Chapter 21 Imported Muffins
Imported Muffins
MITCHELL
The next morning, as promised, I showed up with breakfast. In a fucking basket.
“Let me guess, Sal arranged this?” Winona asked when she'd mostly finished laughing at me showing up like a Little Red Riding Hood. She peered into the bounty of scones and fruit and cultured butter.
She looked fucking breathtaking today, in leggings and a soft shirt, her hair pinned up halfway.
“I won’t bother pretending she didn’t," I said. "But I did tell her what I thought you’d like.”
“How thoughtful.”
It wasn’t actually Sal who was doing all these errands for me. Since she’d taken over in my absence, she had her own assistant. Several actually. But I definitely didn’t need to get into all that.
As I followed her inside, I looked carefully upward, and not at the sexy dimpled curve of her backside. At least not too much. I was here today because I wanted her to know I didn't only want what we talked about last night. It wasn't all or nothing with Winona. Except that I wanted it all.
We sat down to eat first, at a well-worn kitchen table in a beautiful, cozy kitchen that reminded me a little of the one I grew up in. I could tell this table and its mismatched wooden chairs had seen a thousand happy breakfasts, just like ours had, since that's where we ate when Dad wasn't around.
I asked Winona more about Heartbreaker Trades, which I was genuinely interested in, and she humored me, telling me about where everything was up to at this point. I was impressed at how much legwork she’d already done, and on her own, no less.
“I do know a thing or two about non-profits,” I told her. “I’d be happy to put you in touch with our legal and financial teams.”
Winona’s eyes lit up. “Seriously? Those are the parts that are giving me hives. I just want to get out there and meet the people.”
“I’ll set up a meeting,” I said, taking a bite of a lemon scone.
“Are you sure? They must be busy.”
I shook my head. “They do consults all the time.” That wasn’t true at all. But for her, they’d have an open line whenever and wherever she needed.
Winona looked touched. She tried to say something about the cost, and that she had enough budget for probably a few hours of consultation, but I reached over and wrapped my hand around her wrist, taking a threatening bite of her muffin.
“Say that again, and I’m eating the whole thing.”
“Mitchell!” She laughed, incredulously.
“You think I'm kidding." I took another bite before she jerked it out of my way.
“Hands off my muffin!”
I grinned, chewing and washing the contraband bite down with the coffee she'd made. “Winona, you shouldn't negotiate with me about money.”
I regretted the words the moment I said them—they sounded entitled as hell, and the implication that she couldn’t compete was shitty, even if it was true.
But Winona didn’t take it that way. She just tilted her head. “So if you’ll do this for me, maybe I should milk you for some other things I need, too. Like a new wardrobe.”
She was joking, but I set down my scone and reached into the pocket of my jeans.
“Mitchell, what the hell are you doing?”
I pulled out my black card. “You make an excellent point. Not that I want you changing anything about your clothes.” My eyes drifted down the loose cotton top she was wearing, which was a sexy pale pink color and draped over her curves in a highly distracting way.
I forced my gaze back to her eyes, snapping the card down on the table in front of her.
“But so long as I’m here, you should get whatever you need for the business.
And whatever else you want. I don’t get the statements, and Sal—or whoever—pays this one off directly from my personal accounts. No questions asked.”
“Mitchell.” She said my name emphatically this time. “I’m not taking your card.”
“You’d be foolish not to, Winona. I’m dead serious.”
I took another bite of scone.
“What about you? Don't you need that?”
I raised an eyebrow. "I rarely leave my lair, Winona."
"What about online shopping?"
I gave her a look that made it clear I didn't do my own online shopping. "I have more cards,” I said. I swallowed the last bite of my scone and dusted my hands. “So. Can I still see the house?”
Winona opened her mouth, then shut it again. “I’m leaving the card here,” she said.
“Does anyone else come in here? I’d hate to see them benefit and not you. I’d never know, though.”
Her expression was incredulous.
But I stood up, giving her no more room to argue. It really meant nothing to me to give her one of my cards, and I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. But so long as I was in any way involved with her—hell, even if I wasn’t—she wouldn't want for anything.
I strode over to a wall where a dozen different copper molds hung. I looked over my shoulder. “I’m just going to do the tour myself if you don’t take me,” I said. “I mean, you can always kick me out. But I’m not taking the card.”
Winona shook her head, standing up, still looking at me like I was nuts. But that was nothing new.
She walked over to me and looked up at the molds. “My mother collected these,” she said. “These aren’t hers, of course. But they look just like them.”
Of course. I had so many questions already, and we’d just gotten started.
The love Winona had for her home was evident in the way her hands slid over the wood frames of each doorway, and in the way she smiled when she showed me all the secret places, like the old larder and the entrance to the creepy basement.
Even if there were parts she’d left undone, she still took pride in her home.
Just like she took pride in this town, telling me about all the people who'd helped her when she first moved here, and the origin stories of all the things passed down to her.
She talked about Quince Valley the same way my brother did. Like there was magic here.
We lingered longest in the living room, where dozens of framed photos sat on a bookshelf next to the window.
They were almost exclusively of her brothers.
Handsome, beaming boys from toddlers to teenagers.
“Their names are Ryan and Calvin,” she told me with a beaming smile.
They were close, clearly. But it was strange—only a few of the photos had Winona also in the frame. The parents were conspicuously absent.
I picked up a single photo of a woman—the brunette version of Winona, eyes down-turned as she read a book to a tow-headed preschooler in pigtails.
“Your mom,” I said. It wasn’t a question, because it was obviously her. Even with her face tilted down, the resemblance was uncanny.
“It’s the only photo I have of her.” Winona’s voice was matter-of-fact, and she lingered on it long enough I saw the flash of sorrow in her eyes. They were close. Or had been, before she passed.
Winona smiled softly, her finger tracing the book in the picture. “She gave me my love of reading.”
Her hands went to her wrist, to the tattoo printed there.
“What does it say?” I asked, unable to bite back every bit of curiosity poking at me.
She cleared her throat, looking down. “'Meet me at the library'. It’s from a note she left me once.” She smiled briefly, but it was loaded, like the line meant so much more than a note. Of course it did, or she wouldn’t have memorialized the words.
But Winona tugged her sleeve back down, sharing nothing more.
Maybe the library was a special place for them. Or had been.
I turned back to the photos. I wanted to see more of her.
To know everything about her lineage and who’d made her the person she was.
I honed in on a smaller frame containing a young man on a fishing boat.
He looked no older than twenty or twenty-one.
His smile was guarded. Shy, maybe. But there were those same sapphire eyes.
“My father,” Winona said. “Died in a swell before I came along.”
So the boys had a different father than Winona.
Upstairs, she cracked a door into her brothers’ room. If it wasn’t clear from the photos, it was here: this was a childhood bedroom, with its two twin beds replete with matching checkered bedspreads.
It was her brothers she’d looked after.
I didn’t ask her how that came to be, though I was starting to get some kind of picture. Her reluctance to share made me sure it had something to do with what had made her flee her home.
Suddenly though, it clicked.
I’d made a thousand guesses about Winona’s past, needing to know where to direct my fury.
I’d thought it was a bad boyfriend. But she’d taken on the huge responsibility of becoming a parent at what, sixteen?
Seventeen? She was so young in those early photographs of her and the boys, her expression so haunted, and her mother was nowhere to be seen.
It wasn’t a scorned lover who was the villain in Winona’s story. It had to be the boys’ father—her stepfather. I was certain. And he’d been rich. That’s what she’d said that night in my kitchen, right?
I was also filled with a renewed rage at what she’d been forced to do.
But I made myself calm down. As much as I wanted to demand she tell me his name, to end the night telling Sal to get the jet fueled up so I could go to Newfoundland myself, and what, beat the shit out of an old man?
I needed to let Winona tell her story on her own time.
Maybe she’d never tell me, and I’d have to be okay with that.
She’d just barely let me in. I needed to focus only on that.
I forced myself to pay attention to what was right before me.
Winona, showing me glimpses of her life.
This room, with, I noticed now, two very different sets of posters lining the walls.
One was robots and science-y things; the other close-ups of food and cafes, and a chef with an autograph across the bottom corner.
“I’ll let you guess who’s studying engineering and who’s in culinary school,” Winona said, her voice sardonic but laced with unmistakable pride.