“No,” Sophie said, shaking her head. “I’m only ’lowed to have Jell-O. And apple juice.”

Celia laughed. “Who told you that?”

“Daddy.”

“Oh, well, daddies don’t know everything,” Sophie winced as Celia’s tinkly laugh filled the room. Mason pushed through the door. “What’s this?” he said, trying to sound stern. “Since when don’t daddies know everything?”

“I was just about to tell Sophie it wouldn’t hurt for her to have a little piece of our wedding cake and some milk,” Celia explained, snaking her arm around Mason’s waist.

“She actually isn’t allowed to have something like that,” Mason said.

“See!” Sophie smirked.

“Sophie…” Mason said, trying to look stern. “That’s not nice. Celia didn’t know the doctor doesn’t want you having much in the way of real food just yet—this soon after surgery.”

“Oh,” Celia said. “Well, of course. In that case, we’ll just freeze some cake for her, and she can have it later, after she comes home from the hospital.”

“I don’t like wedding cake,” Sophie said stubbornly.

Celia cocked her head and considered the little girl. “How do you know? I’ll bet you’ve never even tasted wedding cake.”

“Have too!” Sophie shouted vehemently. “Have too, have too, have too.”

“All right,” Celia said with a note of resignation. “If you say so, that’s fine.”

“She was a flower girl at my cousin’s wedding last summer,” Mason said. He gave Sophie another stern look. “But that is no way to talk to Celia. I’d like you to tell her you’re sorry for being rude.”

“I’m sorry for being rude,” Sophie said. She pulled the sheet up until it completely covered her head. Her voice was muffled. “Now go away.”

Celia shrugged and reached for her pocketbook. She patted Sophie’s sheet-covered knee. “All right, lamb-chop. I’m going now. Feel better fast so we can bring you home!”

Mason shook his head. “I’ll talk to her,” he said in a low voice. “She’s not herself.”

Celia arched one eyebrow. “If you say so.”

“I’ll call you later,” Mason said, kissing her cheek.

“Tell Celia good-bye, Sophie,” Mason said.

“Good-bye, Sophie,” the little girl singsonged.

*   *   *

Mason was sitting in the living room, reviewing a memo about maintenance costs for the Quixie truck fleet when he heard a key turn in the front door.

Celia bumped the door open with her hip. She was carrying a large sack of groceries and had an overnight bag slung over her shoulder.

“Let me get that,” Mason said, jumping up to take the packages from her. He kissed her cheek and glanced at the contents of the sack. “What’s all this?”

“Dinner for two,” Celia said, heading for the kitchen. “You haven’t eaten already, have you?”

“Uh, no,” he said, following her into the kitchen and hoping she wouldn’t find the greasy brown paper takeout bag from the Smokey Pig. “I was waiting to see what you wanted to do.”

He put the groceries down on the kitchen counter. Celia wound her arms around his neck. “I just want to spend a quiet evening all alone with my man tonight. I want to cook him a gorgeous dinner, and drink some gorgeous wine, and later on, maybe show him just what he missed out on last night.”

“You mean like a wedding? Hey, it’s gonna happen. We just have to get Sophie…”

Celia gave him a coy smile. She unzipped the overnight bag and presented, with a flourish, a filmy black scrap of fabric, only slightly larger than a handkerchief. She held it up to her torso.

“I mean like a wedding night. I thought since you didn’t get to see this last night, maybe we’d have a showing tonight.”

Celia kissed him, and he kissed her back, and she pressed herself tightly against him, and his body responded in a predictable way.

“Mmm,” Celia purred. But she pulled away. “Now don’t try to distract me,” she said, wagging a finger at him, as though he’d been a naughty schoolboy. “I have to get this dinner going.”

Mason leaned back against the counter. “Need me to do anything?”

“Not really,” Celia said. “I thought we’d just have a big, juicy pan-seared steak and some baked potatoes and garlic-creamed spinach. I looked up the recipe from that steak house in Charleston that you love. Oh, and a salad.”

Celia removed a head of romaine from a plastic bag and rinsed it under the faucet.

“Mase?”

“Hmm?” He was staring out the kitchen window at a robin hopping around on the grass outside. He’d talked about putting in a garden out there. It was nice and sunny, but Celia didn’t want the lawn disturbed, and, anyway, she’d informed him that tomato cages and pepper plants looked “trashy.”

She hesitated. “I had a call from an old friend last week. I think maybe you might have met him around? Jerry Kelso?”

Maybe if he put the tomato plants in some nice wooden planter boxes or something? That wouldn’t look trashy, right?

“Kelso?” He frowned. “The president of Jax Snax? You know him?”

“Davis introduced us at a marketing thing in Houston a few months ago.”

Jerry Kelso was a name that had been on Mason’s mind for weeks. Ever since Kelso requested a confidential meeting six weeks earlier. He hadn’t said anything to anybody about the meeting, and was hoping that might be the end of the issue. But apparently, it wasn’t going to be.

“Oh, yeah,” Mason said. “Now I remember the name. What’s up with Kelso? He trying to recruit you away from Quixie?”

She laughed the tinkly laugh, and it sent a shiver down his spine, as though someone had walked over Mason’s grave. What was up with that?

“As if I’d leave Quixie. Or you.”

“As if,” Mason agreed.

“Did you know Jax Snax is the second largest packaged chip and cookie baker in the Eastern U.S.?” Celia asked.

“I knew they were big, but not that big,” Mason said, wondering why they were having this discussion.

“They just bought out Cousin Ruth’s Old-Tyme Chips and Pretzels, that company out of Knoxville,” Celia informed him. “You’ve seen their stores; they’re in all the malls.”

“Yeah, maybe I read about that somewhere in one of the trade magazines,” Mason said, trying to sound noncommital. “Didn’t they buy another company at around the same time?”

Pole beans would be good. He could make tepees from bamboo for them to climb on. Pole beans weren’t trashy looking, were they?

“Monster Cookie,” Celia said. “They sell those enormous chocolate chip and peanut butter cookies you see in those jars at the convenience stores.”

“That’s the one,” Mason agreed. “Looks like Jax is on a buying binge, huh?” He was mentally surveying that scraggly patch of lawn outside the kitchen window. Maybe he’d take a ride over to the garden center next weekend; if the weather stayed decent, he could put in a garden by Good Friday, which was when his granddaddy always planted.

Just how well did Celia know Jerry Kelso?

“A huge Dutch grocery conglomerate just bought a big chunk of Jax,” Celia said. “They’re pretty flush with cash right now. Jerry was saying they’d really love to add a soft drink company to their business mix. You know—Pepsi and Frito-Lay are the same company, so it makes sense.”

That got his attention. “You’ve been discussing selling Quixie with Jerry Kelso?”

“No,” Celia said hurriedly. “Of course not. Jerry just mentioned it. So I thought it would be worth mentioning to you. I mean, with Jax’s saturation of the chip market—especially in convenience stores, where we’re trying to grow Quixie, I thought it was an interesting idea. There’s the potential for amazing synchronicity. That’s all.”

“Synchronicity, my ass,” Mason said, his tone sour. “They’d like to gobble us up, spit us out.”

“It’s just something to think about. Don’t get yourself all worked up,” Celia said, wrapping her arms around his waist. “I don’t want us to talk about business tonight. It’s our wedding night, remember? Forget I even mentioned it.”