Free The Second Chance Café (Hope Springs, #1) by Alison Kent Page B

favors here, you know.”
    “I know a lost cause when I trip over one.”
    “Then I look forward to meeting her. And I appreciate the recommendation, though I hope I have several applicants to consider. That’s actually why Luna stopped by yesterday. She wanted to know about the position for a friend of hers.”
    “How’d she hear about it?”
    “At a craft show over the weekend.”
    Figured. “No doubt from Dolly, if Jessa told her.”
    “I have a feeling Jessa was dialing before I’d pulled away from the building,” Kaylie said with a grin that had Ten nodding.
    “That sounds about right.”
    “You know,” she said, considering him. “The way word of mouth works here, I could’ve saved the cost of the ad.”
    “Guess you were too young to have known that when you lived here before.”
    “Too young, too involved with school.” She chopped her stick through the grass again. “Too busy making sure not to do anything to cause the Wises to want to send me away.”
    “From what you’ve said, I doubt doing so crossed their minds.”
    “That doesn’t mean it didn’t cross mine.”
    Fair enough. “Maybe you could ask some of the people who knew you back then about your parents.”
    “I don’t think they’d know them. I wasn’t living here when I was taken from my mother.”
    “What about your father?”
    “I don’t have a clue where to start looking for him. I don’t even know his name.”
    “It’s not on your birth certificate?”
    She shook her head. “I’ve thought back, trying to remember what my mother called him, but all I knew him as was Daddy. Even Ernest called him Daddy.”
    “Ernest?”
    “He lived across the hall from us. He was a widower, well into his seventies I’m sure, with a grizzled white beard that always fascinated me, since his skin was so black. Ernest Flynn.”
    “You took your last name from him.”
    Magoo came running up then as if remembering his ball. Kaylie cocked her arm and threw it, this time toward the house, canting her head for Ten to walk back with her. “I knew in high school that as soon as I was old enough I was going to change my name. I thought about asking May and Winton if they’d mind me taking theirs, but decided against it. They’d given me so much already. Then I thought about Ernest. I was five the last time I saw him. While the police and paramedics dealt with my mother, he held me in his lap on the apartment building’s stairs. He was crying as loud as I was when the social worker took me from his arms. I remember that moment as clearly as if it were yesterday.”
    And she laid it all out as if describing a day at the zoo. “Sounds like he was a good friend.”
    “I’ve been lucky. I’ve had some of the best. Part of me says I should leave things alone, let those relationships hold me. Ernest. May and Winton. Saul Golden, the man who gave me my first bakery job. He passed on before I could go back and thank him for the time he’d taken with a curious eighteen-year-old who knew everything about brownies but little else.” She reached for his forearm to stop him. “You like brownies, don’t you?”
    “Love ’em,” he said, doing his best to ignore the warmth of her fingers.
    “Good. The first batch I bake in the new kitchen will be all for you.”
    “That sounds even better than the bonus you put in my contract.”
    “Please. It’s just brownies.”
    But it wasn’t. It was Kaylie’s heart and soul. It wasn’t impersonal money, or a case of scotch whiskey he could buy for himself. It was Kaylie thinking of him, baking for him, putting herself into a gift for him. “Thank you. I’m a big fan of chocolate.”
    “Too bad you never stopped by the Sweet Spot. Chocolate was our specialty.”
    “Chocolate what?”
    “Chocolate everything. Cookies and cakes and pies.”
    “And brownies.”
    “The very same brownies I get to bake here,” she said, her gaze leaving his to return to the house.
    His followed, and he took in the