“It’s critical for my mom to have something to return to when she recovers. We have to make this work,” Logan said.
“Yes, we do,” Caroline said. Logan’s determination was contagious. Strange, the compassionate and purposeful man she’d faced today didn’t fit with the image she’d had of him any more than his broad shoulders and toned arms matched the boy she used to know.
Maybe she didn’t know him as well as she thought she did, she acknowledged with a sheepish smile. But when he grinned back at her, his trademark dimples popping on his cheeks, Caroline’s breath caught, and a ticklish feeling settled inside her belly.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded. But was she really okay? Something had to be wrong with her if she was reacting so strangely to Logan Warren. She wasn’t usually fazed by any man, let alone a player with boyish charm and movie-star good looks. Hadn’t she learned her lesson about men like him a long time ago?
DANA CORBIT
started telling “people stories” at about the same time she started forming words. So it came as no surprise when the Indiana native chose a career in journalism. As an award-winning newspaper reporter and features editor, she had the opportunity to share wonderful true-life stories with her readers. She left the workforce to be a homemaker, but the stories came home with her as she discovered the joy of writing fiction. The winner of the 2007 Holt Medallion competition for novel writing, Dana feels blessed to share the stories of her heart with readers.
Dana lives in southeast Michigan, where she balances the make-believe realm of her characters with her equally exciting real-life world as a wife, carpool coordinator for three athletic daughters and food supplier for two disinterested felines.
Wedding Cake Wishes
Dana Corbit
For everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
To all teachers who recognize and nurture their students’ special gifts. Especially to my sixth-grade teacher, Alyce Stewart, who celebrated my love for words in front of the whole class, and to my high school newspaper adviser, Linda Donelson Spicer, who saw potential in me that I didn’t recognize in myself. Your impact on my life and on those of your other students has been immeasurable.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Letter to Reader
Questions for Discussion
Chapter One
“We’re not open.”
Logan Warren tried to keep frustration from his voice. Someone had left the front door of Amy’s Elite Treats unlocked, and now he would have to face his first customer before he’d even located the cake order forms. He almost asked himself if the day could get any worse, but the last week had proven to him that any day could. And had.
A few headaches at his mother’s bakery were nothing, anyway, when compared to what Amy Warren was facing. Her image slipped into his thoughts. His mom looked so different lying in that hospital bed. The stroke had ravaged her body and stripped her face of expression.
Logan squeezed his lids shut and took a deep breath. She would survive—he realized how blessed his family was—but nothing could remove the mammoth lump in his throat, choking him from the inside out. He’d made a mistake in coming here this morning. He should have stayed at Markston Area Regional Hospital, continuing to keep vigil with his brothers. He should—
Logan stopped himself. She needed him at the bakery, too. Someone had to keep the business running for her. He’d been desperate to do something. Anything. It didn’t matter that his mother made her living making wedding cakes and he didn’t even believe in marriage. Running her bakery was one thing he could do.
Continuing past the huge ovens and industrial-sized mixers, he pushed through the swinging door to the dining area where bright May sunshine already poured into the store’s windows.
“I’m sorry. We’re not—” The word “open” fell away before he could speak it. “Caroline?”
Sure enough, the woman standing in the shop’s doorway, finger-combing her mass of chestnut-colored hair, was Caroline Scott. He would have recognized her anywhere, even if her two younger sisters didn’t happen to be engaged to, or married to, his two older brothers. And even if her high cheekbones and full lips didn’t brand her as one of the Scott sisters.
She shoved all that hair behind her ears and lifted her gaze to meet his. “Oh. Hi.”
“Hello?” The word came out sounding like a question because it was one. He rounded the counter to face the woman whose presence was no less perplexing than the unlocked door had been. Chicago was four hours from here. Would she have come all the way to Markston, Indiana, just to visit his mother at the hospital?
“You didn’t say why…” Letting his words trail off, he indicated the room with a sweep of his hand.
“Oh, why am I here?”
Instead of answering his question, she stepped around the room, looking at the ice cream parlor tables and bakery cases as if they were the most interesting things she’d ever seen.
Now she really had him curious, even more so than when he’d been a nosy ten-year-old boy studying the older woman of fourteen. Caroline wasn’t even the most beautiful among the lovely Scott sisters, but she was hands down the most intriguing. Even at twenty-eight, that hadn’t changed. She had the most fascinating eyes, the darkest blue and almost impossible to read.
Those eyes turned back to him now and widened before she found something important to study on the tile floor. What was he doing staring at her, anyway? He had too much on his plate right now to be looking at any pretty woman, let alone Caroline Scott. Unavailable didn’t begin to describe how out of the dating market her mother had said she’d been for years.
“This place looks great,” she said, still not looking at him. “It’s changed since the last time I was here.”
“It’s been a while.”
“I guess it has.”
She chuckled, gripping her hands together in a gesture that seemed uncharacteristic for the take-charge Caroline he remembered. Come to think of it, many things about Caroline were different today. She wore jeans and a T-shirt when she was usually a khakis-and-sweater-set type, and her hair was loose down her back instead of in its usual too-tight bun. Where were the intensity and confidence she usually exuded like perfume?
“You know, we don’t open for another two hours,” he said to fill the awkward silence. “Someone must have forgotten to lock the door—”
She dangled the keys in front of her to explain how she happened to be inside the building. The door hadn’t been left unlocked