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“Hey, Jamie. Can you let the Yurovize contacts know that I’ll be signing the contracts tonight? I plan to have the paperwork over to their lawyers in the morning. We should be good to go then, and the acquisition should be final in less than a week.”
“Will do, Mr. Collins. You finally heading out?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah, I think after this deal is done, I’m finally going to take that vacation everyone’s been bugging me about.”
Jamie looked surprised. Heath was surprised that he’d said it, too, and hadn’t realized he’d been thinking about it. How long had it been since he’d taken time off? Ten years?
He’d been entirely focused on building his business empire and increasing the size of his bank account. The deal with Yurovize ensured that vision had finally been achieved, but where had it left him? With a gaping hole where a relationship could be.
Hell, when he stopped and thought about it, he could have even had a kid or two by now. Not that he’d ever envisioned himself being a family man. Undoubtedly, he would be a terrible parent since his own had set such a poor example for him.
“Well, you just let me know where you want to go, and I’ll book it right now,” Jamie said. “I’m assuming money is no object, so you should spoil yourself. You’ve earned it.”
“How about Fiji?” Heath was being facetious. He had read somewhere that Fiji was one of the most expensive places in the world, at certain exclusive resorts. The scotch was settling in and had given him a warm and relaxed feeling that he welcomed.
He peered over Jamie’s shoulder as she opened up her Internet browser again. He saw that she was on an unusual-looking page that appeared to have a list of recipes.
He knew Jamie enjoyed cooking and considered it a serious hobby. She joked about trying to audition to compete on reality TV shows. He remembered her briefly mentioning something about entering an online recipe contest a while back.
She had been really excited about it, and he felt like a jerk for not asking her about it sooner. “Whatever happened with that recipe contest you entered?” he asked.
Jamie looked up at him and smiled widely. “Funny you should ask. I didn’t make first place, but I did take third. I won a hundred dollars. My picture’s on the site and everything. Here, let me show you.”
Jamie’s fingers skimmed across the keyboard as she entered a URL in the browser, and it popped open a new page.
At the top of the page was a bold headline announcing the winners of Grandma Ethel’s Favorite Down-Home Recipe Contest. Heath’s eye was drawn down to a middle-aged, paunchy man holding a pie. First place. He scanned down to see Jamie’s photo.
He didn’t make it past second place. He forgot to breathe.
Jamie started chattering about some special ingredient that she added to her recipe to give it its unique flavor twist, but he wasn’t listening to her.
He zeroed in on the photo of the second place winner. It was her.
The woman who’d been haunting his dreams for nearly a year. She was real and every bit as beautiful as he remembered. She was smiling in the photo and he wanted to reach into the picture and stroke her downy cheek. Not-Kassy. Finally.
No, wait. Her real name was bolded under the photo. If eyes could stumble, his would have done so as he sought to find what he’d been longing to discover for months.
Sylvie Jones.
He rolled the name around in his brain, tasted it on his lips. Sylvie Jones. Sylvie.
It was perfect. Beautiful. It seemed only right that she should be named Sylvie.
He didn’t realize he had said her name out loud until Jamie gave a small sigh.
“I know, right? Isn’t she just the cutest thing? And those babies! I could squeeze those chubby cheeks and eat them right up!” Jamie exclaimed. “I don’t even mind that I lost to her.”
Heath realized then that Sylvie held a pair of bundles in her arms. He blinked, then wiped his eyes before he squinted at the picture again.
She held two small babies in blue blankets. Babies. Small babies. His mind blanked.
It took a few moments before he realized that Jamie was still talking.
“Do you see that she placed for a take-out Chinese casserole? How brilliant is that? Second place was five hundred bucks. I should’ve thought of something like that. Genius idea. Way better than Mr. Puffy’s pie that got first. I mean, a mincemeat pie? Who cares? But I’d love to try out that Chinese concoction.”
Jamie rambled on, but Heath stopped listening again.
He read the rest of the caption.
Sylvie Jones and her three-month-old
twin boys, Quentyn and Jadyn,
from Zeke’s Bend.
He felt as if his world went in and out of focus, and he wondered for a moment if he were going to lose his footing.
“Jamie,” he said, his voice sounding distant even to himself, “these pictures. When were they taken?”
“Oh, well, I sent mine in after they told me I’d won third. They asked for a recent photo, so I took a new one and sent it in.”
“When?”
“Just a few days ago. No more than a week,” she answered. “Why do you want —?”
“When do you think the other winners sent theirs in?”
Jamie gave him a sideways look. “I have no idea. How could I?”
“Right, right. So you wouldn’t know if theirs are recent, too.”
“Nooo,” she said, her expression increasingly concerned. “I wouldn’t know.”
Heath was a whiz with numbers, always had been. The math took less than three seconds to calculate. Three-month-old twin boys, and he had last seen Sylvie a week or so shy of a year ago.
It couldn’t be.
But the numbers added up.
Jamie stood up abruptly and put her hand on his shoulder. “Mr. Collins, are you feeling okay? You look a little pale. Maybe going somewhere you could get a tan would be a good idea. Gosh, I’m babbling. I’m sorry. It’s just I don’t know what to do. Is something wrong?”
Heath didn’t have the wherewithal to say anything other than the truth. “Damned if I know.”
Chapter Eight
IT WAS THE END OF AN excruciatingly long workday at Shear Stylin’, and Sylvie was beat. She and her business partner, and aunt, Meg Jones, were cleaning up the shop. Sylvie had bought the business and the building it was located in from her cousin, Phae Holmes. It had been a dream come true when it happened.
Sylvie finally owned a business that was all hers, and she knew she was good at it. She enjoyed making the women in Zeke’s Bend feel stylish and attractive, plus she got to stay up-to-date on all the latest town gossip.
Of course, she was always pretty sure she was on the verge of going broke. Phae, who used to keep the books for them, teased her that it wasn’t true, but Sylvie thought Phae might be holding out the bad news because of how much she loved Sylvie.
She did admit that business had been booming. She and Meg had a similar sense of fashion and style and complimented each other well, which meant they were starting to be in high demand around Zeke’s Bend. They even had a few regular customers coming in from Rollinsburg, the larger city nearby.
It was critical that Sylvie make a good living because she was a single mom now. Profits meant that she could provide for her boys without too much worry. But it also meant that her second job of being a mom started the moment her first job ended each day.
She wouldn’t change it for all the world, though. Her baby boys, Quentyn and Jadyn, were the lights of her life. She couldn’t believe how much her life had changed when her twins came into it, and as crazy as everything could get at times, all the change was for the better.
“Am I going to see those beautiful bouncing baby boys before I go home today?” Meg asked as she swept some hair trimmings into her dustpan. “We need to set up a playdate for them soon.”
“You know they’re still too young for a playdate,” Sylvie said with a laugh. “Your son looks at them and
can’t figure out why they don’t sit up and play with him.”
“Who said it was a playdate for the kids? I’m talking about a playdate for their mommas,” Meg said with a wink. “We could bake something delicious. I know. You could make me that casserole you won all that money for.”
“Oh God, don’t talk about that contest. Or Take Out Chinese casserole. You know what a hot topic it’s become. Aunt Chelly and Aunt Charmaine are now complaining to everyone who’ll listen that it was their idea.”
