the curved center of the C in Pricilla’s Patisserie, was Nora Kincaid, with her lips flapping and cell phone clutched in her fist. And since Jeffery had on shoes and a shirt, Lexi couldn’t refuse him service.
Proud that the phrase rat bastard didn’t come out, she settled on a cordial, “What can I get you?”
“How about a hug?” Jeffery asked, his arms out wide. More accurately, his right arm, since his left hand was shoved into Sara’s back pocket.
“Sorry, we’re all out of that,” she said, her anger rising with every second he stood there smiling blissfully. Yeah, it was a free country, and yeah, he grew up here too. But she’d given him Pairing and New York so that she wouldn’t have to watch the man she’d once loved love someone else. “But we are having a special on eat shit and die.”
Sara went white.
Jeffery gasped.
And Lexi, remembering Mrs. Kincaid and her phone’s uploading capabilities, forced a smile as sugary as the cream puffs in her hand before she slid the tray onto the middle shelf of the display case. The counter created a solid barrier between them, which was a good thing, since her hands were itching to reach for her straw and tissue paper—or maybe a rolling pin. “Two for one, actually.”
“I’m sorry…about everything,” Sara stammered, her face flushed with humiliation, and Lexi believed her. Not that it mattered. She was over Jeffery, over the affair and the hurt and the embarrassment, but what she wasn’t over was the way her ex kept inserting himself into her life as though he still had that right. She had a dinner to cater; she didn’t have time for his games.
Lexi grabbed two cream puffs, dumped them in a bag, and set them on the counter. “On the house. Now leave.”
Sara tugged on Jeffery’s arm. “Let’s just go.”
“Fine,” Jeffery drawled, as though Lexi was being overly dramatic and problematic. “I just wanted to give you this.” He gave Sara’s tush a parting pat and walked to the counter. Pulling out a document, he extended it toward Lexi.
“What’s that?” she asked, eyeing the paper and shoving her hands in her apron pockets.
When she didn’t reach for it, Jeffery slid it across the counter. “This is a friendly reminder that all recipes served at Pairing are property of Pairing and that you can’t serve them here or anywhere else, for that matter.”
There was nothing friendly about his tone, or the way her knee begged to greet him properly.
“I haven’t served anything from Pairing. I have a new menu. A better menu.”
“Great, then make sure Pricilla understands the terms of the ruling. You have until Monday to remove these items from your bakery menu.”
At his final words, Lexi’s heart dropped in conjunction with her eyes and she took in the list. It was a printed-out e-mail, sent to Jeffery from a third party, displaying a list of required items. It included her grandmother’s burnt-almond cake, her peppermint bark, Rocky Road truffles, chocolate-or-bust bonbons, and her great-grandmother’s éclairs, among others.
“These aren’t yours.” Not a single recipe had ever appeared on the restaurant menu. “And you have no legal rights to them.”
“The judge ruled that any and all items ever served in Pairing belong to the restaurant. Read the ruling.” Jeffery smiled and Lexi’s heart stopped.
She quickly ran through every dessert she had served at the restaurant, trying to remember a time when she had prepared any of these. She couldn’t. But she could sense that she was screwed. Jeffery never showed his cards unless he was certain he held the winning hand.
Then she saw who was CCed at the top of the e-mail, recognized the name, and her heart literally stopped. Right there in her chest. As though waiting for her to catch up before it broke.
“I don’t understand,” she muttered, looking at the Montgomery Distributions corporate logo written in big-business blue and back to Marc’s name screaming at her from the top line. She tried to take in what it all meant, convince herself that she hadn’t been played, that she hadn’t made a colossal mistake in judgment—again.
She couldn’t. She couldn’t even bring herself to speak for fear that she was right.
Mrs. Kincaid must have sensed the drama and decided to give up her window view for a front-row seat, because before Jeffery could explain, the bell chimed. But when Lexi looked up, it wasn’t just Mrs. Kincaid who had come in to witness the scene, but also Mrs. Moberly, Mrs. Rose, and