“Sure,” Heddy responded.
Glad for an additional sale and for something to do, she took out one of the knives she kept in hot water. Drying the heated blade, she used it to cut the cheesecake he’d requested.
Then she dampened a clean cloth in warm water from the tap behind her counter and brought it with the cheesecake to the customer’s table. She set the plate out of the toddler’s reach—something it hadn’t occurred to the man to do—before she offered the man the wet towel and said, “You can use this like a washcloth. It’ll probably work better than dry napkins to clean him up.”
“I think I just need a hose,” her customer muttered, accepting the wet cloth anyway and thanking her for it.
Then he said, “You wouldn’t happen to be Heddy Hanrahan, would you?”
“That’s me,” she said, struck suddenly that there might be something vaguely familiar about him. But only vaguely. Maybe he’d been in the shop before.
Then he said, “I’m Lang Camden.”
“As in Camden Superstores?”
“That’s us.”
A Camden.
Oh, dear …
That was why he seemed vaguely familiar. The Camden family not only owned Camden Superstores but any number of buildings, businesses, factories, warehouses, production facilities, trucks and who-knew-what-else in conjunction with those stores. The chain was worldwide and the family’s name appeared annually at or near the top of lists of the richest people in the United States.
Their wealth and renown caused pictures of one Camden or another to show up in the newspaper or magazines from time to time. There were so many of them—ten descendants of the man who had built the empire, plus their grandmother—that it wasn’t as if Heddy knew them by sight. But because the Camden name was a name her mother and grandfather were once disastrously connected with, a name she’d heard cursed innumerable times during her life, curiosity always caused Heddy to take more interest in those pictures and the articles that went with them than she might have otherwise. So she assumed she’d probably seen this man’s face a time or two in print somewhere.
“Can we talk?” he asked.
Curiosity about why a Camden would want to talk to her caused her to say a tentative, “Okay.”
“Will you sit with us? Maybe over there, out of the line of fire.” He nodded at the chair across the table from him and from the toddler, who was now standing on his own chair to lean over and reach for the second slice of cheesecake.
As Heddy went to the opposite side of the café table she pointed to the cheesecake and said, “You’re about to lose that.”
Quick reflexes on Lang Camden’s part slid the dessert plate out of the little boy’s reach just in time. Then he caught him around the middle and seated him again.
“More!” the toddler demanded.
The child’s inept caregiver picked up one of the clean spoons Heddy had brought with the second slice and used it to taste the raspberry white chocolate mousse cheesecake. Then he fed a bite to the child with the other clean spoon.
“Mmm …” was the child’s assessment before he opened his mouth for his second bite.
“This is Carter,” Lang Camden said in a flustered voice, still giving her no clue as to who Carter was to him. “He’s two and a half and, as you can probably tell, a big fan of your cheesecake. With good reason—what I’ve tasted so far is fantastic.”
“Thank you,” Heddy said, wondering more by the minute what had brought a member of the illustrious Camden family to her shop in suburban Arcada. And hoping that her mother wouldn’t choose this moment for one of her numerous drop-in visits. Heddy had no doubt that her mother coming face-to-face with a Camden would not be a good thing.
“We saw the article on your shop,” Lang Camden said then, as if he knew what she was thinking.
“‘The Best Cheesecake in Denver That No One Is Eating’?” Heddy asked, reciting the title of the piece that had gone on to say that even after extensive testing by a panel of the magazine’s staff, her cheesecakes had been judged the best that the entire state had to offer.
“That’s the one,” Lang Camden confirmed as he took another bite of the dessert and Carter protested with a “Mine!”
“Okay, okay,” Lang Camden conceded, giving in and sliding the plate to the two-and-a-half-year-old, letting him dive in the way he wanted to.
“How many different variations of cheesecake do you make?” the older of Heddy’s two customers asked then, turning the full focus of those striking blue eyes on her.
“Oh, a lot. I do the mousse cheesecakes and also traditional baked cheesecakes. And besides the most common things like plain, blueberry and raspberry, I try to do what’s in season. Since it’s the start of April we’re getting into spring fruits. I change things up from week to week, and there are a few savory cheesecakes I make, too, but those are special orders.”
He nodded. “We’re about to launch a division of gourmet foods in Camden Superstores,” he informed her. “What would you say to providing your cheesecakes as part of that?”
Taken completely off guard, for a moment Heddy was speechless. Then the only thing she could think to say was, “You’re kidding.”
“Nope, not kidding.”
Heddy heard herself make a sound that was part laugh, part huff. The idea was absurd in so many ways.
“This shop used to be only my house,” she said. “The city allows these old homes on Main Street to be lived in or to act as places of business. In my case, it’s both. I turned my basement into a kitchen space just big enough to make the cheesecakes I sell. Where we’re sitting used to be my living room and sunporch, now it’s my shop. I live in what’s left—the back half and the upstairs. There’s no way—no way—I could ever make enough cheesecakes to supply even one Camden Superstore.”
Not to mention that she already knew much, much too well that the type of arrangement he was suggesting had a history of actually destroying a small business like hers.
“Actually, we’d want to start with all of the Colorado stores at first, then eventually we’d want to expand to put your cheesecakes in every store around the world. And we’d want them to be exclusive to Camden Superstores.”
He really couldn’t be serious with this.
But he’d said it with a straight face.
Maybe he just wasn’t aware of the catastrophe that had befallen her family’s bakery because of doing business like this with his family in the past. It had been years and years ago, long before Heddy was born, before her mother had even met her father. Probably long before Lang Camden had been born, too, since he looked to be her age—thirty or not much past it. She supposed that it was possible that he had no idea that her mother and her grandfather had made a deal with the devil— as her mother liked to put it—and paid for it with their livelihood as well as her mother’s broken heart.
Regardless of the harsh lessons of the past and whether or not Lang Camden knew about what had happened, it seemed more than clear to Heddy that she couldn’t accommodate what he was proposing, so that was the tack she stuck to.
“Again, I couldn’t begin to meet your needs.”
Why had something about that sounded a tad suggestive? She hadn’t intended for it to. And apparently she wasn’t the only one to have heard it because it brought a smile to Lang Camden’s handsome face.
But he made no comment and instead went on to say, “I know that at least part of what makes you leery is that a deal similar to this cost your family their bread business.”