Sugar's Twice as Sweet: Sugar, Georgia: Book 1 (9 page)

Hattie opened her mouth but quickly closed it when Jelly-Lou gave her a reprimanding shake of the head.

“Yankees!” Etta Jayne marched across the kitchen, slowing to a stop as she passed her gifts. Josephina could tell she wanted to snatch them back, but southern etiquette, being what it was, dictated that she forsake the dishes and take her leave gracefully.

The other ladies followed her out of the kitchen and back through the living room, piling up at the threshold. Their eyes all settled on the formal salon, which was situated on the west side of the house overlooking the lake.

“Mud? Inside?” Dottie said with a perplexed shake of the head.

 “She didn’t even offer us a cold beverage,” Hattie said as if that explained away everything.

After seeing the ladies out, Josephina walked back through the house and into the kitchen. She curled up with the cake—the whole cake— and pulled out her designs. In them, she had moved all the seating into the dining room and installed three islands, each with a sink, prep area, and professional-grade range. This would be a perfect place for a teaching kitchen. Arranged right, it would encourage interaction among the guests and create a laid-back atmosphere for mastering southern fare.

Her eyes settled on the bumbleberry-colored stain, and Boo let out a small whimper. She placed him in her lap and scratched him behind the ears.

“We could always make some kind of cool wall art out of that chunk of the countertop,” she said, and Boo yipped. She didn’t want to destroy their memories of Letty, but she also didn’t want their ideas to completely derail hers.

No longer afraid, Josephina picked up the phone and dialed.

“Y-ello, this is Rooster of Rooster’s Roof and Remodels. Shoot.”

“Hey, Rooster. This is Josephina Harrington. Come back,” she said getting into the southern spirit. When he didn’t respond, she added. “Um, Letty’s niece.”

“Yes, ma’am. I came out to your place this morning and checked the roof. Gotta say, it’s not looking too good.”

Roof. Plumbing. Electrical. She could go on.

“Didn’t want to wake you so I stuck the bid to the front door. Didn’t you get it?”

“Yes, I did. Thank you.”
All twenty thousand of it.
Josephina swallowed, willing herself to stay strong. She’d avoided calling him because it seemed so final. And she’d been scared.

But the new Josephina no longer did scared!

Not really.

“I was hoping you could come back out and take a look at the rest of the property. I’d like to get a new estimate.”

Rooster was silent for a moment. “Excuse me for saying, but that there house is a money trap. It’s why your aunt left it the way she did. Fixing it up is going to cost a pretty penny.”

“I have to see how many pennies it will cost before I can get a plan together. I’ll pay you for any time you spend assessing the property.”

“Oh, it ain’t that. I just don’t want you to get all broken up like Ms. Letty did when you see the figures.” Letty had tried to renovate? Why hadn’t she said anything? Between Josephina and her parents they could’ve found the money.

Then again, taking Harrington money meant taking Harrington advice, and her aunt didn’t take anything from anyone: money, shit, or otherwise. Letty was a smart woman, Josephina decided. And she was going to strive to be more like her. Starting now.

“It takes a lot to break me, Rooster,” she said feeling pretty unbreakable. “And I’d love it if you could give me a ballpark of what it would cost to renovate the entire house with the servants’ quarters and dock included in the price.”

Rooster promised he’d come over first thing in the morning and, telling herself that it wasn’t too late to make her and Letty’s dreams a reality, she grabbed the phone book off the counter and looked up the number for Sugar Savings and Loan.

I
might have acted without thinking,” Josephina mumbled to herself as she looked at her phone. “Again.”

After eleven voicemails from Wilson, ranging from annoyed to irate, and nine emails, demanding the immediate return of his golf clubs, Josephina knew that was a gross understatement.

“Please tell me there weren’t witnesses,” Lavender Spenser, the local mechanic and owner of Kiss My Glass, Tow and Tires, called out over the air compressor.

Two days ago, Josephina had uncovered her aunt’s Cadillac parked under a field of crabgrass and next to a nest of feral cats in the side yard. Ulysses S. Grant, as Letty had named him, was green, built like a tank, got nine miles to the gallon, and played Dixieland every time she made a hard left. He also had leaky back shocks and the opossums had chewed through the fan belt, which was why she’d left it at Kiss My Glass while she ran across the street to the bank.

Spenser lay on a dolly in her grease-stained jumper, steel-toed boots, and less-than-sunny disposition. Josephina squirmed on the bench of the rusted-out pickup Spenser had been working on the entire time Josephina relayed the events that led up to her informing Wilson precisely where he could shove his Upper East Side loft and all of its contents.

“No witnesses, but it was in writing.”

“Did you email it? You can claim hacker. It tends to stand up better than scorned woman.”

Josephina leaned out the window of the Ford, draping one wrist on the peeling steering wheel, and yelled over the drilling of power tools. “I wrote it on this cute stationery I picked up in Spain and taped it to the bedroom door. Handmade by monks. The stationery, not the door.”

“Do you have any idea how much you walked away from?” Spenser slid back under the car and mumbled something unintelligible under her breath, which was probably a good thing. Josephina already felt like an idiot; she didn’t need a verbal reminder to cement the feeling.

“I don’t need his money.” Josephina hoped she sounded more confident than she felt.

Spenser’s hand appeared and blindly grabbed some socket doohickey out of her toolbox before disappearing back under the car. “Can you start her up?”

Josephina turned the key and the truck sputtered to life. A thousand little bursts of black smoke filled the garage and made the already smothering Georgia heat suffocating.

“Shit! Off, turn it off!”

She did. The truck coughed and gasped. So did Spenser, who came out with her face the color of tar.

“So you’re back, you don’t need his money, and the dump is yours. Lucky you.”

 “I understand how, to the unimaginative eye, Fairchild House might look like a
dump
, but to someone with a trained eye, she’s a few coats away from perfection.”

Spenser glared, just her eyes and forehead visible from beneath the car. “Don’t let the accent and braids fool you, Manhattan. I have more points to my IQ than you do shoes. Everybody in town knows that Letty only had a little over twenty grand in her estate when she passed. That won’t even make a dent in what needs to be done, which is how it got to be in its current condition.”

Josephina took a bite of her stale doughnut, compliments of Kiss My Glass, and wondered if Spenser was purposely trying to ruin her good day or if she was still angry about the accidental wad of grape gum Josephina stuck in her hair during church when they’d been seven.

With an exasperated sigh, Spenser rolled out and wiped her hands off on a red rag, then dragged it down her face, making more of a mess. “Look, Joie, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. The truth is, that place is a shithole.”

“My magical shithole,” Josephina said, leaning on the window frame, pride bubbling up inside. “Which is why I went to see Mr. Ryan earlier. I asked for a loan.”

“I hope for his sake his grandma doesn’t find out.”

“Why?” Josephina asked, wondering how someone’s grandmother could influence a business decision. She had gone into the bank assuming Mr. Ryan would look at her assets and laugh. He hadn’t, instead saying what a good woman her aunt was, that she was sorely missed by all of Sugar, and he’d need a few days to get back to her. It wasn’t a yes but it sure as hell wasn’t a no.

“How much?” Spenser cut through the bull.

“Half a million.”

Spenser gave a long whistle.

“What?”

“That’s a whole lot of debt to take on for a house you haven’t bothered to visit since you were a kid.” Spenser walked to the pink box on the counter at the front of the shop.

Josephina tried not to notice Spenser’s grease-stained fingers sampling all the pastries before settling on the first one she touched—a jelly-filled.

She immediately set down her own doughnut. If the sticky smudges on Spenser’s jumper were any indication, this was not her first bite of the day. “It’s not a house. It’s a culinary getaway.”

“Here? In Sugar?”

Ignoring the big glob of raspberry jelly oozing from Spenser’s doughnut and her smart-ass grin, Josephina swallowed her growing nerves and looked out over the drums of motor oil and through the open bay door. Giant oak trees lined the cobblestoned walkways, covered in Spanish moss, their gnarled branches intertwined, creating a green canopy covering Maple Street. She took in the six-foot red and blue wooden bull across the street, the Confederate flag flapping above the local bar, and a man moseying across the street—the sidearm holstered at his hip as visible as his package in those painted-on Wranglers.

Ignoring the little voice in her head, the one that sounded oddly like five little old biddies and her parents, she said, “Brett mentioned that the town is in need of an inn.”

Spenser looked at her. “Brett McGraw?”

Josephina shrugged, hating the heat she felt rush to her cheeks, and everywhere else for that matter.

Spenser opened the driver’s door, wedged herself into Josephina’s space, and rested her elbows on the frame. “You already visited with Brett McGraw?”

“Not really. I had some car problems. He found me on the side of the road and gave me a ride.”

She left out the part about dinner and the cell phone.

“You two do the cowboy cha-cha yet?”

“Um, no to all implied.”

“Considering it?”

“Nope.”

Spenser stared long and hard as if Josephina was guilty as sin. No matter how badly she wanted to break eye contact she didn’t. It was ridiculous; she was acting like some high school girl with a crush, afraid that the mean girl would find out and ruin her life.

 “You got left by your fiancé at some airstrip in your altogether, while he flew off to Europe with his secretary, which means you’re single. So you must be lying.”

“She was the vice president of business development, actually. And how do
you
know all that?” Josephina hadn’t spoken to Spenser since she was a kid, so she had only admitted to the breakup, not any of the humiliating details.

“Your mom called.”

“My mom?”

Ignoring Josephina, Spenser continued. “If you’re female, you’re interested. Brett’s sexy, charming, and loves women. And they love him right back. Women in this town have been counting the days until his return. Surprised there hasn’t been another parade yet.”

“Another?”
As in they already had one in his honor?

“Yup. Every time he comes home for a quick visit they throw one. And the women line up, hoping they’ll be the one to snag his heart for at least a night. I’m probably one of three single, age-appropriate women in a six-county radius who hasn’t slept with or fallen for a McGraw. And it was a conscious decision.” Spencer shivered. “McGraw men don’t do it for me, which is a shame since they are so damn good to look at. And, I hear, amazing in bed.”

“Brett doesn’t live here in the off-season?” she asked, not wanting to think about Brett in bed.

“Brett doesn’t believe in an off-season. That would mean staying in one place long enough to settle down. And this generation of McGraws don’t settle and they sure as hell don’t stick. They are missing the commitment gene. Well, unless we’re talking about Cal—but he’s only taken with one lady and she’s his daughter.” Spenser’s smile disappeared. “Their parents were killed in a house fire when Cal was in college. Brett must have only been fourteen. All of them took it hard.”

“That’s terrible.”

“Cal became Mr. Responsibility. Jace started picking fights. Brett, he found golf and girls, in that order. Small towns being what they are, it’s hard to move on when everyone keeps reminding you of where you’ve been. After that video aired, the only way Cal could get him to come home for the summer was to feed him some BS story about the local golf camp being understaffed.”

“He’s spending the entire summer working with kids? Here?” How was she supposed to avoid him for the rest of the summer?

Spenser must have mistaken her panic for judgment. “Don’t let his laid-back, life’s-a-game attitude fool you. Brett, like all the McGraw brothers, protects his own. It’s probably costing him millions to sit out this part of the season. He might be a commitment-phobe who has a weakness for pretty women, but he loves his family and this town.”

Great, he was loyal and self-sacrificing. The guy with the charmed life that she’d created in her head was slowly crumbling, which was bad. If she started thinking of Brett as something other than an entitled athlete, she just might start liking him.

“That said, he has the attention span of a gnat when it comes to women. Translation, as soon as camp ends, he’s heading out to New Jersey for the FedEx Cup.”

Josephina wasn’t sure why, but the thought of Brett leaving didn’t sit right. She should be happy that he would be gone, not bordering on disappointment. He’d been so charming the other night—bringing her dinner, a phone, saying sweet things about her wings until her heart was fluttering. Then again, every time Josephina led with her heart she got burned.

“Well, I’ve done sexy and charming. I’m not looking to relive that part of my life. I’m here for a fresh start. To reopen Fairchild House.”

Josephina stood and paced to the bay door, needing some fresh air and a minute to let her statement settle. It felt good, almost as good as it was to find Letty’s lime convertible still sitting on the other side of the main square in town. It had disappeared sometime yesterday morning only to mysteriously resurface last night, after she’d reported it missing, smelling like cigar smoke and mothballs.

She remembered her aunt putting the top back while speeding down the highway and saying this is what it must feel like to fly. For a girl who’d spent most of her life in the confines of Manhattan, those summers at the Fairchild House had always felt like coming home.

Spenser walked around the tailgate, joining Josephina at the bay door. “Have you considered what will happen if it doesn’t work out? You will have a house no one in these parts can afford to buy and a huge debt.”

If anything, Spenser’s question made Josephina even more determined. “Then I reassess and go at it another way.”

“And what if the bank says no?”

“They can’t. That would mean I would have failed. And I am done with failing.” At least she hoped. “I will do whatever it takes to make this happen.”

“Wow. Letty said you lived balls-to-the-wall.”

“Balls-to-the-wall? Really? Me?”

“Yeah, I didn’t believe her either. Not with all your lace and stupid pink bows.”

“I was a kid. My mom dressed me.”

“What’s your current excuse now?”

Josephina looked down, taking in her runway-meets-respectable-businesswoman ensemble, and frowned. It said classy, together, sophisticated. It also said uptight Yankee.

“Letty talked about you all the time. She told anyone who would listen that someday you’d turn Fairchild House into your own adventure.” That made her smile. “She was a ballsy woman, taught me to fight for what I wanted. Like going to mechanic school and taking over my grandpa’s shop. When my parents refused to lend me the money to buy out Grandpa’s half, Letty made up some lame Southern Business Women’s Loan. She never said a word about the loan being from her, but I knew. So, I say go for it. But if you do something illegal, don’t tell me.”

“Because you’d have to turn me in?”

“Nope. I’d want to join you because it would piss off the sheriff.” Spenser smiled and nodded at the open bay door. “And then I’d make his day because he’d get to arrest me. I hate making his day.”

“Is he ticketing me?” Josephina asked, because there, across the street, next to Frank Brother’s Taxidermy, Ammo, and Fine Jewelry, and in front of the Sheriff’s Station, surrounded by a bunch of lookie-loos, stood one of Sugar’s finest—notepad in hand and studying her car.

“That’s what happens when you forget to pay the meter.”

“I did pay the meter.” A whopping twenty-five cents. “But I didn’t park it there. When you finished working on Ulysses I drove around the block and left him under the maple tree next to your shop,” she defended, not wanting to meet the town’s people with a public misdemeanor.

“You saying it walked away?” Spenser joked, already headed for the open bay.

“No, I’m just saying I didn’t park it there.”

Josephina grabbed her purse and, making sure to smile at every single ma’am sent her direction, made her way down the cobblestoned sidewalk after Spenser, who seemed to be almost preening.

A fire hydrant of a woman dressed in an apron, flour, and a good layer of condemnation stood under a neon sign, which read:
T
HE
S
ADDLE
R
ACK.
It was Etta Jayne, and she was pointing a reprimanding spatula at Josephina and clucking away.

“I put a quarter in the meter,” Josephina defended, hastily adding, “ma’am.”

She half expected the woman to swat her tush with that spatula. She was pretty sure she could outrun the disgruntled granny, but she didn’t want to test that theory.

A tip of a Stetson and three glares later, Josephina came to a halt, nearly toppling into Spenser, who had pushed her way through the gathering crowd and now stood on her tiptoes, glaring at the sheriff.