“Let’s sit out where it’s cooler,” Ad suggested, nodding toward the front half of the restaurant.
They left the swinging doors open so Kit could hear the timer on the ovens, taking refills of lemonade with them.
Chairs were up on the tables in the seating area but Ad took two down for them to sit. Without thinking about it, Kit did what she would have done at any other time after finishing her baking—she took off her chef’s coat.
Only after she had did she recall that she’d been using it not only as protection from splatters, but also as camouflage for the tight red T-shirt she’d put on that morning with Ad in mind.
But it was too late to cover up again and she just pretended not to notice how his eyes dropped momentarily to her breasts in an appreciative glance that she found much too gratifying.
“So, you seem to know your way around a restaurant kitchen,” he said after they’d each taken a seat at the table.
“I should. My first job was making pizzas in my Uncle Mackie’s bar. Uncle Mackie was my mother’s brother. He had a little neighborhood place around the corner from the house where I grew up.”
Ad seemed to find pleasure in that information because he smiled. “You were a pizza-maker?” he said as if he didn’t believe it.
“I could throw the dough in the air and catch it and everything,” she bragged with a laugh.
“I’d like to see that sometime,” he said, quirking up his left eyebrow to make the comment seem lascivious.
“I’ll bet you would,” she countered.
“Is pizza-making what got you interested in baking?” he asked then.
“I’d always liked making cookies as a kid, but—as a matter of fact—it was the pizza-making that started the wheels turning for me as a baker. I loved the feel of the dough. The smell of the yeast. Being able to turn a few simple ingredients into something mouthwatering.”
Now she was giving a sensual tone to it all.
She consciously curbed it.
“Anyway,” she continued, “I started to experiment with adding more sugar to the pizza dough so I could make cinnamon rolls. I went from those to quick breads, then cakes and more complicated cookies than I’d made as a kid. Pies and tarts and tortes came next, and by the time I graduated from high school I knew I wanted to go to culinary school rather than college and be a pastry chef.”
“Did you stay at your uncle’s bar all the way through that?”
“I did. And for a while even after I graduated. He gave me part of his kitchen to work in and featured any kind of dessert I wanted to make. Where else could I go and do exactly as I pleased fresh out of school?”
“When did you leave your uncle’s place then?”
“When I wanted to start my own bakery. I spent two years after school saving every penny until I had enough to rent the storefront next to the bar and buy the ovens and equipment I needed.”
“Do you still work out of that storefront?”
“No,” Kit said after a drink of lemonade. “I stayed there for a few years but the business grew and I needed more space. By then I also realized I was making most of my money from the cakes, so I changed from a bakery that offered breads, rolls and other pastries to Kit’s Cakes.”
“Which, according to what I’ve heard, took off. It’s hard to believe you can make a living just doing wedding cakes.”
Kit laughed at his skepticism. “I do other cakes, too. For parties, retirement send-offs, graduations, wedding and baby showers, birthdays. But, yes, most of my living comes from the wedding cakes. I’m doing Kira and Cutty’s cake as part of their present, but you’d be surprised what I can charge for it. Let’s hope getting married never goes out of style,” Kit finished with a joke that made him smile again and dimple up for her.
The timer rang, and without saying anything, Kit hurried into the kitchen. She didn’t expect Ad to follow her but he did, expressing an interest in how she knew when the cakes were done.
She demonstrated the method of using a cake tester and then pressed a gentle finger to the center of one cake to show him what he should be looking for that way, too. In case he actually did ever bake the recipe she’d promised him.
The cakes were sufficiently baked but she explained that they couldn’t be removed from the pans for ten minutes. Then they had to be completely cooled in order to wrap them and store them in the freezer.
When the ten minutes had passed she flipped the cakes and removed the circles of parchment paper that had come out with the rich chocolate confection. Then she and Ad washed the pans before returning to the dining room to sit again.
“If you’re bored or have something else to do I can take it from here,” Kit told him, realizing belatedly that there wasn’t much reason for him to stay at that point.
“I’m not bored and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing,” he assured, pleasing her more than she wanted to show.
“Okay. Then what about you?” she asked after more lemonade. “How did you get into the bar and restaurant business?”
“I started busing tables here,” he said with an affectionate glance around. “When I was ten.”
“Ten?” Kit parroted. “Wasn’t that a little on the young side? Like by about six years?”
“My dad was a mechanic and when I was ten a car he was working under fell on him. He was killed—”
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Kit said, flinching at the image.
“It was a long time ago. But my mom hadn’t held a job before that and was left with five small kids to support on only a pittance for an insurance policy. She went to work at the dry cleaners but we were still struggling and—in my ten-year-old brain—I thought I could help.”
Kit pictured Ad as a boy who felt that kind of responsibility, and she was torn between her heart breaking for him and admiring how at even that young age he’d taken action to help his family.
“How did you get hired when you were hardly more than a baby?” she asked.
“Bing—Bingham Murphy—owned the place then and he sponsored and coached our little league baseball team. He was always saying he needed help sweeping the floors or taking out the trash if somebody wanted to earn a little money for a new bike or something. It wasn’t really like being hired, it was more like getting an allowance for doing chores. But when I talked to Bing and told him what was going on at home, he let it be my job exclusively from then on.”
“Did you work every day? After school? Weekends?”
“After school or after baseball practice and on weekends. I’d sweep floors and the sidewalk out front. Wash windows. Take out the trash. Bus the tables. Pour water for customers. Small stuff.”
“And this Bing-person would pay you?”
“Right. Plus, folks around here knew us and knew what had happened to my Dad and wanted to help without it seeming like charity, so they’d tip me. It added up. I didn’t do too bad.”
“For a ten-year-old.”
“Hey, I ended up owning the place,” he joked as if his childhood earnings had accomplished that.
“How did you end up owning the place?” Kit asked.
“Stick-to-ittiveness. I stayed put, moved up from busboy to doing just about everything else there was to do—wait tables, tend bar, cook. By the time I was working my way through the local college for my business degree, Bing had retired and I was running things. Then he offered to sell out to me