Chapter 11

11

Grady

I'm just drunk enough that I can't taste the alcohol anymore.

Not that I could taste it in the first beer either, because this is the light shit that Cooper keeps stocked at his place on Thorny Rock Mountain, since he tries to eat right during baseball season.

He's on a rare day off between two home series, so I'm crashing a small party he's having. Copper Valley is just an hour southeast of Shipwreck, which is awesome because we get to see him more often than when he was playing for Colorado when he first got called up to the Majors, but sucks because the Fireballs lose a lot, which isn't Cooper's fault.

He's a beast of a player on a team whose management doesn't seem to give a shit.

And I'm a jackass of a fuck-up whose temper doesn't give a shit about my heart either.

It's been three days since I kissed Annika.

Again.

And it ended exactly like it did ten years ago too.

Now, hanging here with my little brother, two of his teammates who brought women along, plus Ellie and Beck Ryder—yeah, the underwear modeling billionaire from Copper Valley who also has a house right around the corner, and his sister—and their lovey-dovey significant others isn't putting me in any better of a mood.

They're all eating chocolate chip walnut bars that I threw together when I got here, and I can't turn the vibration setting up loud enough on this damn massage chair that I'm sitting in to drown out the secret smiles and intimate touches going on across the high-ceilinged room while everyone else talks strategy for how to turn the Fireballs around.

And there's not enough light beer in the house to get me drunk enough to forget they're all here, being lovey-dovey and disgusting.

"You know what they really need?" Beck says, jerking his head at me. "Banana pudding donuts at the stadium."

"But maybe the kind made with love," his girlfriend, Sarah, says. She has dark hair and brown eyes, just like Annika, except nothing like Annika at the same time, and I don't appreciate the worried look she shoots my way nor the implication that I don't bake with love.

"He bakes with love," Cooper assures her. "His neck's out of whack. Just needs a trip to the ol' chiropractor and he'll be fine."

"Don't think it's his neck that's the problem," Tillie Jean mutters as she breezes through the door.

Cooper grins. "Yeah, but if he wants a dick massage, he's not getting it at my house, so I'm blaming his neck."

"You are so gross."

"Just saying what we were all thinking."

"What you were thinking." She lifts two white bakery bags stamped with the Crusty Nut's logo. "Somebody order banana pudding?"

Ellie Ryder and her military fiancé both dive across the room for her.

Military.

Of course he's military. Like Annika. Likes to growl at me and remind me that Ellie's off-limits.

Which is kinda duh , because while she's not a Shipwreck native, she spends enough time chilling at Beck's weekend house down the road that she's an honorary Shipwrecker, and she's like another sister, always fussing over my love life.

The only time I ever looked at Ellie like she was a woman was the time she asked me to pretend to be her boyfriend at a wedding, and that lasted all of three seconds—during which I was a picture-perfect, gentlemanly, happy fake boyfriend, I might add—before the knucklehead she's engaged to now intervened.

With her bags delivered, Tillie Jean plops down in the second of Cooper's four expensive-ass massage chairs in the airy living room. SportsCenter is muted on the massive TV that takes up half the side wall, and I make a show of watching it so she doesn't start talking to me.

Doesn't work.

"You apologize to Annika yet?"

"For me being right?" I was so wrong it made my balls hurt for two days longer than just getting racked in the 'nads should've hurt. "And then for her advertising the shit out of offering my s'mores cupcakes as a daily special for the grand re-opening of Duh-Nuts this weekend?"

"Who's Annika?" Ellie asks around a mouthful of banana pudding that her fiancé feeds her.

"A Sarcasm asshole trying to steal my business." I'm the asshole.

I'm such an asshole.

She was right. I should've been more understanding of why she's back instead of just pissed that she came back and didn't stop by to say hi. Or stalk me on Facebook and say hi. Or came all the way to Shipwreck to drop off fliers for her bakery without saying hi.

I think that last one might finally be a legitimate beef, except I also think Bailey probably got a ride to Shipwreck and Annika had nothing to do with it, because Bailey—she's like Tillie Jean.

The baby.

The plotter.

The sneak.

"Annika's Grady's best friend from high school that he had a huge crush on for four years," Tillie Jean supplies as the rest of the room turns to pay attention. "But Grady's an idiot."

"Hey, you can't blame a guy for being a guy," Beck says. "We're all pretty much idiots."

"You are not ," Sarah says with a smile as she leans in to kiss his cheek.

Blech.

Also, fuck , I want to kiss Annika again.

For real.

Slow.

Gentle.

But only at first. Until she's panting so bad that she's trying to suck my soul out through my mouth and so hot for my cock that there's a waterfall coming from her pussy.

Christ.

Maybe I just need to get laid.

I glance around the room at the women, who are all happily dating—or just screwing, since I'm not sure how serious Cooper's teammates are about their dates today—then scowl at Cooper, because I know he knows a metric fuck-ton of single women, but the only single woman in the room at the moment is our sister.

Some party .

"You could apologize," he says, but his smirk says he knows I won't.

"You know what their Facebook page says today? It says tomorrow's donuts will be a special, exclusive flavor developed in honor of Maria Williams's lifelong dream of opening a bakery. They're playing the sympathy card so hard, I can't believe nobody's calling them on it."

Tillie Jean slugs me in the arm, and I haven't had enough alcohol for it to not hurt.

Especially since she grew up always trailing behind me and Cooper and had to get really good at defending herself, since we never listened when Ma would yell to remember your sister is smaller than you . I think she lifts goats in her spare time just to keep her guns in top-notch condition.

Also, I deserved that punch in the arm, and I wish she'd hit me harder.

"Now who's being the asshole?" Tillie Jean snaps. "You know you're not going to feel better until you apologize, so just go do it already."

Here's my problem with apologizing: I don't actually have an excuse for why I've been such an asshole.

If my freezer had gone out and I'd tripped and threw an entire batch of donuts all over the floor and my roof got a leak and Sue ate all my butter and got the butter shits on my living room carpet and someone crashed a car through the front of Crow's Nest and I had to shut down for three weeks for repairs and I caught Pop and Nana doing it doggy-style on my prep table, at least I'd have seventy-five percent of an excuse for being in a bad mood.

But instead, all I have is this deep-seated anger and frustration that Annika's back. She's the woman I've loved since I was fourteen, when she walked into biology in army boots and I asked her if she was trying to make a fashion statement, and instead of giving me a smart-ass army boot answer, she just smiled and said, they make me happy .

That Annika is back.

Except she isn't, because she has more stress in her life every single day than I've ever had to face in an entire year.

I was her best friend.

I'm supposed to know how to make her happy, and instead, I keep fucking up and making it worse.

Everything should be fresh and happy and I should be grabbing my second chance by the balls, yet nothing is the way it's supposed to be, because I don't know how to be her friend again.

I don't know how to let go of her rejecting me ten years ago.

That's my excuse for being an asshole.

And now I'm pissed that my excuse for being an asshole is really shitty.

"I don't know what you're thinking, but you might want to eat some prunes or talk to a priest about an exorcism," Tillie Jean offers. "Or possibly both. Do possessed people get blocked up? They have to, right? What demon worth his salt would possess a man and not also make him constipated?

"TJ. Go easy on the man," Cooper orders. "He's doing ten years of mourning in three days. It's rough on a guy."

"I'm not mourning , asshole." And it's been almost a week.

"Shithead," Cooper retorts.

"Fuckwaffle."

"No, dude, I was telling you I'm a shithead. We're the Shipwreck shitheads. You want to be an asshole, you have to go to Sarcasm. Which you should do anyway, because you're not gonna get over her until you bone her."

I grab the massage chair remote and hit the Ultimate Pain button that sends the rollers in the back of the chair pounding up and down my spine at pressure-washer intensity, but nope, it doesn't drown out Cooper's voice.

Or make me feel better.

Although— fuck —that's a tight spot right there.

And there too.

I probably need six hours in this chair.

"Sarah's got a taser if you really want a wake-up jolt," Beck offers.

I flip them all off with shaking middle fingers. I think this chair is getting ready for lift-off.

"Bro, enough." Cooper rises and yanks a plug out of the wall, and my chair bounces to a stop like a rocking horse with a crooked rocker on an out-of-control train going uphill. "Step one: eat pie. Step two: admit you're wrong. Step three: grovel with…huh. Ryder. What do you use to grovel with when food won't cut it?"

Beck's features twist like he's in pain. "Food always cuts it, man. Always ."

"Maybe a different kind of food?" Sarah suggests. "Like?—"

"Moroccan!" Beck finishes for her.

They smile at each other and lean in to play tonsil hockey. I gag again, and Ellie snorts banana pudding out her nose.

"Sorry, Grady," she says while she chokes and tries to clean herself off and also rubs at her cheeks, probably because she has a few chunks of banana stuck in her sinuses. Her fiancé is thumping her on the back. "And ow . But seriously, if it's bothering you this badly, just go talk to her. You're sort of adorable in a lost puppy way when you're this miserable. That'll give you points."

"He already tried to talk to her, and he fucked it up Grady-style," Tillie Jean says.

Leave it to my sister to put all my faults out there in public.

There are exactly two things in life I can do better than anyone else.

Bake, and be Annika's friend.

Except I can't be Annika's friend, because I'm a dumbass.

And I'm in danger of losing my bakery because I'm being out-marketed by a thirteen-year-old.

So instead, I glare at my sister.

"Growth hurts," she says.

"Don't you have a restaurant to run?"

"Dad was making googly eyes at Mom. I'm not going back down to town until I get confirmation that they've been spotted at their own respective establishments again."

I shove up out of the seat, because is everyone getting nooky but me? "I gotta go bake something."

"Again? Awesome," Cooper says. He jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the massive kitchen taking up the back quarter of this level. "Knew there was a reason I got extra butter."

" Away from all of you."

"Bro, you can't be alone. Not when you're like this. First of all, you can't drive after that much beer. Second of all, remember when you made charcoal br?lée when Annika left for the Army?"

"And the time you bricked zucchini bread when Pop had to have that stent put in his heart?" Tillie Jean agrees.

"Even Sue wouldn't eat it," Cooper says solemnly, and I wish he was the type of manscaping asshead who kept throw pillows so I could throw one at him, because the only other thing he has in his house to throw is one of his eighty-seven billion Little League trophies that are littering every horizontal surface, and I don't want to have to apologize to him—and Ma—if I impale one of them in his thigh and put him on the disabled list for the rest of the season, because the Fireballs need him, and I might hate him half the time, as brothers often do when we don't love each other and defend each other, but he still plays for the home team, and I will always be a Fireballs fan.

"Macaron donuts," I blurt instead of confessing that I accidentally set fire to an oven full of banana bread loaves yesterday when I turned on the broiler after glazing the dough with butter instead of waiting until the loaves were cooked.

Yeah.

I have a problem.

And I don't know if cooking will fix it.

But Cooper and Tillie Jean breathe an excited " Ooooooh ," and yep.

That's what I'm fucking doing today, because that was the ooooooh of no way he can pull it off, but if he does, he's a culinary genius .

I'm gonna go master the shit out of macaron donuts.

Without setting anything on fire or burning out any of my appliances.

I don't know how, but when I do, they're gonna put Crow's Nest Bakery back on top in the greatest bakery war of this century.

And maybe actually give me a profitable day or two and ease the pressure I'm feeling to not go out of business.

I might not be able to win the girl, but I can win the fucking war.