The Devine Doughnut Shop(89)

“Then there are no buts. However,” she said with a smile, “just how slow do you want to go?”

He returned her smile. “Your foot is on the gas pedal. You tell me. I’ve got a feeling you won’t be one bit bashful.”

“You got that right.” Grace wished that she could take him by the hand and tell him to drive to the motel in Hondo. But their first night together shouldn’t be at the end of a long day when she was worn out. It should be something special. “Right now, let’s go get ice cream. After those kisses, I do need something to cool me down.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said and drew her even closer for another kiss.





Chapter Twenty-Three


This is going to be a long day,” Sarah said as the three of them made their way from the house to the shop that Monday morning.

“Yep,” Macy agreed.

“Are you pouting because our new hunky preacher didn’t come to dinner yesterday?” Grace asked.

“I believe she is,” Sarah teased.

“I. Am. Not. Pouting.” Macy punctuated each word with a stab of her forefinger toward Sarah. “I understand that it is tradition here in Devine for the outgoing preacher to take him to dinner to celebrate his last day and Jimmy’s first day in the parsonage. Let’s go make dough and get our minds off dreams of dark-haired angels and con men.”

“You are dreaming about that little girl?” Grace asked.

“No!” Macy snapped. “Sarah is, though.”

“My biological clock is ticking, and Angela has been surfacing in my dreams. I want a family and a baby,” Sarah admitted.

“What about you, Macy?” Grace teased. “Are you dreaming about little redhaired boys?”

“I’m not talking about my dreams,” Macy said as she unlocked the door and flipped on the lights. “I need to be busy, so let’s get our hands in some dough. And”—she paused as she set up three bowls—“I got to admit, I’m hungry for one of our doughnuts, too.”

Sarah put two cups of warm water into each bowl. “Do y’all feel change in the air?”

Grace added half a cup of sugar and two tablespoons of yeast to each bowl and used a whisk to mix them well. “I do, but then we’ve always been open six days a week, and we’re talking about cutting it down to four. That’s a radical change. I bet Claud and his cronies won’t like the idea at all.”

“Probably not,” Sarah said, “but I’m looking forward to it, and I wouldn’t even mind if we were only open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.”

“What would we do with all that free time?” Macy asked.

“Well”—Grace added flour to the mixture in one of the bowls—“on our days off, for the first six months, I would sit in Mama’s rocking chair out on our porch.”

“And after that?” Sarah asked.

“I might start it to rocking,” Grace said with a soft giggle.

“That sounds like retirement, not starting a new life with Travis Butler,” Macy told her.

“Grace didn’t say why the chair started rocking, Macy.” The joke only kind of dulled the ache in Sarah’s heart for a family and home of her own.

“Right now, we’re just enjoying each other’s company and getting to know each other. We’re barely in a relationship, and we sure haven’t talked about things that far in the future. Besides, I’ve got a whole year before I even intend to open one of those bride magazines that you still have in your bedroom, Macy,” Grace answered. “Now, getting back to the shop. Let’s keep to four days a week until the girls are out of school. We can start next week so our regulars get plenty of notice that we won’t be here Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. Later, we can decide whether to cut back another day. If the girls don’t get jobs at Travis’s company, they might want to be put on the shop’s payroll this summer.”

Macy added the rest of the ingredients to the dough she was mixing up and kneaded it right in the bowl a few times before setting it back and starting a second round. “Sounds like a plan to me. This flour reminds me of the white sand down at the beach.”

Sarah finished kneading her first bowl of dough and set about working on the next one. “The sugar reminded me of the beach, too, but part of me hopes they don’t take those internships in San Antonio. Having big-people jobs with that big of a company brings it all home that they are growing up too fast.”

“Let’s don’t think about that,” Grace said with a long sigh.

“Amen,” Macy agreed. “I’m going to the dining room to put on a pot of coffee. After two weeks of sleeping until I was ready to get up, this three o’clock a.m. business is kicking my butt.”

“I hear you, sister,” Sarah told her.

The display cases were full, and Macy was still working on putting the icing on the last six dozen doughnuts when Sarah flipped the “Closed” sign around to “Open” and unlocked the front doors. Sure enough, Claud, Ira, and Frankie were the first customers, and they quickly claimed their regular table.

“Good mornin’,” Sarah greeted them with a smile. “What can I get y’all?”

“Girl, we missed y’all so much that us three grown men cried every morning that you were gone,” Ira teased, and wiped fake tears from his eyes.