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A swell of sound changed in the moan as everyone watched, and then the bag landed on top of Adam’s, clinging to the last few inches, half of it perched over the hole.
Neither bag fell in, and a gasping-roar filled the air. He looked over to Maddy, and she shrugged one shoulder and turned to Adam to shake his hand. He grinned at her and shook his head, then pumped her hand hard.
They came down the lane, and Kyle started toward them with Jesse. “Good job blocking that, Adam,” he said, shaking his brother’s hand.
“She’s incredible,” Adam said, glancing at Maddy as he said it. He held Kyle’s hand and leaned in. Maddy and Jesse did too. “Holly and Sierra are going to besomad.” He laughed then, and Kyle sure was glad to see him so happy.
Kyle chuckled too, and Maddy only smiled. Jesse looked pretty mad himself, but he shook Maddy’s hand, and they went to clean up their game.
“All right,” Blake yelled. “That’s the first round. Report your scores to Mama, or they don’t count.” He turned and yelled it down the lanes too, as several people had gone to finish their games.
Sierra and Holly weren’t two of those people, and Kyle reached up and tipped his hat to them right before sweeping Maddy into his arms. She squealed and giggled, and his cowboy boots crunched in the gravel as he swung her around.
“Incredible,” he said. He set her on her feet and kissed her quickly. “That was incredible.”
“I almost got that last one,” she said, grinning at him. “Now, I want you to come try this cake I made.”
“It’s barely ten a.m.” He secured her against his side. “You baked this morning?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Your momma sent me a text and asked me to bring a cake to the family picnic in a couple of weeks. I can’t just show up with anything.”
Kyle laughed. “Yes, you could,” he said. She gave him a sour look, and Kyle went with her to the steps leading down off the cornhole rise. “But hey, twist my arm some more to eat cake before lunch.” They laughed together, and he got in the passenger seat of her car so she could drive them back to her place.
Over the next couple of weeks, he tried at least four cakes per week. A vanilla one with lemon curd between the layers and buttercream frosting. A German chocolate one with too much coconut in the icing. Black forest—not his favorite. A simple Texas sheet cake Maddy had indeed deemed “too simple.”
He told her at every tasting that she didn’t have to impress anyone. Mama likely wouldn’t be impressed no matter what, as she’d been cooking and baking for decades, and she thought everything she made was top-notch.
Before she’d run the finances on the ranch, she’d been the kitchen manager, and some of the recipes they still served for breakfast and dinner had been hers. Or her grandmothers—or Daddy’s momma’s. The fact that the Texas Longhorn Ranch served family recipes endeared their customers to them, and Kyle wasn’t complaining about it either.
He’d heard little from Jolene or the record label since signing, but he wasn’t surprised or worried. They’d told him to keep working on his songs, and that was what he’d been doing. In any pocket of time he could find, he’d written two more songs, and he’d started perfecting one of them. Memorizing lyrics was one of the harder things he had to do, right after coming up with the exact right words to sing in the first place.
His songs went through several iterations, and he hoped to have a decent song to show the label by the end of July.
“It’s tomorrow,” Maddy said as Kyle bellied up to her island bar. “I need to make a choice.” Three cakes sat in front of him, and Kyle recognized all of them. “I can make these three pretty easily now.” Maddy surveyed the white cake with peaked frosting and toasted almonds and shredded coconut stuck in it. The cake inside would likewise be white, and it had a strawberry jam filling and an almond pudding filling.
He did like that cake, and it was unlike anything Mama would make. He’d told her last week when she’d first presented it to him that it was the one. She’d kept baking anyway.
The cake in the middle had stiff chocolate frosting, with only patterns from the spatula for decoration. A fudgy, thick, chocolate cake sat beneath that, with a lighter vanilla crème between the layers.
The last cake was actually a honey cake, with very little frosting scraped around the three tiers of circles. It was bright and yellow and colorful, and it always made Kyle smile. He didn’t love honey the way Sierra did, and he found the cake either a bit sticky or a bit dry, he never could tell which. The lack of icing was also a strike, in his opinion.
“This one,” he said, pointing to the white cake with his fork. He made to drive the tines right into the edge to get a frosting-laden bite.
“Hey,” Maddy barked. “You can’t just go in, forks blazing.”
He looked up at her, and she held a triangular cake serving spatula in her hand. “Well, cut it already,” he teased.
She rolled her eyes and did just that, serving him an overly large piece of the almond strawberry cake. His mouth watered, and he took a big bite from his plate. A groan started in the back of his throat, and his eyes rolled back in his head. “Yes, this is the one.”
“Let’s see what your brothers think.”
Before he could ask her what that meant, she’d vacated the other side of the island and was walking toward her front door. Several seconds later, Todd, Blake, Jesse, and Nash entered her cabin. They chattered with her and each other, and Kyle honestly felt a bit left out.
“You invited them?” He didn’t like that his opinion wasn’t the most important one.
“Everyone has different taste buds,” she said. “This is yourmother.”
Mama was as sweet as huckleberry pie—unless she didn’t want to be. She’d been nothing but kind to the new women in the family, because she wanted her sons to get married and start having babies.
