117: A Baker’s Dozen

“I’ve done it, Brian. I am now officially a resident of Corazón, Indiana,” Joanne said as we cuddled on Tuesday night. “And New York and Paris. But I’m registered to vote here and I now have an Indiana driver’s license. Not that I’ll ever use it.”

“Joanne, I’ve always loved you and I am so happy you are back to stay. Part time,” I laughed.

“God! I took the long way around, didn’t I?” she laughed. We touched each other. We knew that, even though we’d slipped and made love once or twice in the past few years, the condition of being lovers was commitment. She wasn’t quite there yet, but we’d become very familiar with each other’s bodies.

She’d changed over the past year. All for the better. It seemed that getting off the television and out of the modeling scene had been what was necessary to truly let her bloom. She’d gained maybe ten pounds since she started working behind cameras instead of in front of them and the extra weight only filled out places that had been too thin. She was more beautiful than ever and she was finally home.

“Do you think ... I could ever be one?” she asked softly as we caressed. “I don’t mean the one. Just one. We all have businesses and jobs and you’ve got families. My world doesn’t seem that different from yours now. I have to travel. The business is in New York and Paris. That’s where my models come to train. But it’s less demanding than actually being a model.”

“Is that what you want, Joanne? Do you want to really be part of the family or do you just want to have your life and some side benefits, too?” I asked.

“The side benefits are good. It scares me to think of becoming part of the family. I think what I need to do right now is work my way down off my little mountain. I want to become the regular girl that I refused to be when I was growing up. It’s going to take some time. Can you be patient with me?” she asked.

“I’ve waited for you for fifteen years. I think we’ll manage.”

Joanne took off for Paris Wednesday morning. I hardly noticed because we were deep in the final negotiations for the merger. The last of Armand’s other media outlets had been sold. Even with the small percentage of the holding company that we owned, we got a pretty healthy sum. We’d all agreed, though, that the bonus money we were receiving was to be put in a trust to provide college educations for the children of the casa. I was worried about Doug’s kids, but my casa already had them in mind.

“Doreen and Rachel have both red and blue belts,” Rose said. “Matthew, C-Rae, and Raven do as well. They are a part of our family and a part of our Casa del Fuego. I move that we adopt Rachel’s other children as well as Douglas Jr. I’m not suggesting any dissolution of Casa del Agua. But each of them would have dual membership.”

“What about Sandy?” I asked. “That would make her the only person in that group with only one casa.”

“Not if we adopt the casa,” Elaine said. “It leaves the entire casa as a distinct unit, but still gives them membership in our household. You have just as intimate a relationship with Sandy as with Doreen and Rachel. I don’t think we should single the individuals out.”

“I ... uh ... had a talk with Sandy,” Jennifer said.

“A talk?” Courtney giggled.

“We did talk,” Jennifer spluttered. “I asked her why she hadn’t been able to conceive with Doug. You guys made a big thing about her trying to get knocked up when you were putting Raven in Rachel. I found out that was all for show. To make you and Rachel more comfortable. She never went off birth control.”

“Why?” Liz asked.

“It seems that our little hippie chick is more conservative than she lets on. When she has a child, she wants to be married to the father. I don’t think she’ll ever give up on Doreen. If Doreen could get her pregnant, that would be a different scenario. But if she finds the right guy who will marry her and make her a mommy, I doubt that Brian, Rachel, or any of the rest of us will ever get between her legs again,” Jen said.

“Wow.” What else could I say.

“So, pending the agreement of Casa del Agua, we now have twelve children to set up the college fund for,” Rose said.

“And one on the way,” Sam said, lifting her hand. “I peed on the stick. It said positive.” I opened my arms to Samantha, but she paused on Rhonda’s lap and gave her a big kiss before she came to hug and kiss me.

“A baker’s dozen,” Rhonda said. “The last bun is in the oven.”

It still took six more weeks before we closed the deal to merge with CEN. In that time, the second miniseries had been released and Rhonda’s crew was deep into taping the third. Melanie had become a popular starlet and Papa Sly was going crazy working on the offers and making sure his little girl was properly respected and safe. I think he started carrying his gun again. In the meantime, Stephanie was adjusting and growing like a normal healthy fifth grader.

Part of what we had to deal with was staffing overlap. We didn’t have to worry about our production staff too much because we handled eighty percent of CEN’s original programming as it was. We could absorb their newsroom staff pretty easily. I wasn’t so sure about their office staff. A few of our people were already housed at CEN and we’d consolidated some of the roles. Barbara was still managing our audience development, but she had three people on her staff, as well. I wanted to move Randy in as our office manager, but CEN had a fairly entrenched administrative group, including accounting, which I wanted to dispose of completely. Fortunately, Louise told me I was crazy and that we should use the internal accounting staff for daily operations and use her group for audits and taxes.

When Louise explained it to me, her pussy was about an inch from my tongue and my cock was buried in Brenda’s backside while Carl plundered the front. Cathy had grabbed my hand and had it held in her pussy, but otherwise was sitting the raucous sex play out. She and Dawn were racing to get their next kids out at the end of June or early July. As soon as I announced my agreement, Louise settled her pussy on my mouth and began pinching Brenda’s nipples. With five people engaged, it seemed like someone was always coming. But as soon as everyone had had a round or two, we all got up and went to the kitchen for ice cream. That’s the way it was at Casa de la Tierra. They wanted to be wild and intense about sex for an hour or so, and then everything was just a normal family that didn’t even touch very much. Sex at Casa del Fuego—even with all of us present—tended to be a lot more relaxed, but we were constantly demonstrative with each other. As soon as she wiped her pussy off, Cathy dressed and went to pick up Lorelei from her friend Dawn.

“Brenda told me that you learn best this way,” Louise said. “I think the merger will go more smoothly now.”

We finally closed the deal and became Hearthstone Celebration Entertainment Network on May twenty-third. We contemplated dropping the ‘C’ entirely. The original names had been Hearthstone Entertainment and Celebrity Entertainment Network. None of us wanted to be known as HEN. But we decided to replace ‘Celebrity’ with ‘Celebration’. We weren’t really about celebrities.

We were all about celebration.

We started when Whitney got home for Memorial Day weekend. She had two weeks off and was celebrating her command anniversary when she returned.

“Anything new and interesting that you’ll be doing on this go-round?” Nicki asked. “Thumping drunk Marines on their heads?” Whitney had the good grace not to thump Nicki on her head, even though the comment earned a scowl.

“Actually, I’ll be traveling more over the next few months,” she said. “Not all of our police problems are criminal acts by soldiers, sailors, and Marines.”

“I know. I’m sorry, Whitney. I sounded like a crazy bitch,” Nicki apologized. “We’re all wearing a little thin around here. Please tell us about what you’re doing.”

“Kidnappers and sex slavery,” Whitney responded. What the fuck? “We’ve had a dozen instances of personnel going missing over the past few months. Not just Marines.”

“Going missing? Like AWOL?” I asked.

“That’s what we thought. But the profile is all wrong. A dozen people out of a million in the military doesn’t create a big wave—until one comes back. In this instance, she was a Marine that I had trained and was serving on a Navy ship in the Persian Gulf. On shore leave she was kidnapped. Having an AWOL Marine out of a couple thousand serving on a ship in a place where we fought a war a few years ago doesn’t go unnoticed. She showed up at the embassy in torn clothes, with blood on her, gave her name, rank, and serial number and collapsed at the gate. That was back in February. She was in the hospital for a few weeks and while there, asked to see me. I flew to Bethesda and visited her. The story she told me was unbelievable. She just wanted to thank me for preparing her in hand-to-hand combat. She’d killed four kidnappers. Ripped them apart with her hands. She’d been drugged, sexually violated, and heard them talking about where they were going to sell her.”

“Shit! That’s terrible. Whitney, I’m so sorry,” Nicki said. She actually came over to where Whitney was sitting and hugged her. “None of us have had to face what you have to face. I’m so glad you trained her.”

“Well, when I got the whole story, I went to my commander and told him. He was ready to go back and kill anyone she left. Instead, we launched an investigation into missing soldiers, sailors, and Marines. She’d been pretty sure she’d seen a male in the same condition she was in. It’s not easy to collect personnel data on missing soldiers across the branches, but every branch had at least one instance that matched the profile that we developed. Even the Coast Guard. Good looking, young soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines out on their first tour. Suddenly gone,” she said.

“And you’re going after them,” I said softly.

“Yeah. Police, you know. We serve and protect. Somebody is preying on our men and women. Two of my former sergeants and I are hand-picking two squads. We’ll be a rapid response team that gets deployed as soon as we hear of another instance. All the divisions are on alert,” she said.

“Whitney, isn’t it a little unusual to have a Captain lead an operation like that?” I asked.

“Usually. I have an Army butterbar as my admin, but I’m picking my team personally. It will be cross-service, the same way we train. MPs from all branches. But I’m a Marine. We lead from the front.”

I was worried about Whitney, of course, but the way she explained it, it was no worse than any other police action. She could be working for the sheriff’s office and be in just as much danger. Which made me concerned for Judy as well. Damn it!

Nonetheless, June progressed. We got ourselves stabilized with our new responsibilities. The first big hire we made was for a director of programming. We were going for someone with good experience and advertised widely. You can’t imagine my amusement when I saw Patty Stills’s resume. I almost gave the now former program director from Lifelong Women’s Network an interview. That’s karma for you. She’s the one who tried to strip Heaven’s Redress show out from under us and then manipulated us into producing shows they would never air while they launched their Dress for Success show. Fashion shows were a dime a dozen now. We were holding our own with Fashion Week because Leonard and Pam were so adorable. And she still filled the bill of gorgeous supermodel with a gay best friend.

Of course, the real excitement in my life had nothing to do with HCEN. Rebecca, bless her heart, would get me through my day’s work by forcing me to concentrate on helping Rose manage our new empire. But by mid-afternoon, she would make little shooing gestures and tell me to ‘go play.’

I felt like the Pied Piper when I left the office. The kids would be waiting outside, having just come from school. They would all fall in around me as we walked over to my new little shop next door to the Heartthrob Café. I still didn’t have a name for my bakery, but it was almost complete. The two gas-fired masonry ovens were built into the wall with a brick facing surrounding them. When you opened the door, it looked like you were cooking in a fireplace. Next to them was a gas convection oven. I figured we’d bake cookies and rolls in the standard oven instead of the masonry oven. We’d learned our lessons, both in the studio and in our kitchen in the big house, about having enough oven space. This beauty was forty inches wide and had an equal depth. I could put four cookie sheets at a time on each of three racks for a standard cookie capacity of twelve dozen. I didn’t anticipate making that many cookies, of course, but I still planned to bake cinnamon rolls most mornings. I could bake a dozen loaves of bread at a time in each of the two masonry ovens. This was all the capacity I expected to need.

“What’s that, Papa?” C-Rae said pointing at the newest piece of equipment to be delivered.

“That, honey, is our new Iris dough mixer. In the bakery, we need to make a couple dozen loaves of bread at a time. We still have to knead the bread before we set the loaves to rise, but this will take care of mixing the dough,” I said. What I was interested in, though, was the new surface for my bread table. There was still a plastic film sealed to the center island countertop, but I could see the blue-veined white marble clearly. At five feet wide and four feet across, I could toss a lot of bread on this baby. “Okay, what we get to do today is wipe down all the surfaces so they are nice and clean. Then we’ll start unpacking the tools of our trade, washing them, and putting them on the shelves and racks where they belong.”

The tools of the trade included cookie trays, knives, spatulas, bowls, rolling pins, measuring cups, hot pads, bread peels, measuring spoons, scales, and everything else you would find in a well-stocked kitchen. We were getting close. So very close.

“Papa, when do we start getting the ingredients?” Matthew asked.

“Good question, son,” I said. “This is important to all good cooks, kids. Where do eggs come from?”

“The grocery store,” C-Rae said. My six-year-old daughters, Xan and C-Rae, were a study in contrasts. Xan was still smaller than James and Céleste, even though she was almost two years older. And she still seldom spoke. I knew for a fact, though, that she practiced her French each day and studied with Joanne when she was home. C-Rae was an out-going chatterbox who was as tall as her eight-year-old brother Matthew. I laughed at the answer.

“Let’s go to see Maribelle,” I said. We left the new bakery and walked past the café to our little community grocery store. C-Rae immediately ran to the cooler and pointed at the eggs.

“See?” she called triumphantly.

“Maribelle,” I said as the kids all gathered around. “Do you lay these eggs right here in the grocery store?”

“Exactly what kind of an old hen do you think I am, Brian?” she asked indignantly.

“Well, I asked the kids where we got eggs and C-Rae said the grocery store. So I thought we’d better investigate.”

“Oh, I see,” Maribelle said, grinning. “Well, raising chickens to sell eggs to the public is more than I’m equipped to deal with. It’s hard enough getting the goats milked every morning before I come to the store. But Mr. Matheny, who lives over on the other side of the quarry, raises chickens that are fed organically and are uncaged. He supplies eggs for the co-op and for our little store. One of the things I’ve insisted on since opening the market here is knowing where our food comes from. These eggs come from Mr. Matheny’s uncaged chickens and I’ve personally examined what they get fed. It’s just like all the fresh vegetables that we are getting into the market. Ross and his little crew plant them right here on the ranch and the fresh vegetables we have in the store come from that garden. He’s hoping that this summer some of you kids will be out there in the garden helping weed and harvest these good vegetables.”

“‘Matoes,” Céleste said. “Aunt Nic’lette wants ‘matoes.”

“She’ll get good ones from our garden, and I’m sure she will be making that yummy Caprese salad when you go visit her,” I said hugging my red-haired daughter. She was looking more like Liz every day.

“Yum.”

“We’re going to need a lot of eggs for cakes and cookies,” I said. “Will we be able to get them here?”