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Realizing the kitchen smelled like heaven, Caden headed toward the stove
top, where steam billowed from under heavy lids. “What are we having?”
“Something your fancy personal chef can’t make,” said Helen with a roll of her eyes.
“Aw, Helen,” Caden teased, coming back to her side, “are you jealous?”
“I am insulted more so,” she said.
“Don’t be.” He kissed her once more on her rosy cheeks. “I only have taste buds for you.”
Helen shook her head and swore under her breath. “Aren’t you too old for all this flirting?”
“Flirting?” Caden mocked. He stepped over to the fridge for a bottled water before settling in the corner of the counters to look at her. “Who says I’m flirting? I will never settle down until you’re ready.”
Helen reached for the wood rolling pin from the sink and shook it at him. “Don’t make me hit you over the head with this.”
“Fine,” Caden laughed. “What’s going on in there?”
Through the French doors, he spied his mom at the table with a woman he’d swear had red hair. He did a double take, but the other woman his mom spoke with disappeared to her side of the table. Maybe he had Maggie on the brain and was seeing things. Or wanted to. She needed to be here.
“Your mom has a big announcement,” she said with a shrug of her wide shoulders. “That’s all I know. She wanted me to fix a big meal.”
“So I smell.”
Helen looked him up and down. “Speaking of smelling, you may want to run up to your room and shower and change before the cameras start rolling.”
Cameras, he thought with mixed feelings. Surely this was going to be the big moment. Was his mother truly ready to retire? Was he ready to take over? He owed Kofi that much. Kofi was his family.
“There’s no need for him to look pretty,” said Chase Archibald, strolling into the kitchen. Dressed in a dark blue suit and a shiny slick yellow tie, he dutifully gave Helen a kiss on the cheek. “After Mama names me her successor at SSGBP, everyone is going to want my picture.”
“Good luck with that,” Jason added, coming in. Jason wore a seersucker suit with a yellow pocket square in his jacket. “I’m going to be named the president, CEO and whatever goes along with it.”
Caden pinched the bridge of his nose to cover up the way his upper lip curled with the idea of either one of them taking charge. “None of you have any business experience,” he pointed out to them.
EJ, the oldest Archibald brother and therefore named after their father, came in through the back door, just as Caden had. Wearing a pair of sweats and a torn-up shirt, EJ preferred his life as a fisherman. Caden knew for a fact the eldest wanted nothing to do with the pageant. But that didn’t stop him from making a comment. “That’s fresh,” teased EJ, “coming from a man who can’t work with women.”
“What?” Caden laughed sarcastically. “I can work with women. I hired Ebony, didn’t I?”
“I have a deboning knife that can cut your throat if you touch her,” EJ warned, miming from ear to ear.
Obviously not wanting anyone else issuing threats in her kitchen, Helen bounced the roller in her hand. “All right now, enough of this. Caden, you go clean up, and the rest of you behave. Your mama’s been under enough stress thinking about this meeting.”
If his mama had waited until Saturday to have this meeting, she might not be so stressed. Helen turned her back on the boys and went back to snapping beans. The Archibald men, all bearing the same square jaw, long Grecian nose and devilishly handsome good looks, as their grandma would say, turned to face one another and silently offered each other a mutual one-finger salute before heading off to their various corners.
Caden hadn’t bothered heading back to his hotel room to change before leaving Southwood, nor did he head to his house. On his conference call on the ride down here, Kofi had informed him their frat brothers and the women were still hanging out at the house. For some strange reason, he didn’t want to go home. The idea of the weekend-long bachelor party now bored him. The closet in the bedroom he grew up in still contained plenty of suits to wear.
Since Kit had already started entertaining, Caden decided to take the back hallway to keep out of sight before becoming presentable. The narrow space was once used as the servants’ hall. The Archibald boys deemed it the save-my-ass hall when they broke curfew and needed to bypass their father waiting in the cigar room by the front door. The bypass however, led into a squeaky wooden staircase, which alerted those nearby on the first floor. So in order to not let his mom know he was here and not dressed, he needed to take the front steps. The problem was running into anyone coming out of his father’s cigar room or even the bathroom—which happened to catch Caden in a pickle right now. His mother’s voice rounded the other side of the wall, and someone closed the door to the guest lavatory. Caden started to take three steps at a time to get out of view, but the top of a familiar red head caught his eye.
“Maggie?”
Now standing by the bottom step, Maggie shrugged her shoulders and smiled. She wore her hair smoothed back in a bun to the side and a flowery yellow dress. Everyone seemed to have gotten the memo about his mother’s favorite color. A single strand of pearls adorned Maggie’s neck, matched by pearls at her ears. She wore a pair of spiky heels the same color as her dress. Her lips were painted a red color that complimented her hair. Caden’s heart raced.
“What are you doing here?”
“There you are,” Kit said, coming around the corner. A woman with similar red hair as Maggie’s but who appeared older than his mother pushed Kit’s wheelchair. “Oh honey, why aren’t you dressed?”
“I was about to,” Caden said, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb, “but something caught my eye.”
