Mistletoe Bay (17 page)

“Chase, go put him back in his cage.” She frowned at the table but still didn't release it. Everyone was following her lead and kept their grip. “Tucker, please come out from under the table—now.”

Tucker slowly backed out from under the table and stood. He was the picture of pure innocence.

Felicity, Hope, and Faith all glared at Tucker as they slowly released the tablecloth and lowered their legs. Eli released the dog.

“Would you like to explain yourself, young man?” She could see Tucker's little mind trying to work up a plausible story.

“About?” Tucker was buying time. Chase was mumbling encouraging words to Fred and promising him a goodie as they left the room. Fred appeared unharmed—this time. One of these days, Bojangles was going to do more than bark at the reptile.

“Explain how Fred got under the table.”

Tucker shrugged. “He must have followed me when I came down from the bathroom.”

Fred and Eli chuckled.

“How did Fred get out of his cage, on the third floor? His locked cage, I might add.” She watched as Tucker squirmed. Fred was out of his cage more than he was in it lately. Tucker needed a hobby.

“I don't know, Mom. Fred's pretty smart. I think he's unlocking the cage all by himself.” Tucker looked pleased with himself. “Maybe we can get him on TV . . . you know, one of those amazing-animal shows.”

Fred and Lucy both coughed into their napkins. Coop rolled his eyes while Eli nodded his head with approval to the small boy. Dorothy muttered something under her breath, while Sam looked like he was about to bust a seam laughing.

“Tucker James Wright, finish eating your dinner. We will be discussing Fred's latest escape and fibbing later tonight before you go to bed.” She had no idea what to do with the boy. At least for now, dinner could resume at a normal pace and nothing had been broken. For Tucker, this had been one of his milder pranks.

Iguanas weren't a plague, but close.

“But Jenni, he let Fred loose in my room again today. He scared Faith and chewed on my blue eyeliner.” Felicity obviously wanted to push the issue.

Sam shook his head at her, but she continued anyway. “Tucker ruins everything.”

“Felicity, we can discuss this later.” Dorothy looked embarrassed by her daughter.

“Can we please finish eating in peace?” Jenni now knew why they never entertained, even though the Armstrongs and the Fischers seemed to be enjoying themselves. She took another sip of her wine, something else she did very rarely—drink.

Fred and Lucy had contributed three bottles of wine to the meal, so the proper thing to do was to serve it. With Tucker at the table, they should have brought a case with a funnel.

Lucy patted her lips with her napkin. “I must say, that was exciting.” Lucy smiled at Jenni.

She could see the laughter in Lucy's eyes and felt better. She just might not send Tucker off to military school after all. “Thank you.”

Eli picked up his wineglass and held it out toward her mother-in-law. “Dorothy Wright?”

“Yes?” Dorothy looked like she wanted to crawl under the table.

“You're one lady who sure knows how to throw a party.” Eli winked. “I like your style.”

Chapter Nine

“You're going to have to forgive the mess,” Jenni said as they walked the dirt path between the house and the barn.

Or what at one time had been a barn, thought Coop. Now it was Jenni's shop and he was curious to see it. “Most businesses are messy. I can't imagine making soap is a clean job.” That seemed like an oxymoron to him—messy soap. “I can't even imagine how one begins to make soap.”

“Sodium hydroxide, water, oils, fragrance, the usual.” Jenni pointed to her left. “See, that's the dirt driveway that leads to the shop. I told you there was one.”

Coop frowned at the overgrown, deeply rutted path. He would need a mountain bike to travel it, not a big brown box truck. He'd break an axle or get stuck in mud once it rained. “There's no way for me to take my deliveries back to the shop.”

“I already told you that.” Jenni shook her head and smiled. “You just chose not to believe me.”

“It's not that I didn't believe you. I just wanted to see for myself.” He also wanted to get Jenni alone for a while, and it had seemed like the perfect excuse. His mother and Eli's daughters were doing the dishes, and Dorothy was handling the food. Everyone else had glued themselves to the television. He would rather spend time with Jenni than see the last quarter of the football game.

He wanted to talk to Jenni away from the boys, her eagle-eyed mother-in-law, and now his own parents. Jenni was living in a fishbowl and didn't even know it. She was also driving him quietly, but completely, out of his mind.

He had been dreaming of her for the past couple nights and needed to know if she tasted as sweet in person as she had in his dreams—hot, erotic dreams that had left him aching and in need of a cold shower or two. The showers hadn't been helping.

“So now you've seen my road.” Jenni approached the side door to the barn. “I think I should warn you about the smell.” Jenni's hand was on the doorknob, where she had just inserted a key. “It's a little overpowering at first.”

“The smell? I thought you made soaps and body lotions. Doesn't it smell good?” His mother had told him that she had seen a couple of the higher-end stores up in Bangor carrying Mistletoe Bay Company products. Lucy had said she loved the Bayberry fragrance but couldn't see spending that kind of money when she could pick up hand lotion at the dollar store for a fraction of the cost. If someone looked in the dictionary under
thrifty
, his mother's picture would be there.

“The products smell wonderful. It's when you mix all those fragrances in one big building that it gets a little overwhelming.” Jenni opened the door, reached in, and switched on the overhead lights. “Welcome to my laboratory.”

He stepped in the barn and was truly impressed. He never would have known it was a barn from the inside. It had painted walls, wood floors, and an electric dumbwaiter that hauled stuff up and down from the top floor. It was pretty neat and organized for having boxes stacked everywhere. “You do all this yourself?”

Jenni had been right. The place was a little overpowering with all the different scents competing with each other for dominance.

“No, Felicity works for me every day after school and on weekends if we're busy. Lately we've been more busy than not. Even I underestimated the market for all-natural-ingredient products that not only smell good but work.” Jenni closed the door behind them. “I interviewed two high school seniors the other day. Both of them seemed perfect, so I hired them both part time, at least through the holidays. They start Monday after school with Felicity.”

He walked down an aisle and stopped at a table. Someone had been wrapping bars of soap and filling boxes. He picked up a bar and took a whiff. “Lavender.”

“Not a hard one to guess.” Jenni nodded at the soap he had just put back down on the table. “Especially since there's a pile of wrappers sitting right next to the tray telling anyone who could read what the fragrance is.”

“Hey, I'm good. Admit it.” He liked teasing her. He didn't think she got a lot of teasing around here. “I can name any soap you give me.” It was a lie, and they both knew it. Any scent that was related to food, he'd probably guess; it was those darn flowers that confused him every time.

“If you can name three out of five, you're good.” Jenni led the way. “I'll give you a tour of the place as we locate some unmarked soap.” Jenni tossed her coat onto a stool. “This is where Felicity usually works. She wraps the soaps, labels the body creams, packs boxes, and most of the time gets the orders ready for you to pick up.”

He dropped his black leather jacket on top of hers. It was a holiday and he was sick of looking at brown. Today he had worn black slacks and a green shirt. Not a thread of brown was anywhere near him.

He reached into a box and pulled out ajar. “Ocean Breeze?” He frowned at the label. “Why would anyone want to smell like salt air and dried-out seaweed?”

Jenni took the jar from his hand and opened it. “Close your eyes and smell.”

He glanced at the light blue creamy mixture, then closed his eyes. Jenni must have moved the jar closer to his nose; he could smell the lotion now, and it didn't smell salty or rotting. It smelled of sea breezes and sun. “How did you do that?” All he could picture was Jenni smearing that lotion onto her legs and him going on a vacation.

Jenni grinned. “Talent,” she said as she tightened the lid and replaced the jar in the box. “Come on, I'll show you where I work.”

He followed her as she led the way to the back of the room, where there were huge pots, a monster of a mixer, and cases upon cases of big metal cans of oil—coconut oil, olive oil, and palm oil, to name a few. Cases of distilled water were piled high, along with more boxes of empty jars for the body cream. He picked up a empty bottle that had a pump on top from another case. “What goes in this?”

“Cranberry hand wash, the first product and best seller of the Mistletoe Bay Company. It's made with cranberry-seed oil and organic honey. It's a totally soap-free cleansing gel. A lot of people out there are extremely sensitive to soaps and chemicals.”

“Sounds different.” He'd never heard of anyone sensitive to soap—to chemicals, yes; soap, no. But it sounded reasonable. “So how do you come up with the scents?”

“That's the hard part. Putting different fragrances in the right combination and in the right amounts to give you the scent you're after. I developed most of my recipes when the boys were small, mostly for myself and as gifts for friends. I perfected the combinations and scents before I started the business.”

Jenni glanced around the crowded room. “When the business becomes financially secure, I want to expand into the baby products end of the market. That's how the whole thing started. When Chase was born he had a reaction to just about anything I would use on him. I got tired of trying different products and watching my son go through rashes, breakouts, and pure misery.”

“Why didn't you start with baby products first?” It seemed strange to him. Jenni's hazel eyes had actually lit up when she talked about starting the baby product line for the business.

“When you have a baby, you reach for a brand name you can trust. It's only after that doesn't work that you start reading labels and buying anything that is on the shelf. I need to build the name first. Besides, women buy lotions and soap on the packaging first, then the smell. Names don't really mean a thing until they discover how great it is, and then they start looking for that name brand again.

“Another reason is that all-natural products aren't cheap. In fact, they are downright expensive to make, so customers must be willing to pay a high-end price. When Chase was three months old, I would have been more than willing to pay any price for a product that worked.”

“Instead you made one yourself and started a business.”

“Not exactly. I'm going about it a little backward, but that's okay. My degree is in chemistry, so I'm putting it to good use.”

“Chemistry? Lord, you're a geek.” During his two years in college he had avoided the geek girls. Anyone who actually understood calculus and Einstein's theories scared the bejeepers out of him. Give him a hammer and a road map and he could conquer the world. Give him a computer and he would commit mayhem and bring civilization to an end.

Jenni smirked and shook her head.

He looked at Jenni, dressed in her gray slacks and shimmering gold blouse, and he had to wonder what he had been missing all these years. He might not have given the geek girls a second look twelve years ago, but he was looking now. And drooling.

“So how do you come up with a new fragrance?” he asked Jenni before he did something really stupid, like kiss that smirk off her tempting mouth.

“Mostly trial and error, and one heck of a lot of time.” Jenni lifted the cover of what looked like a sheet on a tray that appeared to be about four inches deep. There were racks everywhere holding those trays. Some were covered; some weren't.

“What's that?” He walked over and took a peek. The tray was filled with a hard pink stuff. He leaned closer and sniffed. “Flowers.”

“This one doesn't count because there are a few flower scents combined.” Jenni covered it back up. “Tomorrow these get uncovered, and they sit until Saturday morning, when I cut them into bars.” She nodded to a wicked-looking machine in the corner. “That slices a whole tray of soap in about three seconds.”

“Nice.” He now understood why the shop had been locked tighter than Fort Knox. Tucker and that slicer didn't belong on the same planet, let alone property. “So what's this soap called?” He nodded to the pink stuff.

“It's one of my seasonal specialties. That one is Naughty and Nice.” Jenni wiggled her brows. “It's a big seller.”

“I can imagine.” He could imagine quite a lot with a name like that.

“Over here.” Jenni went to a rack of trays with light blue soap. “Close your eyes and guess.”

He closed his eyes and had to almost touch the soap with the tip of his nose. The other scents in the room were making it harder for him to get only that smell, but once he did, he knew immediately what it was. “Suicide Hill.” He hadn't been there in fourteen years, but he would know that scent anywhere.

“What's Suicide Hill?” Jenni looked confused.

“A toboggan run on the outskirts of town by Sunset Cove. Haven't you been there?” He straightened back up. “I'm sorry—you and the boys haven't been in town long enough to go sledding, have you?”

“No, but I've sledded before and have even been on a toboggan a couple times in my life. But I've never been down, nor am I planning on going down, a run called Suicide Hill. I'm not that crazy.”

“Now that's a challenge if I ever heard one.”

“Challenge? What challenge?”

“To get you to go down it. I'm betting that before the new year I can get you to go down it, if there's enough snow by then. Some years we had to wait till January for the snow to pack down nice and deep. There's no fancy snow-making equipment out at Sunset Cove, just Mother Nature at her finest.”

“I did not challenge you, Coop, and you're crazy. I won't go down it—period.”

“If you say so.” He grinned. “So if that's not Suicide Hill, what is it?” He pointed to the light blue soap.

“Coop, do you honestly think customers would buy a soap called Suicide Hill?” Jenni laughed and shook her head. “It's called Snowflakes.”

“I like.” Okay, Jenni could bathe with that soap, and he could pretend she was Suicide Hill. He'd die a very happy man.

“There's one more seasonal fragrance, but I don't have any of it in here. It's all upstairs curing.”

“Curing? Soap cures?”

“Indeed it does, four to six weeks. These batches are the last of the Christmas-season specials. The body creams don't need to cure, so I can make them for a couple more weeks yet.” Jenni led the way back out of her work area and toward a set of steps. The electric dumbwaiter was only big enough to carry one of those metal rolling racks holding all the trays. The racks were about five feet high. He had to wonder how Jenni managed to get the filled trays up or down from that height.

Jenni climbed the wooden steps. He climbed behind her, enjoying the view. “Did you do all this work to the barn?” Maybe she had better experiences with a handyman out here in the shop, where the boys weren't allowed.

“I gave the walls a fresh coat of paint, that's all.” Jenni stepped onto the wide-open second floor. Row after row of metal racks of curing soap and boxes filled the space. “Whoever owned it before me did all the work to the barn. They put in a bathroom, running water, a couple of windows, all the walls, and heat and central air. It's the reason I spent a lot more than I wanted to on this piece of property. The shop and of course the bay were the main selling features. The house, as you've seen, needs work. Lots of work. But it's the perfect place to raise the boys and run my business.”

“Speaking of work, did you ever call either of those names I gave you the day the washer hose broke?” He hadn't noticed any improvements around the place or pickup trucks parked out front. It was Thanksgiving, and the Halloween decorations were still up out front, along with the rotting pumpkins and the electrical cords strung everywhere. Jenni should be thankful today that the house hadn't burnt down so far.

“Daniel Creighton called me back. He's got a lot of jobs lined up for his slow period, but he said he might be able to get around to doing one or two jobs early spring. He penciled me in for the last two weeks of March.” Jenni started walking down the aisles of racks, inspecting the soap. “The other guy, Pete Van something or another, hasn't returned either of my two phone calls yet. I've got a feeling Bob Sanders has been down at the handyman union center spreading the word about Tucker, the glue gun, and the cat.”