The back door slid open, and in walked Celeste and Grace. Blaze waited while Tyrone toddled up and entered the house too, nearly toppling as he lifted his foot to go over the lip of the door.
“Careful there, bud,” Uncle Blaze said, and Joey smiled at her cousins.
“Momma’s making the doughnuts right now,” Celeste said.
“Can we have the pink frosting with sprinkles?” Grace asked. They both slid onto a bar stool and watched Faith and Joey roll out the dough and cut it into rounds.
“Up, up,” Tyrone whined, and Uncle Blaze swept him up into his arms.
He babbled something else to which Faith said, “We’re doing pink frosting and chocolate.” She smiled at her son. “You can have the chocolate one, buddy.” He flapped his arms, causing Uncle Blaze to lean away.
“I might not be able to stay long enough to do the bars,” she told Aunt Faith.
“Oh, it’s fine,” Faith said. “The girls and I will finish them up. They want to take them around to their cousins and grandparents.” She smiled at her girls. “And they should have to do some of the work if they’re going to get all that gratitude.”
“What do you have going on?” Uncle Blaze asked, and Joey’s heartbeat froze in her veins. She had not introduced Adam to her momma as her boyfriend, and either her momma wasn’t very observant, or Joey and Adam had hidden the way they’d been kissing and holding hands well enough to not be detected.
She glanced over to Aunt Faith, who lifted another ring’s doughnut out of the dough and set it on a tray to rise.
“I—” Joey said. “Well, truth be told, I have a date.”
“A date?” Uncle Blaze’s eyebrows went up.
“I haven’t told anybody about him yet,” she said, giving her grouchiest uncle a smile. “Not my momma or my daddy—so I’m certainly not going to tell you.”
Rosie would have cocked her skinny hip and demanded to know who Joey was going out with. Harry and Belle had already asked, but Uncle Blaze simply held up one hand and said, “All right, I’m not going to make you tell me if you don’t want to.”
She didn’t want to, but Aunt Faith bumped her with her hip.
“Looks like you like him,” Faith said.
“Does it?” Joey asked. “What makes you say that?”
“You’re wearing a special smile,” Faith teased.
She thought about the kissing her and Adam had done earlier that week, and her face heated.
“Oh, she likes him all right,” Blaze said, his smile growing. “Is this your first date?”
Her uncles were known for asking a lot of nosy and difficult questions, but Uncle Blaze wasn’t usually one of them. Of course, he couldn’t know that this question was actually difficult when it shouldn’t have been.
“I’m not actually sure,” she said, and he chuckled.
“That’s kind of weird, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you know if you’d been out with him before?”
“Well, I guess what you could call our first date was…kind of not really a date. So, yeah, I don’t know.” She also didn’t want to have kissed Adam before they’d even gone out, which made Uncle Blaze’s question far more complicated than he even knew.
Thankfully, Blaze and Faith didn’t ask a bunch more questions, which was why they were one of the safer couples for Joey to tell about her date. Blaze didn’t like his business being splashed all through the family and around town, which meant he would never do that to her.
Joey made a traditional glaze and a pink frosting and a chocolate frosting, while Faith manned the fryers. There was nothing in the world as good as a freshly fried doughnut, hot from the oil and dunked in traditional glaze, and Joey bit into the sweet and crispy treat, a moan coming out of her mouth.
“You can take some for your date,” Faith said. “If you want.”
They’d let some of the other doughnuts cool, so that the frosting wouldn’t melt, and Uncle Blaze currently strapped Tyrone into his high chair while the girls put the plates of sausage and utensils on their table.
Joey looked at the pink and chocolate doughnuts, her heart expanding a couple of sizes. “I’d love that.”
Aunt Faith handed her a paper plate, and Joey took a chocolate, a pink-frosted and sprinkled, and a regularly glazed doughnut and put them on the plate for Adam. She sat down and ate a couple of sausage links, and then said, “I don’t want to eat too much because we’re going to brunch.”
