“She’s probably embarrassed about the salt snafu,” Jack said, “not to mention it’s a busy time of year, and she has a Christmas-themed shop. She’ll be occupied with that. My girlfriend Chloe’s café is crazy busy right now with holiday party orders.”
“Morticia said she would come help decorate your estate for your big surprise,” Jonathan told me, “but she wants something in return.”
“What?” I asked apprehensively. “It’s not a kidney, is it?”
Belle smirked. “With the number of baked goods you’ve been eating lately, I don’t think anyone wants your kidneys.”
“She wants you to grow gothic vegetables in your vertical farms,” Jonathan said, cutting off a piece of his fish casserole.
“What the hell is a gothic vegetable?” Oliver asked.
“Like a very dark purple cabbage or a special type of dark purple tomatoes or black corn. She also wants black eggplant.”
“That sounds horrifying,” Owen stated.
“If it helps cheer Merrie up, Morticia can have whatever vegetables she wants.”
I was worriedthat decorating the estate house wouldn’t be enough for Merrie.
Even though she had said it wasn’t my fault and obviously I hadn’t mixed the cake batter, what if she was mad that I hadn’t been as helpful as I should have been? Brody, for example, had actually made the puff pastry tower while all I had done was cut out a few cookies and stir some fruit as it was cooking.
So, she hates to lose. Everyone hates to lose. It’s not like she needed the money.
Well, she did sort of need the money.
After leaving dinner with my siblings, I went over to my office and logged in to the property management portal. Before starting the vertical farming company, I had been investing in traditional farms. One farm I had bought had Merrie’s building included in their property portfolio. I wasn’t interested in property management. I had a few small office buildings that had been included with several agricultural land bundles, especially in small-town areas, but I was trying to off-load them. I didn’t want to deal with small-scale tenants when I could manage a 100,000-acre farm. It wasn’t as if paying off Merrie’s rent wouldn’t affect my business at all. I transferred the money from my personal account to cover the back rent owed and changed the interest to zero percent.
I leaned back in my chair.
There. Now there was no reason for her to be sad about the money.
Matt:I have a surprise for you.
Matt:It’s going to cheer you up.
I frowned at the phone and scrolled through the past messages I had sent her.
I had been texting Merrie since she disappeared from the bake-off, but I had gotten no response from her.
Where was she?
75
Merrie
“Where’s your handsome billionaire boyfriend?” Aunt Bettina asked.
“He couldn’t make it,” I lied. “He had to work.”
The truth was that I didn’t want to face Matt. I hadn’t been able to sleep the night after Olivia had told me that Matt was back together with Hensley. I had obsessively baked and decorated cookies all night and into the next morning until Olivia finally told me to stop because she was afraid the towers of cookies were going to collapse and bury us.
Hell of a way to go, though.
And all through my inner turmoil, Matt had continued to text me like nothing was wrong. I couldn’t figure out what his endgame was in all of this. Was I just supposed to be his side piece? When was he even going to tell me he and Hensley were getting married? Was he going to pretend he was off on a business trip during his honeymoon?
“I made spicy cheese straws,” Aunt Bettina said, leading me into her house. It was decorated for Christmas with the same 1950s decorations I remembered from my childhood. They looked a little more bedraggled over the years, but then didn’t we all?
“I know you’ve had a hard time of it,” Bettina told me. “If you hadn’t mixed up the salt and sugar, I think for sure you would have won the contest.”
