Chapter 2

2

Annika Williams, aka a daughter and sister who's changed a lot, but is still best known for her chocolate chip cookie bricks, which means this bakery idea isn't going to end well

Usually when people say their lives are in the shitter, they don't mean it quite this literally.

Also, my family's life was already in the shitter before this, so I'm not amused at today's turn of events.

To say the least.

"Can you fix it?" I ask Roger Rogers, owner of No Shit Plumbing , who's standing over the toilet in Duh-Nuts Bakery's lone bathroom, staring down at the swirling gray water.

He scratches his balding head, then claps his Copper Valley Fireballs baseball cap back on. His dark beard is streaked with gray, and he keeps shooting a glance at the kitchen like he's hoping to be paid in double chocolate fudge cookies.

Which I won't be baking, because I've turned committing sins against sugar into an art.

"Normally a plugged crapper ain't a big deal," Roger says, "but normally the plunger ain't broke and stuck real good inside the crapper either."

I tamp down on the urge to throw the plunger handle at his head and shout I know, that's why I called you when his lips turn up in an ornery grin.

"Aw, c'mon, Annika. Had to give you shit about it. Heh. Shit. With a broken crapper. That's funny. 'Course I can fix it. Just gotta go grab a new plunger to plunge out the old plunger pieces, since you ripped yours in two when you pulled the handle out and left the plunger stuck in the john."

He grins at joking about plunging out a plunger head that's currently stuck in the toilet and blocking the water from flowing the way it's supposed to after someone attempted to flush raw cinnamon roll dough down the toilet an hour ago.

I don't grin back, because if I can't get this bakery back up and running, I don't know how I'm going to take care of my mom and sister.

I swallow a lump of tears the size of the iceberg that took down the Titanic.

Who am I kidding?

I can put Mama's building back together, but I don't know how I'm going to lure in enough customers to keep her brand-new bakery in business.

Not with my skills.

We'd be better off with me buying all the snack cakes the grocery store has in stock and sticking unicorn horns in all of them to make them "unique" than with letting me take over the baking.

But I can't tell Mama that going ahead with her plans for Duh-Nuts right now is a bad idea.

Not when it's everything she's ever dreamed of.

Not when she's finally managed to get her hands on it.

And not when it's the only thing getting her out of bed and coping right now.

"Hey. Chin up, baby girl. You know we got this." Roger claps me on the shoulder with his meaty hand. "Take me less than five minutes. Go on. Time me."

With a wink, he ambles out of the restroom, and a minute later, I hear the bells jingle on the front door as he exits to get his tools from his truck.

I sag against the bathroom wall, still clutching the plunger handle, and try to convince myself that I can do this. That we can do this.

Funny.

Ten years in the Army didn't seem as daunting as getting through today.

But then, in my ten years in the Army, I knew my mom and sister were okay on their own, I had a job where I could spreadsheet and plan the hell out of everything, which is where my real gifts lie, and I didn't need to train myself to be a master baker overnight in the midst of running Mama to doctor appointments and managing social worker and contractor visits to her house.

"Shitter cleared up yet?" Bailey, my baby sister, asks as she peers around the corner. Her big dark eyes are daring me to call her out on being crude—or on being the culprit who tried to flush my awful, thick, crusty, over-floured cinnamon roll dough down the toilet—but I have bigger problems than a thirteen-year-old pressing her luck with her mouth, especially when I know she was just trying to remove evidence of my crimes against dough so she could whip up her own batch.

Which I should've let her do in the first place.

"No. Did you finish frosting the cupcakes?" The ones that she made, because my cupcakes tend to look more like coal turds that even Santa would reject for the naughty kids, and those are my vanilla cupcakes. Don't ask how my chocolate cupcakes turn out.

"Yep. But…I made fresh frosting, and probably you should leave the cookies to me too."

That's right.

Mama's new shop is called Duh-Nuts and do we have any donuts this morning?

No, we don't.

Because I couldn't make a donut to save my life, and with Mama suddenly blind and unable to fry things, because safety , we're concentrating on the bakery part of her business instead of the donut part these first few days.

"Good thing all our customers today will be pity customers," I mutter with a sigh.

"That seems unlikely," a deep voice answers, startling both of us.

I lean out of the bathroom while Bailey's eyes go round, and I'm instantly eighteen again.

Unprepared, not entirely happy, uncertain what I'm supposed to do with the plunger handle, and very much on edge.

"Holy shit," Bailey whispers.

"Language," I say quietly, because it's either that, or I might start dropping a few creative words I learned in the Army that she doesn't need to know yet.

"Holy shirt on a shirtcake," she corrects. "He's hot for an old guy."

Grady Rock's blue eyes crinkle at the edges when he smiles at Bailey, which is an expression he wasn't aiming at me, for the record.

Also for the record, he's not old .

He's my age, not yet thirty, and he's aged as well as double-oaked whiskey.

"Adults ruin all the fun," he says to her.

"I can say whatever I want at home. Just not here, or Annika will swap out my mascara for her special homemade chocolate frosting. Who are you?"

"He's—" I start, and I realize I have no idea how to finish that sentence.

My former best friend?

The boy I crushed on all through high school, even though I knew better?

The guy who asked me to sacrifice my future and my independence and all my life plans to wait around for him to get back from culinary school since he finally realized, on graduation night, mere hours before I had to catch a bus to Army basic training, that he couldn't live without me?

The man I left behind because while I love my mama and would do anything for her, I didn't want to be her?

"I'm Grady," he says, shifting an unreadable glance away from me and holding a capable, strong, long-fingered hand out to Bailey. He's in a black Shipwreck—We Do It Pirate-Style T-shirt, because of course he is, and those biceps are definitely a new development. "I run the Crow's Nest Bakery over in Shipwreck."

Soda bubbles fill my veins.

I didn't keep up with the Grady Rock gossip after I left home. I didn't join Facebook or Twitter, I didn't sign up to get the Sarcasm News delivered to my inbox, and I didn't come home on leave and stalk him to find out what Shipwreck local he married and how many kids he had.

I needed space and distance to get over him and to start my life fresh and be someone, someone who could take care of herself, away from where I was the daughter of that wild child who got herself pregnant at sixteen .

I needed to get to know who I was when I wasn't in love with Grady Rock, because despite four years of solid friendship, after that night, he didn't call. Or text. Or email.

He completely dropped out of my life just when I needed a friend most.

But I still knew he was running Crow's Nest.

That we're basically competitors in this little slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains, though I'm competing on Mama's behalf right now, and if we can't find a real baker in the next month, he'll put us out of business with one hand tied behind his back.

And Mama's dreams will go up in smoke faster than she suddenly lost her eyesight three weeks ago.

I'm trying to be the bigger person here, to be happy for him and to be professional, one baker to the next—or one stumbling, klutzy mess of a kitchen disaster to one baking god—but my nerves have been raw since Bailey called in a panic in the middle of the night because Mama was in the ER unable to see anything, and nothing about this morning and the broken toilet and the ruined cinnamon rolls and the general panic over figuring out how much of Mama's and Bailey's lives I can fix before I run out of emergency leave and have to report back to Fort Bliss in Texas if my discharge paperwork doesn't go through, is making seeing him again easier.

"You're from Shipwreck?" Bailey asks, her entire posture going suspicious. "Then what are you doing here? Don't you have another village to plunder?"

He slides another unreadable blue-green glance at me.

There's a smear of chocolate frosting in front of his left earlobe, but otherwise, he's calm and cool and put together with his jeans melding to his thighs, two days' worth of scruff on his chin and neck, and his dark hair just long enough to curl at the edges.

"Heard an old friend was back in town," he tells Bailey.

It's clear she gets the implication when she frowns at me. "You have friends in Shipwreck ?"

"You will too, once you start high school," I point out.

"Nope. I will only hang out with people from Sarcasm. It's better here. Sarcastic people score twenty points higher on IQ tests than normal people, and we all know pirates are dumber than normal people."

"What if one of them is good at volleyball?"

Her eyes narrow, because she knows I have her there. "This conversation is over." She turns to Grady with a flip of her hair. "And you need to leave."

"I liked you better when you were two," he tells her, which almost throws her off—I can tell by the slight flare in her eyes—but she's a Williams, through and through.

"Well, bless your heart," she says sweetly. "Annika, I think our crowd's starting. We should go finish those tres leches donuts and get to work on our bubble waffles."

We barely managed to put together the coffee pot this morning, but she gets points for her addiction to Food Network and the bravado that goes with the bluff.

"Be right there," I tell her.

She tilts her head at me in the you are not seriously going to stand here and talk nice to THE COMPETITION FROM SHIPWRECK, are you? glare, and I barely refrain from smiling.

Family, food, volleyball, and loyalty to Sarcasm are Bailey's life.

She's pretty damn awesome.

"I have to wait for Roger to finish the toilet," I remind her.

"Roger knows where the toilet is."

"Bailey."

"If you think I'm going to leave you alone to let some random baker guy from Shipwreck besmirch your honor or throw you off your game, you're crazy."

Seriously.

I love her to pieces, and not in the least because she's willing to pretend I have any game when it comes to running a bakery.

Grady, though, I'm not so sure about.

Everything between us is more or less ancient history. We're practically strangers. I'm not the same woman I was when I left home ten years ago, and I'm sure he's changed too.

He still has his dimples, but his body is honed and his eyes are full of a depth that they didn't have ten years ago.

We've both grown.

But I can't stop the feelings about who we used to be.

And the feelings are too overwhelming on top of all the other chaos that I can't fully color-code in my life planner right now.

"Thanks for stopping by, but the grand opening isn't until this weekend. We'll be sure to send an invitation."

I am not sending an invitation.

Which I think he knows, because I get the full intensity of his searching blue-green gaze, the gaze that used to smile at me over cupcakes in the cafeteria at school, that he'd dial up to coax me to come over to Shipwreck and go roller skating tonight after you get off work, and I'll bring these toasted macadamia-pistachio cookies I've been working on , that would calm me the fuck down when I was freaking over a test or a late assignment or getting my shoe stuck in mud at the lake and not knowing how I was going to tell Mama we had to buy me a new pair, when I knew Bailey was growing faster and needed more things than I did.

It's the same gaze that would silently ask if I was okay after some asshole in the hallway between classes would make a crack about my mama. I was that freshman, the daughter of a teen mom who was now single and pregnant in her early thirties with number two, because doesn't she know yet where those come from and can't she keep her legs shut?

Like it didn't take two. Like it wasn't more offensive that a man who claimed to love her and me had shoved us out of his life as soon as he found out she was pregnant.

Like she hadn't done a kick-ass job of raising me all on her own.

You ask me, she deserved a fucking medal.

But every time someone said something snide, Grady was there, asking if I was okay.

He knew I didn't need to be protected, but he offered it anyway.

Because we were friends.

"You bake now," he says.

"Never underestimate a motivated woman." I try to add a smile, because I don't want to be cranky and affected, but god .

I am affected by having him standing two feet in front of me. Who wouldn't be?

I'm also trying really hard to keep up the bluff that I can bake now, and even though it's been ten years since we've been friends, I still feel like he can see right through me.

"You bake for Sarcasm ," he adds.

The disdain in his voice makes my attempt at a smile die a quick death. "I grew up here," I remind him.

"You opened your own bakery in Sarcasm ."

"And it's so nice of you to be happy for me."

Those bubbles streaming through my blood are popping and sparking something far uglier. I don't bother correcting him, to tell him that it's Mama's bakery.

We stare at each other, because he's clearly not happy for me, and I'm not happy that he's not happy for me.

Aren't friends supposed to be happy for each other when good things happen?

And how about friends asking, hey, how've you been? What brings you home? How long are you here? Oh my god, your mom went blind? What can I do to help?

"You're putting fliers all over my town for your bakery."

"That was me," Bailey says. "Because you can't grow a business without advertising, and it's been a one-bakery county for way too long. I hit all the towns, by the way. Just in case you think I made a special trip to Shipwreck. I actually put them there under protest, because having a pirate town in the mountains is stupid, but now I'm really glad I did it."

" You're not old enough to drive ," he barks.

"So?"

Her total disregard—and lack of any desire to explain herself—should be funny.

But I'm not amused.

I'm pissed as hell that he's treating me like an intruder instead of a friend who came home.

"Excuse me," I say shortly. "As you can see, I have a bakery to run."

I grip Bailey's hand too hard when I grab her and pull her back toward the kitchen, but she still squeezes back.

I got your back, Annika , that squeeze says.

She's thirteen.

She shouldn't have to have my back. I'm supposed to be the adult. I'm supposed to be the one putting everyone's lives back in order. Figuring out how Mama's bakery can get off the ground when it's starting in the midst of a crisis.

Except we're both Maria Williams's daughters.

And I couldn't be more grateful for that than I am right now.

We're going to be okay.

We're all going to be okay.

And Grady Rock can bite me.