Mama’s Boy by Avery Flynn
Chapter Thirty-Two
Dixon
His kitchen was a disaster zone. Plastic wrappers cut haphazardly off tubes of cookie dough had fallen to the floor. There were quarter-size globs of sugar cookie dough dotting the countertop. Metal sheets littered with the inedible remains of his efforts sat on top of the gourmet oven he’d now used for the very first time.
“You better not leave that mess for the housekeeper, or she’ll kill you and I’ll help bury the body,” his mom said on the video call over the din of the cocktail party she was throwing going on behind her. Over her left shoulder were the Swiss Alps, and over her right was the newest Impressionist painting his dad had added to his collection.
“I’m not gonna leave the mess,” he said, sounding way too much like he was still eight and standing in the middle of a Lego disaster for his liking. “What did I do wrong?”
His mom took a sip from her martini. “You didn’t order.”
He flipped the camera so his mom would see him and not the kitchen. “Fiona said it was the cookies from the tube.”
His mom cocked her head. “She bought cookies in London?”
“Not the Underground—a plastic tube stuffed with raw cookie dough.” The directions were printed right on the goddamn wrapper. How in the hell had he messed it up multiple times? “It said just to cut them and bake them.”
“How hard could that be?” she asked.
Yeah. That’s what he’d thought a few hours ago, too.
“Well, that’s the first batch.” He flipped the camera again and pointed the lens at a tray of thick cookies with their middles sunken in. “That’s the second batch.” He moved to show another set of cookies, these thin enough that they looked like burned potato chips. “And this is the one I tried to make from scratch but I only had baking soda so I used that in place of the baking powder, and they taste bitter and awful.”
“There is such a thing as baking soda and baking powder?” his mom asked, as if both were rocks from an alien planet. “How are they different? And why do you have either of them in your kitchen?”
“I have no idea.” There were things in his pantry that a caterer or executive chef must have left. Like his mom, he ordered in; he didn’t make it himself. “What do I do now?”
“What you should have done in the first place. Order.” She shot him a told-you-so look that traveled the thousands of miles between Harbor City and Switzerland. “I know the perfect little bakery that makes the most divine macarons in the Breakwater neighborhood.”
“Don’t suppose you have a jewelry shop, too?” He looked over at Fiona’s necklace in the bowl by the front door holding his car keys.
His mom’s eyes rounded, and she gasped. “Dixon Edward Beckett, have you been holding out on your mother?”
“No, Fiona’s necklace needs to be fixed.” Heat turned the tips of his ears red. Noticing that telltale sign on the tiny version of himself on the screen only made it worse. “The clasp broke.”
“And you’re taking care of it?” His mom lifted an eyebrow. “You, the CEO of a multibillion-dollar cosmetics company, have all the time in the world to bake cookies and fix necklaces, but I’m supposed to believe that there isn’t more to this Fiona woman than a means to winning a bet?”
When she put it that way, it sounded so cold. Sure, he’d said the same, but that was before. Now it was…well, he didn’t know what the hell it was, and he had a better chance of baking the perfect sugar cookies before figuring it out.
“A jeweler, Mom,” he said. “Do you have one?”
“Of course. I’ll text you Anton’s personal line. Tell him I sent you.” She blew him a kiss. “Now let me get back to my guests, but don’t think I’m giving up on this conversation, Dixon. I expect to be told what all this means.”
“Goodbye, Mom.”
He clicked the End Call button and set his phone down next to a large dusting of flour on the island. What did this mess mean? That he was a lousy cook. Period. End of story.
Except that he was sure as hell starting to want more.
