Josie was finally able to get away for her next horseback riding lesson, not when she planned, but a few days later.
When she walked into the stable that afternoon, she was surprised to hear muffled sobs coming from one of the stalls. Knowing the sound couldn’t possibly be coming from a horse, Josie made her way over toward the source of the incredibly unhappy sound.
That was when she found Shannon huddled in a stall. The teen was sobbing her heart out.
Declan’s niece didn’t even seem to be aware that she was even there, Josie thought.
Sinking down next to the girl, Josie slipped her arm around the teenager’s shaking shoulders. “Shannon, honey, what happened?” Josie asked.
Shannon sounded as if her heart was breaking.
The girl’s eyes were red-rimmed when she looked up at Josie. It took several seconds before she was finally able to get her words out. “There’s a bake sale at school tomorrow,” Shannon sobbed.
Josie was well aware that Shannon was desperately trying to fit in at this new high school that Declan had finally registered her for, but she had no idea how this bake sale could be such an incredible source of distress for the girl.
“And that’s a problem because?” Josie asked the teen, not certain why a bake sale would make her cry like this.
More tears spilled down Shannon’s cheeks. “Because I don’t know how to bake and Grandma’s arthritis flared up. Her hands hurt too much for her to be able to cook or bake anything.”
Declan walked into the stable just then and he was able to shed more light on the situation.
“I offered to pick up some cupcakes from the grocery store, but Shannon told me that that store-bought isn’t good enough.”
Shannon turned her tear-stained, red face toward Josie. It was difficult for her to speak. “According to the rules, whatever I bring to the sale has to be homemade,” she cried. “That means I have to make it. I can’t bake, Josie. I’ll be the only one not bringing anything.” She hiccupped as another sob followed her declaration.
“No, you won’t,” Josie told her firmly. “C’mon, honey,” she urged. “Get on your feet. You and I have work to do.”
Shannon blinked, not sure if she was hearing her friend correctly. “We do?” she questioned.
“Yes, we do. I need you to ‘assist’ me,” Josie told the teenager. She held out a tissue to the girl, waiting to help her up.
Shannon closed her hand around the tissue. She looked at Josie uncertainly. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask the woman for help.
“You know how to bake?” she asked Josie.
“I’d better,” Josie laughed softly. “I ran my own catering business before I came out here.”
Shannon’s eyes widened. She could hardly believe her luck. “Really?”
Josie lifted the girl’s head, tilting it back with the crook of her index finger. “Have I ever lied to you?” she asked the teen.
“Not that I know of,” Shannon answered, looking at Josie cautiously.
No question about it. The girl was definitely her uncle’s niece, Josie thought.
“Well, I haven’t,” she told Shannon with a note of finality. “I was baking before I was ten years old.” Then, taking in a deep breath, Josie said, “If this sale is taking place tomorrow, we need to get started.”
The teenager saw a conflict forming. “But what about your riding lesson?” Shannon asked, looking over her shoulder at her uncle. He hadn’t said anything about Josie volunteering to help her. She knew he didn’t like his plans suddenly changing on him.
Thinking that the girl felt bad about her having to miss her lesson, Josie merely shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. If I can miss a lesson because my aunt Bunny needed me, I can certainly miss a riding lesson because you need me. The way I see it,” Josie went on, “this counts as an emergency.”
She was rewarded with Shannon’s radiant smile. But even so, despite the rebellious noises she had initially made when she had come to live at the farmhouse, the teen looked toward her uncle for permission.
“So it’s okay?” she asked Declan.
“Hey, Josie told you that she wanted to help you. Who am I to get in the way of that?” he asked his niece.
Josie looked at Shannon’s uncle, pleased with his response. She knew she was pushing her luck with this next statement.
“You might have to go to the store for us,” Josie told him. “You probably don’t have everything that we’re going to need for this project.”
Declan looked at the woman his niece now thought of as her new patron saint. “Just how much are you planning on baking?” he needed to know.
Josie in turn looked at Shannon. “A lot,” she responded.
With that, she walked into Declan’s kitchen and began rolling up her sleeves.
Ruth was sitting at the table, having a cup of tea. Surprised at their entrance, she set down her cup. “What’s going on?” Declan’s mother asked as she looked from Josie to her granddaughter.
“Josie’s going to help me with the bake sale,” the teen happily announced, beaming. “Isn’t that great, Grandma?”
Ruth had been feeling terrible all morning because she wasn’t able to help her granddaughter. Hearing that Josie was stepping in to help out was the perfect solution to the problem.
“Bless you, dear,” she told the younger woman with feeling.
“Josie said she had her own catering company back in—where did you say you were from?” Shannon asked the woman who had come to her rescue.
“Florida,” Josie answered. Walking over to the pantry, she opened the double doors and looked over the shelves. “I was right,” she said to Declan, making a quick inventory. “I’m going to need you to take a quick ride over to the grocery store. Just let me make up a list,” she told him.
Finding a pad, Josie pulled it over and quickly began writing things down as they occurred to her.
When she was done, she held the sheet of paper out to Declan.
“You sure you need all this stuff?” Declan questioned, his eyes moving quickly over the page. “This looks like an awfully lot of ingredients for a school bake sale.”
“Better to have too much than to run out right in the middle,” she told him. “Besides, none of this will go to waste. I can always come back and make some more baked goods if you find you come down with a sudden craving.”
The comment brought a smile to Ruth’s lips as she glanced over toward her son. Her smile seemed to fairly shout “I told you so.”
Declan was not about to argue with his mother at this point. Especially not in front of Josie. Or Shannon, who was clearly listening intently. Taking the sheet of paper from Josie, he glanced at the list again. He folded the paper several times over then shoved the resulting tiny square into the pocket of his jeans.
“Not sure where I’m going to find all these things,” he warned Josie and his niece. This sort of thing took him way out of his element.
“All those things can usually be found in the same aisle in the store,” Josie told Declan. “Grocery clerks like to make things easy for their customers,” she assured him. “And if you have any doubts, just ask,” Josie said.
Declan frowned. He wasn’t holding out too much hope about the grocery store excursion at the moment. He had never liked going shopping, putting it off to the last minute if not even longer. To him, grocery shopping was something to be endured and came in just a little above doing hard penance.
When his mother had come to live with him, that had become her department. But only when her arthritis wasn’t acting up. At the moment, that wasn’t the case.
“Easy. Right,” he commented under his breath just before he went out the door.
It amazed Declan, when he returned with all the groceries and Josie got started, to see the woman he was teaching how to ride showing him another side of herself.
He was used to simple dishes, not to the kind of things that appeared to require this amount of effort to create.
As he watched, Josie proceeded to bake up a storm. Several hours went by, but by the time she and her new “assistant” were finally finished working together, “they” had produced a large tray of mint chocolate-chip brownies, several dozen beautifully decorated sugar cookies, plus a monumentally large tray of chocolate biscotti.
The combined tempting aroma wafting from the baked goods was almost too irresistible for him to resist.
Declan looked around his kitchen. It seemed as if every single inch of space was covered with the end result of her labors.
Declan looked at the various pastries. He had never thought of himself as having a sweet tooth—until now. He could almost feel himself salivating.
“You know, this is almost too tempting to ignore,” he told his niece.
Shannon didn’t know if she should be worried or if he was joking. She had never found herself in this sort of a situation with her uncle before. With the advent of Josie in their lives, everything seemed to have gotten more comfortable. But she hoped that didn’t mean that her uncle would start eating the product of her hard work.
“Well, you’d better ignore it,” Shannon told her uncle. “I need to bring everything that’s here in to the bake sale,” she said then pleaded, “Please promise me you don’t eat any of it.”
“Not even one piece?” he asked his niece.
He was serious, Shannon thought. “Josie.” The teen all but wailed nervously, asking her mentor for help.
“He’s just teasing you, honey,” Josie told the girl. “If he wants to eat any of these things—” she waved her hand at all the items that were left cooling on the table “—he’s going to have to come down to the school and buy it like everyone else.”
Declan laughed dismissively. “It’s not like I have all this extra time on my hands,” he pointed out.
She realized that her solution had brought up another problem for Declan. “All right,” she said, picking up the apron she had just removed. Putting it back on, she tied the ends together again, forming a bow. “Then I’ll bake something just for you.”
Declan was about to tell her not to go to all that trouble, but he had to admit that the smell of the baked goods was really beginning to get to him. He was truly tempted.
Still, he finally forced himself to say, “You don’t have to do that.”
She knew when she was on the receiving end of a halfhearted protest. “Oh, I think I do,” she told him. “Do you want to sit here and keep me company, or just come back for the finished product?”
He was somewhat tempted by the former, but there were still things he had to get to. The ranch didn’t just run itself, no matter how much, at times, he wished that it could.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Declan promised Josie.
“And I’ll probably still be here,” she answered.
It was the “probably” that got to him and made Declan hurry. As it was, he managed to return just before dinnertime.
But when he walked in, he found that Josie had already left.
“She didn’t stay?” he asked his mother, trying not to sound as disappointed as he felt.
“No,” his mother answered. “The poor dear was worn to a frazzle,” Ruth told her son. “She had spent all that time baking those things for Shannon’s bake sale, then,” she added significantly, “a bunch of baked goods just for you. When she was finished, she also saw the way I was holding that whisk as I was trying to make mashed potatoes. She insisted that I sit down and take it easy while she went on to make dinner.” She smiled broadly. “I tell you, Declan, that girl is one in a million. Maybe even two million,” she declared.
Declan rolled his mother’s words over in his mind then said, “Well, you won’t get an argument out of me. What did she wind up making?” he asked, referring to the aroma he smelled coming from the oven.
“Dinner,” his mother answered simply. When he looked at the woman quizzically, she told him, “If you can’t figure it out, then my guess is that your sense of smell died of boredom after that bland slop you’ve been cooking for all these years.”
Declan took in another breath, deeper this time. It smelled wonderful, he realized. “It’s fried chicken, isn’t it?”
“Right on the first try, dear. Maybe your sense of smell isn’t dead,” she told her son, smiling at him. “So, are you just going to sit there, sniffing, or are you going to bring the chicken over to the table and do it justice?” she wanted to know.
“Guess I’ll do it justice,” Declan said, picking up the platter and bringing it over.
Placing a piece on his plate, he heard a side door close. The next moment, Shannon entered the room.
“Hey, you weren’t going to eat without me, were you?” the teen wanted to know. She slid into a chair at the dinner table.
Declan quirked a brow. “Where were you?” he asked.
“I was just putting away the goodies that Josie made for the bake sale,” she told her uncle.
Declan had his own ideas about that. “You could have left them out. It’s not like the things she made were going to spoil before tomorrow,” he told her.
“No,” Shannon agreed. “But they could very well have gotten eaten.”
“Are you saying that you thought I’d eat them all on you?” Declan asked, feigning surprise.
“Not even your uncle has that big an appetite,” Ruth told her granddaughter as she came to Declan’s defense.
Shannon looked a little skeptical.
“There’s always a first time,” she told her grandmother. “And those things that Josie made all smelled really delicious.” She smiled happily. “They’ll probably all sell out within the first half hour,” she predicted. “Hey—” she suddenly had a thought as she helped herself to some of the fried chicken “—do you think that Josie could teach me how to make at least some of those baked goodies?” she asked her grandmother.
“I don’t see why not,” Ruth answered. “She’s a nice lady who’s obviously very generous with her time.” The words were meant for her granddaughter but she was looking at Declan as she said them. “Do you think that fried chicken is her favorite meal?” she asked her son. Unconsciously, she was stretching her hand, trying to get feeling and mobility back in it.
He thought it over. “Well, that all depends,” he answered.
She wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “On what?”
“On whether or not this was the only thing you had on hand for her to make for dinner,” he told his mother.
Because she didn’t trust her memory the way she used to, Ruth walked over to the refrigerator. Opening the door, she looked inside.
The shelves were very close to being empty. She remembered that she’d meant to go shopping and then her arthritis had kicked in, making going to the store for food a real challenge.
“Looks like the chicken was it,” she told her son. “But Josie certainly did a good job of making it.”
“I didn’t say she didn’t,” Declan answered. “All I said was that she didn’t have another choice when it came to making dinner, so maybe fried chicken isn’t her favorite meal.”
Ruther frowned at her son. “You’re just saying that because you don’t want to invite her over.”
“No, I’m just saying that because I honestly don’t know if it’s her favorite meal. But you can still make fried chicken. As I remember it, you make one mean fried chicken.”
Ruth smiled, massaging her hands as she tried to get the sharp pain she felt in them to recede. Despite the fact that the pain had settled in, she offered her son a pleased smile.
“I do, don’t I?” she asked brightly.
Bringing his plate over to the sink, he paused, leaning over to kiss his mother’s forehead. “You really do,” he assured her with conviction.