by Erin Wright
She stopped her retreat to the front door, her gaze swinging wildly between the display case and the massive employee who worked there. She was almost to the front door. She was almost free. If she went on the offensive, then maybe he wouldn’t look at her as easy prey and she could make her escape.
“You know,” she said bitingly, “you shouldn’t serve up such large quantities of sugar. They’ve done a lot of studies on it. It’s terrible for the human body. It’s places like this that have caused the obesity epidemic in our nation.”
His smile completely disappeared then, replaced by an increasingly pissed-off glare. “Hey, I didn’t force you to come in here,” he practically growled. “If you don’t like it, you can leave.”
“Well, maybe I will!” she shot back as she swung around, the bell ringing wildly above her head as she pulled the door open and ran blindly down the street, panic and anger nipping at her heels. Get away, get away! Escape!
Finally, she forced herself to stop, slumping up against an icy brick storefront and gasping for air.
She was fine. Everything was fine. She had taken control of the situation and had escaped.
She sucked in a lungful of air, trying to slow her breathing down.
She was fine. Everything was fine. She’d escaped. She was fine.
She forced herself upright and looked up and down the street, hunting for her Jeep, finally spotting it several blocks up. Whoops. She’d apparently run right past it in her pell-mell escape from the bakery and the wall of muscle who snuck up on people for fun and scared them half to death.
Man, what a jackass.
With any luck at all, that guy’s boss would’ve overheard that little exchange, and he’d be gone by time she actually moved up here. The sweet, elderly lady who surely owned the Muffin Man would be unhappy to have such a muscular man practically attacking defenseless women in her bakery.
With that pleasant thought, she began marching back up the street to her Jeep. She was going to head back to Boise, make some decisions that she’d been putting off for a very long time, get her life in order, and be back in just a couple of months. By that point, Muscle-Bound Man would be gone, off to go terrorize some other store, and she could settle into a quiet existence in her smoothie and health shop.
She slid into the driver’s seat and turned the heat on full blast as she headed back home. Finally, she was getting her life back into order. She wasn’t about to allow anything – or anyone – to get in her way.
Chapter 2
Gage
April, 2019
It was the banging that got to him.
It’d been a pretty quiet morning – not bad for a Monday, anyway, with the regulars stopping by for a cup of coffee to get their day going, and a donut if they thought they could get away with it, or a muffin if they didn’t. Gage’d been able to keep up with the flow of traffic without falling too far behind, although it was damn useful that a few of the regulars had simply helped themselves to the coffee when a line had started to form.
Sugar’d had her baby three weeks ago – a tiny bundle of human being hardly bigger than a mite, but she sure could make herself known if she thought her momma had waited too long between breast-feedings. It was a damn lot of fun to see Sugar, Jaxson, Rose, and the two boys when they stopped by the bakery once a week, but a small part of him was dearly missing his only full-time employee and the one person who’d been there for him through thick and thin. Sugar’s hard work and loyalty to the bakery was what had allowed him to build it up to what it was today, and her remaining three weeks of maternity leave stretched out in front of him, desolate and exhausting.
He wasn’t entirely sure if he could make it another three weeks without her help, honestly. He’d thought about pressing some of the regulars into service – asking them to walk around with a carafe and refill mugs at regular intervals – but then had thought better of it. Mr. Maddow, the most dedicated of his regulars, also had shit for eyesight and it’d be just Gage’s luck that Maddow would pour coffee all over someone’s expensive iPhone instead of into a coffee cup, and Gage’d end up on the hook to replace it.
Bam, bam, bam.
“What the shitting hell is that?!” Gage yelled at no one in particular as he glared at the offending wall. On the other side of that wall was an abandoned storefront – a piece of real estate that as long as Gage could remember, no one had occupied. Hell, the For Sale sign was so old, it probably needed to register to vote.
Over the past four years since he took over the bakery from his grandparents, he’d toyed with the idea of buying the storefront and expanding next door, but he wasn’t real sure what he would sell over there, plus it’d be twice the space to heat and cool and staff, not to mention all of the renovation work that needed to be done to the storefront, and he had his hands full just trying to keep the Muffin Man above water—
Bam, bam, bam.
“That’s it!” he announced to the world, or at least the few patrons of the bakery. “I’m going next door. I’ll be back.”
Mr. Maddow raised his coffee cup in salute. “Go get ‘em!” he said with a cackle. “Tell me what’s going on when you come back.” Mr. Behrend, sitting across from him, raised his cup in a matching salute.
But Gage was already out the door and heading down the sidewalk to the vacant storefront attached to his. The weak warmth of April in the mountains felt good – a nice change after months of nothing but snow and cold and ice – but Gage wasn’t about to be mollified by the blooming schedule of the flowers in town square, dammit. He’d lived through months of construction after the bakery fire last April, and had only just kept a hold of his sanity by his fingernails through it all. Construction noise had never been something he would consider to be soothing and beautiful, but after months of listening to it up close and personal, he’d downgraded construction noise to just above hell on earth.
He yanked at the handle of the door for the abandoned storefront, but it didn’t budge. He pressed his face against the dirty glass, cupping his hands around his face to block out the light. If he could just spot whoever was making the noise and gesture at them to stop—
“Shit!” he hollered, yanking his head back in shock when a face appeared on the other side of the glass, just inches away from his.
It took him a moment to place the jaw-droppingly gorgeous female face.
“Double shit,” he muttered to himself.
It was Skittish Girl from three months back.
He saw a lot of people come through his bakery and after a while, they tended to blur together, but this one…he’d never forget her. The whole thing had just been too bizarre. He’d recommended the cream puffs to her, and she reacted like he’d just suggested that he should rape her for kicks and giggles. He’d never seen someone go from normal looking to completely freaked out in under two seconds like that.
And then the way she’d talked about the sugar content of his goodies, like he was lacing his food with crack cocaine or something…
The whole thing had stuck in his craw, to say the least, and now she was banging up a storm in the abandoned store next door.
She was still just standing there, though, not moving an inch towards letting him in to talk to her, so he simply crossed his arms and glared at her through the dirty glass, clearly conveying that he wasn’t going to leave until she opened the damned door and gave him some answers. After endless moments where he could practically see the gears turning in her head as she scrambled to find a reason not to let him in, she reluctantly flipped the lock on the door and then stepped back, not even pulling the door open for him to welcome him inside.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded before he even got through the door.
“What…” he stuttered, staring at her in disbelief. “What am I doing here?” he finally got out. “What are you doing here?”
“I asked you first,” she volleyed back, glaring up at him, arms crossed protectively across herself. She was just a tiny thi
ng – about Sugar’s size and build, actually, with the same dark brown hair but this lady’s hair was wildly curly, strands and curls going every which way in a cloud around her head. She looked like an angel – a very pissed-off angel, that was, with a very bad attitude.
Honestly, that was the hardest part for him to understand. Gage wasn’t arrogant; he didn’t think of himself as God’s gift to women. But he was aware that women found him attractive, and when he put his mind to it, he could charm any woman from age 2 to 102.
Which just made this woman’s reaction to him, as if she knew some deep dark secret about him that no one else knew and despised him accordingly…it just didn’t make sense.
“I’m here because I own the bakery next door,” he finally answered, “and your banging was causing a racket and disturbing my customers.” Technically, that was true – she’d been so noisy, even mostly deaf Mr. Krein who’d stopped in earlier had heard her – so he didn’t feel too bad blaming this encounter on someone else. “So! What are you doing here?”
“You own the bakery?” she whispered under her breath, staring up at him with horror in her light golden eyes the exact color of crème brûlée. “Oh no. Oh nooo. The Muffin Man. Of course it’d be a guy who owns it.”
Gage just cocked an eyebrow at her, waiting for her to invite him back into the conversation. As it was, she seemed to be conducting this one all by herself.
She drew herself back up to her full height, which had to be a whole five-foot-nothin’, and announced, “I bought this store. It’s mine now. So I was just working on some…repairs.”
Gage wasn’t a male chauvinistic pig – he believed that women could do anything they set their minds to, and if that included carpentry and repairs, then by God, they could do carpentry and repairs. But there wasn’t a damn thing about this petite woman in front of him that led him to believe that she actually knew which end of the hammer to swing. She was so damn tiny, anything but a kid-sized hammer would probably be too heavy for her anyway.
Maybe, if he just pointed out the flaws in her plan, she’d pack up her bags and go back to wherever the hell she came from.
One could always hope, right?
“If you actually paid money for this building, you got ripped off,” he said bluntly. “Hell, they probably should’ve paid you just for being willing to take this piece of shit off their hands. There’s a reason why it’s been vacant for so long. It’s got a list of problems longer than my arm, and how on God’s green earth did it pass an inspection from any bank with two pennies to rub together? I can’t believe you got a loan on this place.”
“For your information,” she said icily, her curls of mahogany flying around her face with every word, “I paid cash. Which I really don’t see is any business of yours. Now, if you will kindly leave, I’ve got work to do.”
Cash? She had enough money to just buy a building, even a rundown, piece-of-shit building, with cash?
She was obviously playing in a different league than he was financially, and was also just as obviously willing to waste said money for the fun of it.
“It’s your money to set on fire,” he tossed out as he headed for the front door. “Be it far from me to tell you what to do.”
“I’m glad you understand,” she tossed back and then just stood there, arms crossed, waiting for him to get out of her store.
Her store. He shook his head at the shock of it.
Well, he decided as he stomped back to his bakery, there was no way she would last long. Once she found the leak in the roof, the asbestos in the tiles, and the smoke damage from the bakery fire – if she’d somehow missed the fact that one of her walls was a deep, dark gray – she’d be out of his hair, tail tucked between her legs.
And, in his not-so-humble opinion, it couldn’t happen a moment too soon.
Chapter 3
Cady
What. an. asshole.
How dare he come in here, telling her what to do and how to do it, like he’d been put in charge of her life and finances when she wasn’t looking. It wasn’t any of his damn business how she got the money to buy the building; it wasn’t any of his damn business that she’d bought the building. This was America, and she could buy and sell buildings all day long if she wanted to.
She picked up her hammer and began banging again, right about where she thought his kitchen for the bakery would be. Not that the man had exactly given her a tour of the joint, but it made sense it’d be right – bam! – about – bam! – here – bam!
She sat back on her heels and stared at the wall in satisfaction, the rotting 2x4 she’d been whacking at finally detached and out of the way. It was in slivers, beat to smithereens, but she’d won, and that was what mattered. It was all going in the trash anyway, so it wasn’t like it had to look good while being pitched into the dumpster.
A part of her really wanted to continue banging as loudly as she could, but she didn’t actually have another rotten 2x4 to remove, plus there was the pathetic fact that her arm was getting sore from lifting the heavy hammer.
She shouldn’t have sold the carpentry set that she’d been using most of her life – unlike what she’d bought from the hardware store just down the street, her own tools had fit her hand just right, and hadn’t worn her out just from lifting the damn things in order to pound on something. But her set had been given to her by her dad and every time she looked at it, the memories of him showing her how to hold a hammer and how to measure a piece of wood accurately had…
Well, they were overwhelming. Wonderfully touching memories that she wanted to treasure but they mostly made her just crawl into bed and inspect the backsides of her eyelids for days at a time, and if she were stronger, she wouldn’t have had to rid herself of everything but she wasn’t strong – that much was perfectly clear to everyone, even herself – and so it had been sold to a little girl, blonde hair in pigtails. The kid had fallen in love with the purple and pink case that Cady’s dad had made for the tools, and had begged her dad to buy the set for her.
“Your dad might be dead tomorrow. Don’t waste your time with him. Treasure every moment,” Cady had wanted to tell the little girl, but who told a little girl a thing like that? And so she’d simply sold the set to the kid and then closed her garage door and crawled into bed and stayed there for another three days.
And now Cady had to make do with the carpentry supplies she’d bought from Long Valley Hardware. She’d picked up screwdrivers, screws, nails, a measuring tape – all of the essentials – but when she’d come to the hammer display, she’d balked. She’d asked the crotchety old man behind the counter if he sold smaller hammers than the ones on display (which all looked more like sledgehammers to her than regular hammers) and he’d simply looked at her like she was nuts and then ignored the question.
Great customer service ‘round here. First, muscle-bound men practically attack women and then grumpy old men ignore women. Great start to this plan, Cady. Why did you think this was a good idea again?
With a groan, she pushed herself to her feet and headed for the sink, cleaning up before starting in on Phase Two of her plan – scrubbing everything to within an inch of its life. The place could only look better after some elbow grease was applied to it. There was charm here, sure, but it was well-hidden under a layer of grime an inch thick.
She’d die before she admitted it to the jackass next door, but she’d already been unpleasantly surprised by a few problems that she hadn’t noticed during her hurried inspection of the business before she’d bought it.
For starters, she’d found some really old wiring that appeared to have been installed at the turn of the last century, and after a quick Google search on her phone, she’d confirmed it – she had something called knob-and-tube wiring in a couple of different spots in the store. Not all of it – some of the wiring looked like it’d at least been installed since her birth – but according to her Google search, knob-and-tube wiring was nothing short of a death trap.
Just then
, Skittles nudged her leg, begging for some lovings, and Cady picked him up, snuggling the calico against her chest. “I bought this place for a good price so I’d have enough money left over to do extensive remodeling, right?” she told her purring cat. Skittles began kneading her shoulder with his claws, clearly delighted at having been picked up. Cady tried to ignore the fact that she’d just turned into a human pincushion and continued on. “Between the life insurance, the settlement, and the sale of Mom and Dad’s home and both of their cars, I have a nice financial cushion. I refuse to let myself become intimidated now. Ouch!”
She yanked Skittles away from her shoulder, forcing him to extract his claws from her skin.
“I happen to like my skin,” she told him seriously. He meowed, unhappy at being dangled up in the air instead of snuggled against her. “Well, I’m unhappy, too. I already smashed my thumb using that damn oversized hammer; I don’t need your help in beating me up.” He meowed again, piteously, and with a sigh, she snuggled him back up against her abused shoulder. “I don’t quite know why I like you,” she said, even as she scratched him under the chin, right where he loved it best. His purrs of pleasure vibrated their way through her chest.
She turned in a circle, looking at the storefront she’d bought. There was a part of her that questioned this particular life choice – okay, a very large part of her – but she also knew that if she didn’t make a radical change, an over-the-top, can’t-come-back-from-it change, that she’d slide right back into her bout of depression. She had the money; she probably could’ve hidden away in her childhood home for the rest of her life.
But what kind of life would that be?
It was better that she pushed herself out of the nest, even if the fall to the ground was scary as hell.