My grandma’s blue eyes brighten, crinkling at the corners. “Ooh! I knew it. That one is useful. Iameating butter.”
I use the diversion to pinch off a sliver of the dough and pop it in my mouth. “Me too.”
She waves a blue-and-white-striped kitchen towel my way, shooing me out of there. “You were never able to wait, Ripley,” she tuts.
“Why should I?”
“It tastes better when it’s, you know, done.”
“I guess I just like to live dangerously,” I say.
“And the gray hairs on my head are proof.”
“You don’t have any gray hairs!”
She shakes her head of platinum-blond hair like a shampoo model. “Only my stylist knows the truth.”
I bring a finger to my lips. “And Kyle never tells.”
“Exactly.” She points to the door. “Now go, you croissant thief.”
I flash her agotchasmile. “Bet you’ll need to say that in French.”
She rolls her eyes. “Au revoir!”
“Bye, Grandma,” I say, shifting to practical mode now. “I need to take Juniper around town, but I’ll be back in a few hours. Also, when you see Ramona, remind her we need more bottles of lotion for?—”
“The Slippery Dipper,” she supplies. “I know. I used to run this place.”
She ran Lavender Bliss Farms for years, before my parents died, and after too. Much longer than she planned to. Now, she takes care of the bees. She loves bees, and bees are cool. Also, they get along great with flowers, so we like to give bees a good home.
“And now you get to make croissants and study French and possibly go to Paris,” I say, hoping she hears the gratitude in my voice for all she’s done.
“Peut-être,” she says. I’ve learned by osmosis that means bothperhapsandmaybe. I preferperhapssince that’s more hopeful. Grandma wants to spend the fall in Paris with her boyfriend, Laurent, a handsome Frenchman she met on a cruise last year.
And dammit, she will. As long as I can keep this place in the black. The film should help that if everything goes as planned. After grabbing a canvas bag, I stuff it with some lavender goodies, then head out to the garage. I hop into my pickup truck—electric, Juniper, imagine that—and drive off to the inn a couple of miles away.
I trot up the steps and dart into the lobby, ready to say hello to Bridget, one of my besties and inn owner extraordinaire, but my plans are thwarted when the businesslike-during-the-day brunette is chatting amiably with a guest. “Of course we’ll make sure you have hot towels in your room every morning,” Bridget tells the man.
I walk behind the guest, furrowing my brow and mouthing, “Hot towels? WTF?” at Bridget, but she keeps smiling, masterful at ignoring my shenanigans.
I beeline to the lobby library, where a woman with bright-blue hair, a porcelain complexion, black glasses, and a camera slung around her neck stands against a tall bookshelf. She’s bent over a phone, swiping across the screen. “Ready for some Kale Yeah?” I ask Juniper.
She smiles. At least, I think it’s a smile. The corner of her lips moves maybe a millimeter. “Yes. Just checking my Helios Pro,” she says, her brow creased with worry.
“Cool,” I say, because I have no clue what that is.
“It’s an app that tracks the sun at different locations,” she adds, like she needs to justify what she’s up to. Maybe she’s under a lot of pressure for this film shoot too. That makes sense.
“Glad you have it then,” I say, and she tells me more about it as we head to my truck. How she needs to make absolutely certain what the light’s like at different places and times, and yup, she’s stressed. Who isn’t these days? I listen to her as she goes on about permits next, since I suspect that’s what she needs—an ear.
We hit the smoothie shop, and she seems a touch calmer once she’s sucking green liquid through a straw. We walk to the community center a block away. After a quick pit stop there, where we meet my friend Chloe’s mom and Juniper asks her about using some of the local community theater actors to play extras in the film since Chloe’s mom’s the director, we head to Josiah’s Hardware.
Once we arrive, I snag a small pot of the Loddon Blue from the bed of the truck and go inside. I spot the affable owner offering aChuru to a fluffy orange cat who saunters across the counter like he’s going to take the cat treat, but then snaps his furry head toward me, eyes bugging out before he flies off the wood, racing who the hell knows where.
Josiah shrugs when he sees me, apologizing for the feline. “Cats.”
“Cats,” I second.
