Bluegrass Blessings

“Oh, unique is the word. I can tell you I’ve never heard anything like it ever before. How long have you been out here?”

“About a year and a half.”

Rollings practically choked on his coffee. “That short?”

Are you saying I look old enough to have been here a decade? “I have a highly adaptive personality,” she said defensively. “I can be at home in any situation.”

“Or any kitchen.” He reached into his pocket and removed a bottle of red sparkle nail polish, which he placed on her counter. “You left this on my kitchen table. Aunt Sandy had a field day when she found it. She didn’t believe it was yours—she says redheads don’t wear red.”

Nobody told Dinah Hopkins what to do. She raised one leg and pointed to her toes, which were a delightfully sparkly crimson that matched the shade on the bottle. “It depends where.” She snatched back the bottle of polish and tucked it behind the counter.

Cameron finished his coffee and tossed the paper cup into the trash can by the door. “And by the way, yes, I am a churchgoin’ man. Can’t wait for Sunday, as a matter of fact. I gotta see what kind of church can handle you and Aunt Sandy in the same congregation.” With the closest thing to a grin she’d seen out of him yet, he pulled open the door and headed off down the street.

“Well, well, I do declare,” Dinah drawled as she put the Back in a Minute sign on her door and hoisted the tray of dough for a trip to the apartment oven. “What hath the Good Lord brought unto Middleburg?”

Cameron was beyond annoyed.

Served him right for buying a piece of property sight unseen. He, of all people, ought to know better. Then again, who’d have thought to not trust a family member? Aunt Sandy didn’t seem to have a deceptive bone in her body. And in truth, she hadn’t lied. It was good property.

She’d just left out a large chunk of the truth.

“The what?” A man in thick glasses had stared blankly at him when he went to town hall for the legal history of the Route 26 extension. The extension was the short street on which he’d purchased not only the land that would hold his new house, but three other eventual large-lot homes as well. A little bluegrass subdivision. His little corner of the world. A street to call his own.

A street that evidently didn’t go by the perfectly normal name of Route 26. The perfectly legal, perfectly acceptable name of Route 26.

“That stretch out over by the Wentworths’ farm?” the clerk had said. “You mean Lullaby Lane?”

“Pardon me?”

“Lullaby Lane. I can’t remember the last person that ever wanted to know anything about Lullaby Lane.” He looked as if that query called Cameron’s sense of good judgment into question.

Cameron pulled out his paperwork. “All my documents refer to that parcel of land as ‘the Route 26 extension.’”

“Well, it is the Route 26 extension all right, but ain’t nobody here ever called it that. It’s been Lullaby Lane for as long as I’ve been here and I’ve been here a long time. All that property you bought is Lullaby Lane, mister, no matter what your piece of paper says.”

Cameron immediately drove out to the land in question. He stopped his car in front of the rusted old street sign, leaning precariously to the right against a falling-down stone wall. His new empire, his future, was indeed Lullaby Lane.

Lord God, You’re kidding. Lullaby Lane? Aunt Sandy and Uncle George sold me something called Lullaby Lane? I know land is land is land and it’s only a detail, but could You just cut me a break here? It’s salt in the wound, Lord. I used to be the smart guy at the office. Now I feel like the biggest fool in the county.

“She went through with it?” Dinah balked when Cameron returned to the bakery. “Sandy said George had an idea to finally sell Lullaby Lane by getting someone from out of town to invest in it by its legal name—the something-something extension. And it’s you.” She got a look on her face that was half shock, half amusement. “You bought Lullaby Lane. Man, I thought I was having a bad week.”

Cameron stared around the bakery. His bakery, actually. He now owned cupcakes and lullabies. It’d be hard to think of anything farther from real estate empires and high finance. “I bought a parcel of land called the Route 26 extension. The ‘Lullaby’ part was conveniently omitted.”

Dinah hopped up on the counter and swung her legs over to slide off on the other side. “It’s just a silly name. You look like the kind of guy who can handle a challenge like that. Oh, the oven’s dead. Thanks for asking.”

He stared at her. She was just this side of crazy.

“I reckon you’ll be fine.” She had a completely fake, completely unconvincing look on her face.

He glared until she dissolved into a cascade of giggles.

“Okay, okay, everyone knows it by Lullaby Lane. It’s too sissy a name for all those horsemen and so nobody lives there.”

He widened his stance. “Street names get changed all the time.”

She shook her head, one unruly curl spilling out across her forehead. “Not in this town. Middleburg’s as anti-change as it gets. You have no idea what you’re dealing with here.”

“You have no idea who you’re dealing with here.” He pointed to his chest. “I’ll find a way.”

She pulled some napkins out of a box and started stuffing them into a holder on a table. “Well, suit yourself, but that will take some serious leverage, and y’all only been here—what—two days?”

Cameron walked up and planted his hands on the table. “Well, then it’s a good thing I’ll have resourceful help.” He looked her in the eye. “You can’t afford a new oven, can you?”

“Well,” she replied slowly, “I admit it’s a bit of a cash flow challenge, but the money I was saving up to buy my building has surprisingly freed up.” She gave him a pointed look.

So she had designs on owning the building. No wonder she’d bristled when he’d told her who he was. “Have you got enough to replace the oven?”

She stopped stuffing napkins, slowly moving her gaze up to meet his. “Almost.”

He felt the first grin in days creep across his face. “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll loan you the money for the oven if you help me get my name change.”

“It’s just a name. You’re getting all crazy over nothing.”

“A sissy name according to you. As for the crazy, it sounds like I’ll fit right in.”

“I knew you would, honey,” Aunt Sandy’s voice came from behind him. He hadn’t even heard the bakery door open. “I’m so glad to have you out here instead of squeezed into a stuffy suit back there in New York.”

Cameron couldn’t think of a moment when the word “impossible” didn’t describe his Aunt Sandy. The one his mother called “loony Aunt Sandy.” The “black sheep” sister of his mother’s well-groomed Massachusetts family—although looking at the woman, “blond sheep” would have been a better metaphor. “Aunt Sandy, I’m thinking I should haul you in for fraud. And I know enough attorneys that I might just do it. Lullaby Lane?”

Sandy actually managed a look of remorse. “I did not lie. It is the Route 26 extension. That is its legal name. And I knew that my nephew Cameron was just the type of real estate mogul to take on a challenge like Lullaby Lane.”

“A challenge is something you know about in advance and accept. As in willingly take on. This is more like an ambush. Dangerously close to a con job, if you ask me.”

“Well, then,” Aunt Sandy said with an indulgent grin, “I suppose I should thank the Good Lord I’m not askin’.”

She pointed a pink fingernail at Cameron. “You just think about one thing, son. There’s a reason you said yes. Maybe you know it somewhere inside, maybe only God knows it yet, but there’s a reason a detail-focused, suit-wearin’ planning type like you said yes to buying a hunk o’ land sight unseen. You think about that, hon.”

She sauntered out of the bakery as if that were an acceptable explanation. It was annoyingly true that what Sandy had done was legal, but it was not especially ethical in Cameron’s book. And not at all the kind of stuff he’d expect out of a woman who claimed to have as much faith as Aunt Sandy did.

Cameron thought perhaps he should just point his BMW east—toward civilization—and start driving. Somewhere between here and the Atlantic Ocean, somebody needed a commercial real estate broker. God just wasn’t cruel enough to make him stay here.

Chapter Three

Dinah glanced up from her cookie dough while Cameron negotiated—again—with the oven man. At first she was glad to have Cameron offer to take care of dealing with the repair man—dashing between the bakery and her apartment oven all day was keeping her running—but the minute a dollar sign got involved the man couldn’t seem to turn off the big city tycoon persona.

“You can’t give me another fifty for the old one? You could get more than that for the scrap metal alone.”

The repairman, a nice guy from a company that had been more than amiable to her in the past, looked up at Dinah as if to say where’d you find this guy? He pointed to a page on his clipboard. “I got a chart here says what I can give you. This is what I can give you. That’s it.”