The Devine Doughnut Shop, page 1
PRAISE FOR CAROLYN BROWN
Hummingbird Lane
“Brown’s (The Daydream Cabin) gentle story of a woman finding strength within a tight-knit community has just a touch of romance at the end. Recommended for readers who enjoy heartwarming stories about women overcoming obstacles.”
—Library Journal
Miss Janie’s Girls
“[A] heartfelt tale of familial love and self-acceptance.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Heartfelt moments and family drama collide in this saga about sisters.”
—Woman’s World
The Banty House
“Brown throws together a colorful cast of characters to excellent effect and maximum charm in this small-town contemporary romance . . . This first-rate romance will delight readers young and old.”
—Publishers Weekly
The Family Journal
HOLT MEDALLION FINALIST
“Reading a Carolyn Brown book is like coming home again.”
—Harlequin Junkie (top pick)
The Empty Nesters
“A delightful journey of hope and healing.”
—Woman’s World
“The story is full of emotion . . . and the joy of friendship and family. Carolyn Brown is known for her strong, loving characters, and this book is full of them.”
—Harlequin Junkie
“Carolyn Brown takes us back to small-town Texas with a story about women, friendships, love, loss, and hope for the future.”
—Storeybook Reviews
“Ms. Brown has fast become one of my favorite authors!”
—Romance Junkies
The Perfect Dress
“Fans of Brown will swoon for this sweet contemporary, which skillfully pairs a shy small-town bridal shop owner and a softhearted car dealership owner . . . The expected but welcomed happily ever after for all involved will make readers of all ages sigh with satisfaction.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Carolyn Brown writes the best comfort-for-the-soul, heartwarming stories, and she never disappoints . . . You won’t go wrong with The Perfect Dress!”
—Harlequin Junkie
The Magnolia Inn
“The author does a first-rate job of depicting the devastating stages of grief, provides a simple but appealing plot with a sympathetic hero and heroine and a cast of lovable supporting characters, and wraps it all up with a happily ever after to cheer for.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The Magnolia Inn by Carolyn Brown is a feel-good story about friendship, fighting your demons, and finding love, and maybe just a little bit of magic.”
—Harlequin Junkie
“Chock-full of Carolyn Brown’s signature country charm, The Magnolia Inn is a sweet and heartwarming story of two people trying to make the most of their lives, even when they have no idea what exactly is at stake.”
—Fresh Fiction
Small Town Rumors
“Carolyn Brown is a master at writing warm, complex characters who find their way into your heart.”
—Harlequin Junkie
The Sometimes Sisters
“Carolyn Brown continues her streak of winning, heartfelt novels with The Sometimes Sisters, a story of estranged sisters and frustrated romance.”
—All About Romance
“This is an amazing feel-good story that will make you wish you were a part of this amazing family.”
—Harlequin Junkie (top pick)
ALSO BY CAROLYN BROWN
CONTEMPORARY ROMANCES
The Sandcastle Hurricane
Riverbend Reunion
The Bluebonnet Battle
The Sunshine Club
The Hope Chest
Hummingbird Lane
The Daydream Cabin
Miss Janie’s Girls
The Banty House
The Family Journal
The Empty Nesters
The Perfect Dress
The Magnolia Inn
Small Town Rumors
The Sometimes Sisters
The Strawberry Hearts Diner
The Lilac Bouquet
The Barefoot Summer
The Lullaby Sky
The Wedding Pearls
The Yellow Rose Beauty Shop
The Ladies’ Room
Hidden Secrets
Long, Hot Texas Summer
Daisies in the Canyon
Trouble in Paradise
CONTEMPORARY SERIES
The Broken Roads Series
To Trust
To Commit
To Believe
To Dream
To Hope
Three Magic Words Trilogy
A Forever Thing
In Shining Whatever
Life After Wife
HISTORICAL ROMANCE
The Black Swan Trilogy
Pushin’ Up Daisies
From Thin Air
Come High Water
The Drifters & Dreamers Trilogy
Morning Glory
Sweet Tilly
Evening Star
The Love’s Valley Series
Choices
Absolution
Chances
Redemption
Promises
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2023 by Carolyn Brown
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake, Seattle
www.apub.com
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781542038492 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 9781542038485 (digital)
Cover design by Leah Jacobs-Gordon
Cover images: © ronstik, © New Africa, © NG-Spacetime, © Al.geba, © MaraZe, © EPS, © LumenSt, © schankz, © LilaloveDesign, © Bokeh Blur Background / Shutterstock
To my family, all forty-five of you—kids, grandkids, and great-grands—for your love and support
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Epilogue
Dear readers ...
About the Author
Chapter One
Where’s the nearest convent or boot camp?” Grace Dalton stormed into the kitchen of the Devine Doughnut Shop that Friday morning. “This daughter of mine needs to spend some time in whichever one that will take her.”
“What has Audrey done now?” Grace’s younger sister, Sarah, asked.
“She sent me a text last night after I’d gone to bed and said that she had been suspended for today,” Grace answered as she slipped a bibbed apron over her head and tied the strings in the back. She tucked her hair up into a net and moved over to the sink to wash her hands.
Their cousin Macy, who was a partner at the doughnut shop, set the bowls up on the counter to get the dough made and rising. “Good Lord! What did she do?”
Grace flipped the hot doughnuts into a bowl of powdered sugar glaze, turned them over, and set them out on a different rack to cool. “She got caught with a pack of cigarettes and one of those little sample bottles of whiskey at school. When she goes back after spring break, she gets to spend two days in the in-school suspension building. I’m paying for your raising, Sarah June, not mine. I was the good child.”
“Thank you for that. But, honey, you were every bit as bad as me. You just hid it better.” Sarah turned around, saw what her sister was doing, and pushed a strand of platinum hair up under a net. “I appreciate you glazing those doughnuts, but you’ve got severe memory-loss problems if you think you were the good child.”
“None of us can brag about shiny halos and big white fluffy wings,” Macy said.
“Amen to that,” Grace said, “and I have to remember that Audrey’s father was one of those bad-boy types that mamas warn their girls about. She’s got his genes as well as mine, but she wasn’t this rebellious until she started running with those two girls, Crystal and Kelsey. She was so much easier to live with when she hung out with Raelene Andrews and that group of kids.”
“I’m glad that Neal and I have decided to have all boys when we start our family,” Macy said as she punched down a bowl full of dough, flipped it out on a floured board, and began to knead it. “This is the last of what we’re making this morning. If we hadn’t sold out early to those fishermen, we wouldn’t have had to make more.”
“Good luck with only having boys.” Grace grimaced. “You mig
Macy gasped. “No!”
“Could happen,” Sarah said.
Grace nodded. She and Sarah both had a thing for the bad-boy type. She’d gotten over hers when Justin deserted her, but Sarah still walked on the wild side. An unlikely bunch of roommates, the three women and Grace’s daughter all lived in the same house, not far from the back door of the shop. Grace felt that she was in the middle of the scale and Sarah was on the far-left end. Tomorrow night, since it was Saturday and the shop was closed on Sunday, her little sister would be off to a local bar to drink, dance, and maybe even go home with a two-steppin’ cowboy.
On the opposite end of the scale—the far right—Macy was a Sunday school teacher and engaged to be married in June. Dozens of her bridal magazines cluttered up the old yellow chrome table in the back of the Devine Doughnut Shop—the Double D, as the folks in town had called it for years.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Macy rolled out the dough and cut out the doughnuts.
“It means,” Sarah piped up, “that you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of having boys, but you could have all girls. Look at our family. We haven’t had a boy in it since before Texas became a state. There’s us three, and before that there was our Mama, Liz, and Aunt Molly; Granny and her sister, Gloria; and Great-Granny, who started this shop, and her sister, Edith. We are a family of sisters.”
Grace thought of their great-grandmother, who had inherited a chunk of money from a land sale when her father died. She’d used the funds to buy the acreage, build a small house, and start a pastry business. She was already famous all over town for her pastries by the time her husband was off to fight in the war. Now the fourth generation was reaping the financial benefits of that small endeavor.
“And a couple of girl cousins thrown into the mix back along the way.” Grace nodded toward Macy. “Four generations of us have lived in the house and run this business, and now I have a daughter who hasn’t got enough ambition to pick up her dirty socks. She’s more interested in being as popular as her two new friends are than thinking about running a business in the future. We may be the last group to keep this business alive.”
Grace was glad that she’d lived on her salary from the bakery all these years and put her profit-sharing check at the end of the year into savings and investments. Not that she was patting herself on the back for being frugal. Her sister and cousin had done the same thing. The one thing she missed was having the time to spend a small portion of that money on vacations, but the shop had been open six days a week since it began, and none of them could bear to break the routine.
Audrey pushed the back door open, slouched down in a chair, and opened a bridal magazine. Her blonde hair hung down to her shoulders and looked like a brush hadn’t seen it in a week. She tucked a strand with a blue streak behind her ear when it fell down over her right eye. Her jeans had holes all up and down the legs, and her T-shirt looked like something a stray dog would have tried to bury in the backyard.
Grace shook her head. “Oh, no, little girl. You don’t get to sit around and do nothing. See that bucket over there? Your first job is to go clean the windows, and after we close up, you get to mop the floors. You will work all during your spring break for what you’ve done.”
“Good grief, Mama,” her daughter whined. “I could break a nail, or someone might see me cleaning windows or mopping.”
“Honey, that’s the least of your worries. Starting tonight, we aren’t going to clean the dining area after work. You will be getting up and coming to work with us at three o’clock in the morning. From then until five, you will mop the floors, clean all the glass, wash dishes, and do whatever else needs to be done until we close the doors.”
“No!” Audrey crossed her arms over her chest. “Getting up at that ungodly hour is child abuse!”
“Maybe so, but that’s what you’ll be doing,” Grace told her.
“I hate you,” Audrey whispered.
The air in the shop seemed too heavy to breathe. Then Grace got a second wind and smiled at her daughter. “Well, darlin’, I love you every second of every day, but today I don’t like you so much. I wouldn’t call it hate. It’s more like mild aggravation at your choices this past year. With every choice comes a consequence. Your choice to hide cigarettes and booze for your friends means getting up at three o’clock every morning and working right here in the shop with me all through your spring break.”
Audrey drew in a long breath and let it out in a huff. “I might as well be in prison.”
“Shh . . .” Grace shushed her and held out her hand. “I wasn’t finished. Your phone, please.”
“What? Why?” Audrey sat up a little straighter. “You can’t go through my phone. That’s an invasion of my privacy.”
“I pay the bill on it, so legally, it is my phone, and since you hate me . . .” Grace shrugged. “I won’t pay an expensive phone bill for anyone who hates me, so give me your phone.”
“No!” Audrey raised her voice.
“All right,” Grace said. “Have it your way.” She pulled her own cell phone from her pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and went back to work. “Get busy, girl. There were a bunch of little kids and fishermen with grimy hands in here just before closing yesterday, and the display cases and windows need shined up.”
“I hate to do windows,” Audrey complained.
“We do, too, and we’re really glad you’re in trouble and have to help us,” Grace told her.
Audrey stood up and pulled her phone from the hip pocket of her jeans. She hit the screen several times but nothing happened. Then she whipped around to glare at her mother. “What did you do?”
“Remember when I gave you that phone for your thirteenth birthday?” Grace asked in a calm tone, even though she was anything but that inside. “I had two apps put on it: One that tells me where you are, always. The other is so I can turn the phone off whenever I want. I’ll turn it back on at the end of spring break if I feel you have learned to show some respect.”
“That’s not fair,” Audrey sputtered. “I can’t believe you are interfering with my privacy.”
Grace held out a hairnet. “Fair is in the eye of the beholder—or in this case, the one that pays the phone bill. Put this on and get busy.”
Audrey continued to glare at Grace as she pulled her tangled hair up into a ponytail and took a few slow steps toward the utility room.
“Just a minute, kiddo.” Grace shook the hairnet at her. “You forgot your hairnet. If an inspector comes in, we could lose our license, so put it on.”
Audrey gasped. “What if one of my friends comes in?”
“Then they’ll see you wearing a net and shining windows,” Grace answered.
Audrey put the thing on but left the blue strand of hair hanging out the side. She turned her back on her mother and opened the small utility room.
Grace tapped Audrey on the shoulder and didn’t even flinch when the girl turned around and gave her another dirty look. “All of your hair goes under the net—and if it falls out while you are working, I’ll either confiscate your tablet and computer when we go home or you can cut that blue streak off at your scalp. Your choice. And, darlin’, I love you. This hurts me as much as it does you.”
“I hate this place, and I’ll sell it when I inherit it,” she spat. “And when I’m out of this godforsaken town, I’m going to get a belly ring and a tattoo. I don’t know why I can’t have one now. Crystal has a butterfly on her shoulder and Kelsey has a rose, and they both have belly button piercings. The only thing we have alike is our blue streaks.”
“When I don’t pay your bills anymore, you can do whatever you want. And, darlin’, who says you’ll inherit it?” Grace asked. “Macy is getting married in three months. Her children may be the ones that we name when we make up our will. The blue stuff in the spray bottle is for cleaning the glass, and use paper towels to wipe it off. Don’t leave streaks.”
Audrey mumbled under her breath as she headed inside the utility room, grabbed the cleanser and paper towels, and headed for the dining room in a huff.
“That was some badass tough love,” Sarah whispered and then turned to Macy. “Are you sure you want to have kids after seeing this?”
“I told you, Neal and I are having boys,” Macy answered with a smile.
“And if God has a sense of humor and gives you girls?” Sarah asked.
“I’m sending them all to Grace to raise.” Macy’s blue eyes twinkled. “She makes a good drill sergeant.”
