“I don’t know what happened,” Violet said, looking both perturbed and confused.
“You probably took it out too early. Though, it’s nothing a little extra icing can’t fix. And it’s my girls’ night tonight, so I think it can be of use in that environment rather than being put up for sale.”
Violet screwed up her face. “It’s ugly.”
“An ugly cake is still cake. As long as it doesn’t have raisins it’s fine.”
“Well, I didn’t put any raisins in it.”
“Excellent. Of course, I try to provide raisined items to people with taste bud defects, because we here at Pie in the Sky like to be inclusive. But not in cake. It’s just not happening in cake.”
Alison was slightly amused that her newest employee seemed to know about her raisin aversion, even if she didn’t quite have cooking times down. Violet was a good employee, but she had absolutely no experience baking. For the most part Alison had put her on at the register, which she had picked up much faster than kitchen duties.
Maybe it wasn’t necessary to give Violet a chance to get some experience with the actual baking part of the bakery, but right now she was short on staff, and even shorter on people who had the skill level she required with the baked goods to do any training. So while she could farm out Violet’s register training, the cakes, pies and other pastries had to be done by her.
“I’ll do better next time,” Violet said, sounding determined. Which encouraged Alison, because Violet hadn’t sounded anything like determined when she had first come in looking for work. Violet was a sullen teenager of the first order.
Having been a horrific teenager herself, Alison felt some level of sympathy for her. But also very little patience. But Violet seemed to react well to her brand of no-nonsense response to attitude.
“You will do better next time,” Alison said, “because I can eat one mistake cake, but if I have to continue eating mistake cakes my jeans aren’t going to fit and then I’m going to have to buy new jeans, and that’s going to have to come out of your paycheck.”
She patted Violet on the shoulder, then walked through the double doors that led from the kitchen to behind the counter. The shop was in its late afternoon lull. She decided to take the opportunity to check the freshness of her baked goods. She opened the glass-backed display case, grabbed a piece of wax paper and pressed gently on the first row of muffins, then moved on to a loaf of cinnamon chip bread.
A rush of air blew into the shop and Alison looked up just in time to see a tall, muscular man walk in through the blue door. A pang of recognition hit her in the chest before she even got a good look at him. She didn’t need a good look at him. Because just like the first time she’d seen him, in Ace’s bar, the feeling he created inside of her wasn’t logical, wasn’t cerebral. It was physical. It lived in her, and it superseded control.
For somebody who prized control it was an affront on multiple levels.
He lifted his head and confirmed what her jittering nerves already knew. That beneath that dark cowboy hat was the face of the man who had most definitely been looking at her at the bar the night before.
He hadn’t left town. He hadn’t been a hallucinogenic expression of a fevered imagination. And he had found her.
The twist of attraction turned into something else, just for a moment. A strange kind of panic that she hadn’t confronted for a long time. That somehow this man had found out who she was, had tracked her down.
No. That’s not it. Even if he did, that doesn’t make him crazy. It doesn’t.
And more than likely he was just here for a piece of pie. She took a deep breath, steeling herself to look directly at him. Which was... Wow. He was hotter than she remembered. And that was saying something. She had first spotted him in the dim light of the bar, with a healthy amount of space between them.
Now, well, now the daylight was bright, and he was very close. And he was magnificent. The way that black T-shirt hugged all those muscles bordered on obscene, his dark green eyes like the deep of the forest beckoning her to draw close. Except, unlike the forest, his eyes didn’t promise solitude and inner peace. No, it was something much more carnal. Or maybe that was just her aforementioned overheated imagination.
His jaw was covered by a neatly trimmed dark beard, and she would normally have said she wasn’t a huge fan, but something about the beard on him was like flaunting an excess of testosterone. And she was in a very testosterone-starved state. So it was like stumbling onto water in a desert.
Of course, all that hyperbole was simply that. His eyes weren’t actually promising her anything; in fact, his expression was blank. And she realized that while he might look sexier to her today than he had that night, she might look unrecognizable to him.
Last night she had been wearing an outfit that at least hinted at the fact that she had a female figure. And she’d had makeup on, plus she’d gone to the effort to straighten her mass of auburn hair. Today, it was its glorious frizzy self, piled on top of her head, half captured in a rubber band, half pinned down with a pen. And as for makeup... Well, on days when she had to be at the bakery early that was just not a happening thing.
Her apron disguised her figure, and beneath it, the button-up striped shirt that she had tucked into her jeans wasn’t exactly vixen wear.
“Can I... Can I help you?” She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and found herself tilting her head to the side, her body apparently calling on all of the flirtation skills it hadn’t used since she was eighteen years old.
Very immature, underdeveloped skills.
Suddenly, her lips felt dry, so she had to lick them. And when she did, heat flared in those forest green eyes that made her think maybe he did recognize her. Or, if he didn’t, maybe his body did. Just like hers recognized his. Oh Lord.
“Yes,” he said, his voice much more... Taciturn than she had imagined it might be. She hadn’t realized until that moment that she had built something of a narrative around him. Brooding, certainly, because he had most definitely been brooding a little bit in the bar, but she had imagined he might flirt with a lazy drawl. Of course, it was difficult to tell with one word, but his voice had been clipped. Definitely clipped.
“I have a lot of different pie. I mean, a lot of different kinds. So, if you need suggestions. Or a list. I can help.”
“I’m not here for pie. I’m here to pick up my daughter.”
Pick up DOWN HOME COWBOY, the latest Copper Ridge novel from Maisey Yates and HQN Books!