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“Mom did go back to school. She’s a full-time medical tech. She loves that stuff. Hmmm, what else? Oh. Not sure you knew this, either, but Genevieve works for my company. Roberta is kind of undecided about her career, kind of between things. But she’s a whizz with data, so she’s under contract with the company for a year.”
Samantha chewed on all that, and I played with her auburn tresses, unbraided and sexy as hell. Got lost in her freckles. Traced my fingers over and around her breasts through her clothing.
Finally, she asked, “I’ll never know how I got my name. But how’d you and your sisters get yours? They all seem sort of old-fashioned. Mine, too, I guess.”
My parents told us that!
“We’re all named for one of their grandparents, so ourgreat-grandparents. None were alive when we were born. Leighton William was my paternal great-grandfather. And …”
I grinned at the memory.
“What, baby?”
“Dad said great-grandpa was a tinker by trade. That’s a guy who took apart, repaired, or improved, and reassembled appliances and small machines for people in his neighborhood!”
That got her attention! “Ah-Hah! I detect a family trait!”
Samantha
Leighton was better. We both went back to work that next day. Alex and Amy gave me a full report about the success of Alex’s pastry creations; Jerry told me the numbers and they were more than good. They had inched up a little over our best daily sales to date.
I put Alex to work every day from then on to make his delicious new offering. If customers emptied the display case of them every day, why not? I also challenged Alex to come up with two holiday pastries—traditional or otherwise—and told him not to forget to look at ethnic pastries.
“From anywhere in the world?Really?”
He looked like a kid in a candy store with a whole dollar in his pocket, so I laughed at him.
“Sure. We already make croissants and Fatigman. French and Norwegian. We make Italian bread.” I went on to list all the ways we were already international.
“We can add to that.”
He got all excited and got to work again.
I had a trade fair coming up. I’d attended the year before, but now that I had a bakery and had seen how it did and didn’t work for us, I knew I’d be looking at things with new eyes and asking the equipment and store design vendors different questions.
Leighton asked what I wanted to do on our next Official Date. I proposed the IBIE trade fair.
His dark eyes lit up with both interest and confusion. Since he clearly didn’t know this fair I said, “The International Baking Industry Expo.”
“Oh? I never thought of going to that one.”
“Last time they had a thing called Innovation Showcase.” That got him smiling!
“Do you go to lots of trade fairs, baby?”
“Sure, it’s a great boost to creativity and I can get inspired for new projects. But, you know, I’m sure there’s lots of inventive and creative inspiration to be had in the world of commercial baking as well.”
I teased, “You and Alex! He can hardly wait for me to take days off now that I have him inventing new pastry items. You can hardly wait for an idea for a new invention! I’m surrounded on all sides by disgustingly creative men!”
I had noticed that the building on the other side of Leighton’s was under renovation construction. I asked him what he knew about that.
“Everything.”
Huh?! He saw my surprise.
“Well, we’ve never talked—not really—about my work or any of my investments, have we?”
“Can we?” I repeated my zipped-lips move with a question on my face.
