suddenly tapered to near silence, it seemed the other men were distracted by something, too.

Madison stood near the door of her silver truck with its side popped up to serve as an awning. Moments ago she had seen nothing but the men lined four to six deep waiting to make their selections. Now, those men were shifting, booted feet shuffling in the dirt as they parted like a denim-clad Red Sea.

“Morning, Mr. Callaway,” said someone from the back of the group.

“Morning, sir.”

“Hey, Mr. Callaway.”

“Hi, guys,” came the deep and cordial reply. “How’s it going this morning?”

The men’s replies to the question were now accompanied by an undercurrent of murmurs. Workers who weren’t talking simply remained silent and stared.

Madison immediately recognized Matt Callaway. He was the tall, commanding-looking gentleman in the suit and hard hat the others greeted with a certain deference. He owned the construction company building the enormous York Port Mall that was currently nothing more than acres of concrete slabs, rebar and steel girders.

He wasn’t alone.

With a curious jolt, Madison realized she knew the man with him, too. Of him, anyway. Just as tall, even more imposing, the man earning the stares that ranged from curiosity to envy was Cord Kendrick.

She had never seen him in person before. But there was no doubt in her mind who he was. Like nearly everyone else in America, she’d seen pictures of him in People and Newsweek, on Entertainment Tonight and in the supermarket tabloids her grandma Nona Rossini devoured like candy. His reputation for fast women and faster living continually made the news. Even people who didn’t pay attention to the lives of the rich and infamous knew of him. The entire Kendrick family was practically considered royalty by the press. His beautiful mother actually was royalty, or so Madison had heard.

She just couldn’t quite remember if Cord’s last scandal had been a paternity suit or a car wreck as she watched both men approach her. Certain her grandma would know, she settled her attention on the men’s boss.

“Morning, Mr. Callaway,” she greeted with her easy smile. “Do you want your usual?”

He was a bit of a celebrity himself, she suddenly remembered. His marriage to the oldest Kendrick daughter last year had caught half the nation off guard, since no one had even known Ashley Kendrick was dating anyone in particular. What Madison recalled most, though, was her own surprise when her grandmother had read the woman’s new husband’s name and Madison had recognized Matt as the very man who had given her permission to enter his site to sell to some of his workers.

The birth of his and Ashley’s daughter a couple of months ago had made headlines, too. It had also resulted in paparazzi lining the chain link fence surrounding the vast construction site trying to get shots of him.

“My usual,” Matt repeated, rubbing his chin. “I didn’t realize I was getting that predictable.”

“So you want zucchini, then? Or banana nut?”

“Surprise me.”

She reached for a zucchini muffin and an empty cup for him to fill himself.

“And for you?” she asked, finally glancing toward the man she just realized would now be his brother-in-law. She had heard that the Kendrick family owned the mall project. That association alone could explain how the owner of the construction company had met Cord’s sister. It would also explain Cord Kendrick’s presence on the job site.

Grandma Nona was going to be terribly impressed that she’d seen them both today. But the only thing that truly impressed Madison herself was that Matt Callaway looked right at home in his silver hard hat, while the man with the admittedly gorgeous blue eyes looked more as if he were modeling his for GQ. The cut of his jacket was definitely designer. Italian, probably. The sweater under it looked too soft to be anything but cashmere.

His blue eyes crinkled appealingly at the corners. “I’ll have his usual.”

“One poppy seed. Coffee?” she asked, trying to ignore the jerk of her heart as his glance skimmed over her.

There was nothing the least bit subtle about that glance. He was checking her out, boldly, bluntly and quite thoroughly. He apparently liked what he saw, too, as his glance moved back up the length of her long, denim covered legs, over the maroon turtleneck tucked into them and up to where she’d pulled her dark hair up and back with a clip.

His beautifully sculpted mouth moved into a knee-weakening smile.

Photographs truly had not done the man justice. That expression packed enough charm to fascinate nearly anyone in a skirt.

“Cream. No sugar.”

“You’ll find cream down by the coffee.”

“What kind is it?”

“The kind from cows.”

“The coffee,” he said, hitting her with that smile again. “Jamaican? French roast?”

“Folgers,” she replied, politely. “That’ll be a dollar and a half.”

“I’ll get it,” Matt said.

“Already got it,” Cord replied. Pulling a money clip from his front pocket, he peeled off a five-dollar bill and nodded to the logo on her driver’s-side door. Mama O’Malley’s Catering was stenciled in a shamrock-green arc.

“So, who’s ‘Mama’?” he asked.

She darted a smile past his arm as another worker took a muffin and handed over his money. “That would be me.”

One appraising eyebrow shot up. “You?’

“That’s right.”

Cord watched the tall brunette with the long, lanky body and the face of an angel hand over a cheese roll that the man behind him couldn’t reach. She wasn’t being especially rude or cool to him. Her tone even held the same hints of kindness he’d heard when she addressed everyone else. She just wasn’t giving him the same bright smile she’d seemed to manage for every single one of the other guys.

She didn’t seem interested in conversation with him, either.

He could always get a woman talking. Young. Old. In between. Especially in between.

Hating to think he was losing his touch, Cord skimmed a glance over her once more. “You don’t look anything like my idea of a Mama O’Malley,” he confessed, slowly shaking his head. She didn’t look like anyone’s mother. She had incredible eyes, skin so smooth it begged to be touched and a mouth that made his water just looking at her. And those legs. They went on forever. “Why do you call your business that?”

“Because O’Malley is my last name and I liked the alliteration. Hi, Bob.” There was the smile. All five hundred watts of it. It wasn’t for him, though. It was for the guy with the belly and a welder’s mask tipped back on his head. “What can I do for you?”

“Come on.” Matt nudged his arm. “Let’s get back to work.”

Cord stepped back. “Thanks,” he called to her, giving it one last shot.

“You’re welcome,” she replied, still polite, and turned her focus to the other men demanding her attention.

Cord felt his forehead pleat as he turned around himself, and started to walk away. Her eyes seemed to light up for everyone else when she smiled. Just not for him.

He glanced back, saw her look down as she made change from the pack around her slender waist. He wondered if they’d met before. If maybe he’d run into her at one of the local nightclubs and if he’d done something to offend her. He made it a point to never offend a woman if he could help it. He’d discovered the hard way that a woman scorned could not only be furious and hellish to deal with, but downright expensive.

The woman he’d heard the other men call Madison didn’t seem at all familiar, though. He would have remembered the name. He definitely would have remembered that smile. It lit her eyes, made her seem friendly, approachable, as if she glowed warmth from within. Without it, she was just another pretty face.

“Does she come here every day?”

“Who?” Matt glanced behind them. “The gal with the snack wagon?”

“Yeah.”

“We have a couple of trucks that come through here,” he said, looking as if he were trying to recall the specifics of this one’s owner. “I think she’s been around pretty much since we broke ground.” A quarter of a muffin disappeared, totally muffling his “Why?”

Cord shrugged. “Just wondered,” he said, and sank his teeth into a bit of heaven that tasted of sweet butter and lemon and had him closing his eyes in pure bliss.

Madison watched the two big men in the silver hard hats walk away, devouring her muffins as they headed past a huge pile of steel beams and a bright-orange crane that sat still and silent while its operator drank coffee and smoked a cigarette. The workers only had fifteen minutes for a break. They usually cleaned out a third of her stock in five. That gave her ten minutes to pull her restock from the storage compartment at the back of the truck, fill in the gaps in the three tiers of muffins, cookies and rolls, consolidate the fruit so it didn’t look picked over, and change the coffee grounds in the built-in urn so there would be two freshly brewed gallons by the time she reached her next stop on the dock twenty minutes away. She had another stop farther down the dock a half an hour after that. After a quick stop at a small tool-and-die operation, it would be back home to restock with the sandwiches and desserts she’d already made for the lunch run that started at 11:15 a.m.

Male laughter drifted toward her as she set her empty stock box in the back, flipped the switch to start the coffee and closed the stainless steel door. As she did, she consciously kept herself from looking around to see if Cord was still anywhere in sight. She hated the thought that he might catch her and think he had made any sort of impression. And he hadn’t. Not really. Not in any way that mattered.

She had never before met a man anywhere near his social or economic stratosphere, or one whose presence seemed quite so…large. She was around his basic type a lot, though. The attractive irresponsible type whose sole goal was to get into a woman’s pants and be gone before breakfast. She’d met plenty of them coming and going from her friend Mike’s pub, since she happened to live upstairs from it and routinely borrowed his kitchen to prepare her food. And men like them, even if they were rich and famous, weren’t worth the time it took to give them a second thought.

She didn’t think about him, either. Not until twenty-four hours later when she found herself in the same spot she’d been twenty-four hours before, doing pretty much the same thing she did at that same time every Monday through Friday.

Cord Kendrick had so slipped her mind that she hadn’t even remembered to call her grandma last night to tell her she’d met him and given the dear woman the opportunity to demand details.

The only reason she was thinking of him now was because Matt Callaway’s secretary had just called her on her cell phone to order a dozen muffins of the sort she’d given Cord yesterday, along with six large coffees. She wanted them delivered to the construction trailer, which Madison could see parked a city block away toward the middle of the work site.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Madison replied, going through the same motions she had a thousand times before as she closed the back of her truck and started to close the side. “I’m on a schedule, so I can’t make individual deliveries. If you can send someone,” she suggested, being as accommodating as she could, “I’ll have it ready when they get here. I won’t be leaving for another couple of minutes.”

The harried-sounding woman asked her to hold on, which Madison did while pulling six empty cups and lids from the dispenser and popping open a cardboard tray to set them in. A half a block ahead of her the huge orange crane started up with a rumble and a roar. Break time was over.

A rustling sound came over the phone.

“I understand you don’t make deliveries.”

The voice on the other end of the line was suddenly much deeper, much richer and carried a faint hint of challenge. She recognized that disturbing voice in an instant. That threw her, too. She didn’t want to think that anything about Cord had made an impression. She especially didn’t want anything about him messing with her heart rate.

Had the secretary come back on the line, Madison would have caved in and run the order over. It sounded as if the woman could have used a break. Since it was Cord, Madison’s soft streak succumbed to self-preservation. “It would throw off my schedule.”

“You don’t ever make exceptions?”

“I’m not in a position to do that,” she replied, pretty sure Cord Kendrick didn’t eat many meals from a catering truck. If he had, he’d have some idea of how important it was to stay on time. “I have people who will be waiting for me for their break.”

“What about the people here?” he asked with the ease of a man who knew exactly which buttons to push. “We need a break, too. But we’re in a meeting no one can leave and we really need coffee. We need those muffins, too.”

“Isn’t there a coffeemaker in the trailer?”

“It’s broken. Look,” he said, having failed to elicit her sympathies, “I’ll give you a fifty-dollar tip. Just bring the order. It won’t take that long. Okay?”

Madison could practically feel her back stiffen as she set down the cardboard box she’d started to fill and glanced toward the long white trailer. It was as clear as the patches of blue in the early May sky that Cord Kendrick felt whatever he was doing was far more important than her schedule. It seemed just as apparent that he felt his money would get him anything he didn’t want to bother getting by persuasion.

For a moment she was sorely tempted to tell him he was just going to have to go without today. As she let her more practical nature take over, she grudgingly admitted that, just this once, she could be bought.

Ever since she’d started her catering business, she had dreamed of expanding it. In the past six months, that dream had become an obsession. She wanted to cater parties. Big ones. Little ones. Maybe even weddings, where the food she presented could be elegant rather than everyday. She’d done a couple of small events already. Not that a birthday party for the McGuires’ nine-year-old could be called an event, but the Lombardis’ oldest daughter’s engagement party had been rather nice. She desperately needed equipment, though. Having to rent serving pieces ate up all her profit. And fifty dollars could help buy the professional double chafing dish she had her eye on.

Aside from that, if she hit the lights right on Gloucester, she usually had a couple of minutes to spare.

“It’ll take me at least five minutes to get there,” she finally said.

“You’re less than a minute away if you drive.”

“It’ll take me that long to close up and drive around the cordoned-off area across from where you are.”

“Forget going around. Just pull up to where it’s barricaded and park across from the stack of trusses. Ignore the sign.”

“What sign?”

“The one that says No Admittance. And bring one of those coffees with…”

“Cream,” she completed, then sighed because she rather wished she hadn’t just let him know she remembered that. “Does anyone else take anything in theirs?”

She heard him ask. Then she heard him tell her they had sugar and powdered cream there before he thanked her and hung up.

She didn’t know why his thanks surprised her. Maybe it was because he seemed a little impatient this morning. Maybe it was because it seemed pretty clear that he expected his wishes to be met so thanks weren’t necessary.

Suspecting that not many people did deny him what he wanted, annoyed that she’d just done what everyone else probably did and caved in to his expectations herself, she finished boxing up the muffins and filled cups, closed the side of her truck and drove it at a crawl past girders rising from huge concrete slabs and the giant orange crane now swinging its boom toward a stack of steel beams.

Because she was always careful to park only in areas where she and her customers would be safe from traffic and heavy equipment, she was very conscious that she was going where she normally wouldn’t go. She was now close enough to the actual construction to see individual sparks fly from welders’ torches and feel the vibration of a back-up horn blaring as a churning cement truck edged toward massive wood forms. A forklift rolled past, carrying a large blue drum on a pallet.

Ahead of her, wooden barricades blocked vehicle access to the construction trailer. Assuming that the cars parked near the trailer had entered from the street on the other side, which she had originally thought to do herself, she looked around for the sign Cord had mentioned. She couldn’t see it, but the stack of trusses that would eventually be part of a roof was impossible to miss.

Parking across from them, she shook off the niggling feeling that she shouldn’t leave her truck there and slipped out, carefully balancing the box so she wouldn’t tip the coffees. She would only be gone for a minute. Two max, she thought, stepping around the barrier.

It was then that she noticed the sign. The wording on the barrier faced the trailer and its parking lot. From there, the words No Admittance Without Authorization and Hard Hat Area practically screamed at her to go back.

Turning, she picked up her pace, her athletic shoes leaving curvy little patterns in the dirt and the three wooden steps that led up to the long white trailer’s door.

She didn’t have to knock. The door bearing a plaque that indicated the trailer to be the construction office opened before she could even decide if she needed to.

Cord’s big body filled the doorway. Yesterday’s designer Italian had been replaced with designer American. Aware of the Ralph Lauren logo on the sweater pushed to his elbows, she glanced from the wall of his chest past the lean line of his jaw. She had no idea if his smile was for her or for what she carried, but he looked tired, handsome and definitely anxious to get his hands on caffeine. “Am I ever glad to see you,” he murmured, and relieved her of the box. “Come on in.”

He turned away, leaving her to stare at his broad back a moment before she stepped inside. As she did, Matt Callaway rose from a long blueprint-covered table where three other men gathered. All seemed to be talking at once. A middle-aged woman wearing the look of a harried den mother cradled a phone against one shoulder while she pulled incoming faxes from the machine behind her desk and fed them directly into a copy machine. The smile she gave Madison was quick and decidedly grateful.

While one of the other men retrieved the copies and passed them out, Matt reached for his wallet. “Thanks for bringing this,” he said to her. “It’s not a good morning for the coffee machine to be out of commission.” He nodded to where Cord and the others were lifting foam cups from the box. “We have a little problem this morning and none of us can leave right now.” A good-natured note entered his voice. “There are also some of us who had a late night last night and are a little more desperate for caffeine than the others.”

“Hey, I was here on time,” Cord defended, his tone as affable as his friend and business partner’s. Lifting a cup toward the secretary to let her know it was hers, he set it on her desk. “If I’d known you wouldn’t have coffee here, I’d have brought some myself.” He reached into his own pocket. “I’ve got this,” he insisted. “I owe her a tip, anyway.”

Stepping in front of Madison, Cord held out a hundred-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said.

Madison blinked at the face of Benjamin Franklin. Beside her Matt had already turned to pick up his coffee and was asking one of the men about some sort of design change. The others were peeling the lids from their cups as they looked over the pages coming from the copier and talking about variances and bearing loads. The numbers and phrases they threw around wouldn’t have made any sense to her even if she hadn’t been so distracted by the man watching her from an arm’s length away.

She caught hint of his soap, and of aftershave lotion laced with citrus and spice. Two relatively fresh nicks on the underside of his carved jaw indicated a close and hurried encounter with his razor.

“You said fifty,” she reminded him, not wanting to notice such personal things about him. It sounded as if he’d had a late date last night. Rushing to make his meeting on time could easily account for why he’d missed breakfast. “With the muffins and coffee that’s only seventy-one dollars.”

There were slivers of silver in his compelling blue eyes. She didn’t want to notice that, either.

Someone’s cell phone rang. Across the room the fax machine beeped. “Consider the difference a delivery fee.”

Her voice dropped. “That’s very generous.”

“I’m very grateful,” he said, echoing her phrasing as she took the bill and slipped it into her waist pack. “You have no idea how I’ve fantasized about those muffins.”

His smile was all the more dangerous for the hints of fatigue that might have tugged at any other woman’s sympathies. But his notorious charm was wasted on her. She’d heard too much about it. It also had nothing at all to do with the jolt that had her flattening her hand over her heart.

An echoing boom shook the trailer from ceiling to tires. Windows rattled. Conversation died. Surrounded by the vibrating cacophony of crunching metal and something heavy collapsing just beyond the trailer’s walls, Madison wondered for a frantic second if they were having an earthquake. But just as suddenly as the sound hit, it stopped.

The men began speaking at once. Two engineer types headed for windows. The rest headed for the door.

Cord reached the door first, throwing it open so hard that it bounced back on its hinges. Matt was right behind him, hard hat in hand and shoving Cord’s at him as soon as his feet hit the dirt.

Caught in the surge of bodies as everyone else now rushed out, Madison found herself hurrying down the steps then stepping aside so she wouldn’t be in the way or get knocked over in the ministampede of foremen and the secretary coming through the doorway. Everyone else seemed to realize that whatever disaster had caused the noise was man-made rather than natural, but Madison barely had a chance to hope that no one had been hurt before she looked to where the wall of men now blocked the No Admittance sign.

They couldn’t go any farther.

The crane that had been lifting long steel I-beams had lost its load. Right on her truck.