Chapter 20

20

Grady

Turning flour, sugar, and butter into foodgasms takes skill, concentration, and sleep, but tonight I have none of those.

Except concentration.

I'm sitting in the bed of my truck in the far corner of the winery's parking lot, soft serve ice cream piled in a cake cone and melting in a cup next to me, my own waffle cone of mint chocolate chip that I got from Shipwreck's Sea Cow Creamery half-gone, and I'm beginning to wonder if I've been stood up when headlights cut through the darkness, blinding me and making me wince.

A minute later, Annika steps out of a Ford Focus next to my truck, and my heart leaps into a drum solo. I can only make out her outline, but I still know it's her.

She doesn't say anything while she boosts herself up onto the tailgate next to me in the dark, and I just as wordlessly hand her the goopy mess of sub-par ice cream she's always loved.

I'm a food snob who eats cereal for dinner.

And I'm okay with that.

"Oh, this is good," she moans, and I suddenly don't care an ounce what she's eating, because she's humming in the back of her throat and I'm at full mast and my cock is going for some kind of world record for speed and height.

And possibly density.

"You're so weird," I force out.

It's normal. Or what used to be normal.

She snorts into her soupy soft serve, and I watch her dark profile as she wipes her nose with her hand.

"Napkin?" I offer.

"Probably useless until I'm done. Did you bring a sink too? It's dripping down my arm."

I picture myself licking all that fake ice cream stuff from her wrist to her elbow, and I have to shift to give my hard-on more room. "Yep. Up in the cab."

She licks the side of her hand, then goes back to the ice cream, and even in the dark, when all I can make out are shadows and shades of black and gray, watching her head bob over the cone makes me break out in a sweat.

Does she know what she's doing?

Or is she as oblivious as High School Annika was?

"Need help?" I ask.

She freezes, then slowly twists her head to study me. I can pick out the outline of her lips. The angle of her delicate nose. The arch in her normally stoic brows.

Probably I should get that frog out of my throat before I talk again.

"Rocky road in a waffle cone dipped in chocolate?" She nods toward my hand.

"Mint chocolate chip."

Her smile is just as breathtaking in the dark as it is in the light. It's like my soul can feel it.

"Would've been my second guess. And what's on your menu in the morning?" she asks, and I wish I could see her face more clearly. Know if her eyes are getting calculated, or if she's just testing me.

"Banana pudding donuts. Town favorite. Sure sell-out. You?"

"Bailey wouldn't tell me, so I don't know."

"Bailey wouldn't—" I cut myself off with a bark of laughter. "Holy shit. You still can't bake."

"What? I can bake. I can bake your ass off."

"Christ, Annika. You're fucked."

"And thank you so much for helping by starting a bakery war ."

Shit. Shit .

"Good for business," I venture.

"Hm."

Dammit.

She can't bake. She can't bake .

We're both fucked.

And it's my fault.

My ice cream is sitting in my stomach swirling itself into a lava whirlpool that's gonna leave me with indigestion for weeks.

"You have help?" My palms are sweating and I couldn't take another bite of ice cream if the fate of the world depended on me finishing this cone. My boner's still going strong, though, so maybe all's not lost.

Or maybe I shouldn't use it as a crystal ball, because it's a dick. "Other than Bailey."

"Everything's fine," she insists.

She's running a bakery with a thirteen-year-old and a woman who went unexpectedly blind.

She's not fine.

And I'm sitting on an email from a reporter who wants to cover the greatest bakery rivalry Virginia's ever seen.

I'd crush her.

Unless—

"Sales good?" I ask.

"I'd like to be friends, which means we can't talk about this."

Friends . Being friends can bite me.

I'm gonna be her fucking hero.

Decision made.

Several, in fact.

Right here, right now.

I don't just bake . I create masterpieces . Foodgasms. That won't change in two weeks. In six months. In ten years. I will always be a master baker.

Maybe I'll keep my own bakery if I can manage to keep my profits on an upward trend.

But what I do in the next thirty seconds will determine if I can ever be anything else besides a master baker.

"My sales are up since we started taunting each other," I tell her.

"How terrible for you. My mama threw a crochet hook through a picture and nailed it right through picture-me's nose."

"Huh. Makes you wonder how often she did that when she could still see what she was aiming at." Shit. It's exactly what I would've said ten years ago, and exactly wrong .

"I mean—" I start.

She shoves her soupy ice cream cone in my ear before I realize she's moved.

I yelp and leap off the tailgate, spinning like I can locate a shower, a laugh starting deep in my belly, because that's Annika.

My Annika.

Not taking any shit from anyone. Including me.

And if I still know her, she's about to apologize for it.

"I'm not sorry," she informs me as though she's reading my mind. "You asked for that."

There's cold fake ice cream dripping down my face and flooding my ear and catching in my stubble, and I'm suddenly bent double.

Cracking the hell up.

"I did," I agree on a wheeze.

" And you ruined my ice cream cone, because I don't want to eat your earwax."

"Here." I hold out what's left of mine while I use my shoulder to wipe my ear. "You earned it."

"I earned a whole fucking soft serve machine getting delivered to my bakery, that's what I earned."

My laughter dies away.

She's right.

She deserves all the credit for bubble waffles topped with soft serve coming to the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Because she did all this on her own. She rose above where she started, joined the military, went to college—yeah, the rumor mill crosses town lines, and I know she has a college degree—co-signed on a loan for her mom to have her dream, and now she's starting fresh all over again.

Without complaint.

Without a baking bone in her body.

And I'm standing here without a worry in the world beyond some hurt feelings over a ten-year-old leap that ended poorly for me, knowing that if I fuck up my own bakery, my family will bail me out.

I won't lose my house.

My family and the whole town will rally around me until the problem of Grady Rock fucking up is solved.

I'm a spoiled rotten shithead.

A spoiled rotten shithead whose sales are up because of a rivalry with my former best friend.

"I can help you," I offer.

"I didn't ask for your help. And I don't entirely trust it even if I wanted it."

"Okay."

Even with the parking lot in near darkness, I can see her suspicion blooming.

I can also see her outline as she twists and searches the truck bed, probably for napkins.

"Annika."

"Don't say my name."

I step closer, until my hands come to rest on her knees. "You know the only thing people love more than donuts and cupcakes?"

"Good revenge and eight hundred thread count sheets?"

"No, they?—"

"Playing with babies and the smell of rain?"

"Also good, but—wait. You like babies?" She was jumpy around Bailey when we were kids, and didn't like how much she cried, and also confessed once that she hated how jealous she was of all the attention Bailey got, and she knew it was irrational, and she couldn't tell her mama, but she also couldn't make herself not feel it.

I'd told her I felt the same about Cooper, who's only a year younger than me and hadn't been a baby in years, we both laughed, we both knew we were each completely serious, and neither one of us talked about it again.

At least, to each other.

I've never told another soul, but I don't know what she's told all the people who came in and out of her circle while she was gone.

"You said people ," she reminds me. "I'm being general. People like babies. People also like the first sip of coffee in the morning, sleeping all through the night for the first time after a cold, and spring flowers."

"People don't love spring flowers more than cupcakes and donuts."

"Yes, they do. Not everyone lives and dies by the scent of sugar in a fryer or an oven."

I squeeze her knees, because she's trying to distract me, and I want to kiss her for it, but that clearly didn't end well for me the last time, so I need to keep myself under control.

For at least another minute.

"Gossip, Annika. People love gossip."

"People are assholes. And shitheads."

"We keep up the rumor that we're feuding, and both our bakeries will be full to bursting with people wanting to know which of us insulted the other and how we feel about me making prettier baked goods to combat those unicorn pirate cookies you put together, and about your banana pudding getting written up in the Blue Lagoon County Gazette and taking my sister's crown."

She smirks, and yeah, I can totally see the smirk in the darkness. "That really hurts, doesn't it?"

"If someone with taste had written the article— ow ."

Her playful shove didn't hurt, but the motion has her leaning closer to me, and I can smell my mint chocolate chip ice cream on her, and I want to dribble it all over her skin and lick it off and fuck , I'm so hard my nuts hurt.

"You know why we got along so well in high school?" she says.

"Because I was fabulous and you were the only person who could see it?"

"Because your body might've been born in Shipwreck, but your soul belongs in Sarcasm. But only because there's not an Egoville around here."

"Whoa, now?—"

I cut myself off when she laughs.

I missed that laugh.

I missed it all the way deep down to the pit of my soul, which hasn't been fully settled since the night I confessed to her how much I liked her.

It's not settled tonight, either, but it's swirling with two things that have been in short supply the last decade.

Intrigue and hope.

"So you propose we be secret friends who are publicly at war to keep the gossips going and make each of our bakeries thrive with people wanting to weigh in on whose muffins are best?" she asks.

I can't read her tone.

It's too flat.

Like maybe I've stepped in it all over again.

"And I can teach you how to bake so you can keep up," I offer.

"You are such a jerk."

"I'm a little off-center these days, but I'm serious about helping, and if you really can't bake, you need help. Take my help. Or at least promise me you have a plan better than letting your mama and sister continue to take care of all the baking."

"Why?"

"Because your bakery will fail if Bailey and your mama are your entire plan."

"No, I mean why do you care so much?"

"Because we're friends."

"Friends."

"Annika. You know you were my best friend."

"And you can be satisfied with that? With just friends?"

Not likely. "I—I missed you. And I always liked your mama and your sister, and I don't know what it's like to go suddenly blind, or to put your whole life on hold to care for someone who has. I've had this rock in the pit of my gut since I heard what happened, and baking is the only thing I know to do to fix anything. Baking is the only thing I've ever done best . Besides be your friend. Which I've been pretty shitty at the last week."

"That wasn't an answer."

"I liked you. In high school. A lot ."

"I'm not that girl anymore, and you're not that boy."

"Not even close," I agree. "But this?" I squeeze her knees again. "I want to find out what this is. And who we are now. I'm not the same man I was two weeks ago either. Not since you came back."

"I don't have that to give right now, Grady. My plate's a little full."

"You're trying to keep a gallon of soup from overflowing a teacup. I know. So let me help. You don't have to do anything besides agree to let Bailey tell a reporter how terrible I am and not let it slip that we're talking behind the scenes."

"And what kind of lesson is that for Bailey?"

"I'll say terrible things about her too."

"No, you won't."

"Okay, I probably won't," I concede.

"Probably?"

"Definitely." My fingers inch up her firm thighs, and she doesn't bat me away. "You know that feeling when you realize you were a better person in high school than you are today?"

She doesn't answer, because of course she doesn't feel that too.

Nope, that's just me.

"What would your family say about you helping me?"

"Tillie Jean would probably blow a gasket. Pop would double down on his efforts to find me a girlfriend. But Ma would be thrilled."

Her thighs go tense at the word girlfriend .

So I still have a chance.

"Just think about it," I tell her.

"Do you know what I really need right now?"

"A double shot of tequila and a triple fudge cupcake?"

"No. This ."