Baked with Love

by Erin Wright

  Another long silence and then, “Is this why you hate it when I walk up behind you?”

  She flinched. She wanted to lash out at him. What made him think he had the right to ask all of these questions? What business was it of his anyway?

  But then a small voice peeped up, quiet and niggling and oh-so-terribly correct, that the real reason she hated the question was because he was right.

  Why did he have to be right? Why did he have to keep pushing and prodding at every single sore spot on her soul?

  “Probably,” she equivocated, and then paused.

  And groaned.

  “Yes,” she finally admitted. “I know it’s hard to believe, but I didn’t used to jump at every little sound and noise and movement. That’s definitely a new development. And someone coming up from behind? That’s the worst.”

  She felt his chin rub up against the top of her head as he nodded, and then, just as she thought they were done excavating her soul and they could go on to do something fun for a change, like shoving wooden toothpicks under her fingernails or something else equally as delightful, he went a step too far.

  “Have you talked to someone about this? A therapist or something?”

  And with that, the loose-boned feeling disappeared – gone in the blink of an eye. She bolted straight up and folded her arms over her chest protectively.

  Dammit all, he’d really gone and stepped in it this time. It was bad enough that he thought he could force her into talking about the worst day of her life – he didn’t need to imply she was insane at the same time.

  “I don’t need a psychiatrist!” she snapped. “I’m not crazy. I just went through something hard, is all. People go through hard things all the time, and aren’t crazy afterwards.”

  “Whoa, whoa,” he said, holding up his hands. “No one said you’re crazy—”

  She shifted on his lap so she could really glare at him – she could get a good glare going when she had a mind to – when they both felt it.

  Directly underneath her ass was the start of a hard-on. Her eyes got wide, his eyes got wide, and they just stared at each other, dead silence between them for a moment.

  “It’s just a biological reaction,” he blurted out. “I’m sorry. You’re a cute girl, wiggling your ass across my lap…I can’t control…”

  But that didn’t make her feel any better. A guy who’s not able to control his lust?

  No, no, no, that did not make her feel better, not one little bit.

  The panic was welling up again and instinctively, she fumbled for the door handle and this time, he didn’t try to stop her. She spilled out onto the cold ground and then scrambled to her feet, brushing off her knees even as she demanded, “Go! Go away. Get out of my car. I’m going to go home now.”

  He looked around the interior of her vehicle as if surprised to see that he was, in fact, in her Jeep, and then pushed himself out of it, palms out. “It’s fine. I’m not going to attack you,” he said slowly. “I’m just gonna walk back up to the party. You could come back with me. Are you sure you want to leave?”

  That was such a ridiculous question, she didn’t even bother answering it. Did he honestly think she’d stay now? After what just happened?

  They sure did grow them big and beautiful and stupid up in the mountains of Idaho.

  She was shaking – shaking so hard – and a part of her realized that she was right back where she’d started. Except now, Gage knew everything there was to know about her. All of the bad stuff was laid out in the open, and she still didn’t feel any better.

  She marched on wobbly legs to the driver’s side and slid in, slamming the door closed behind her and breathing in deep. Calm down. It’s going to be fine.

  Except the faint smell of sugar and yeast and flour was left behind, a smell she was beginning to associate with Gage. It was drifting through the car, taunting her. Even a simple birthday party ended in disaster when she was involved.

  Her Jeep roared to life and, slamming her foot to the floor, she tore backwards out of the parking space and into the street. She realized with an inward grimace as she threw her Jeep into drive that she’d forgotten to check her mirrors before roaring out into the street. It’d been nothing but sheer luck that she hadn’t run straight into someone.

  Well, at least she’d had one tiny piece of luck today.

  God only knew that in every other aspect of her life, she hadn’t had even that.

  Chapter 10

  Gage

  Slowly, Gage made his way around to the back of his parents’ house, working his way through everything that he’d just heard as he walked. He’d known it was bad. Every warning sign that’d blared off Cady like a nuclear reactor about to explode had said that whatever had happened to her in the past hadn’t been pretty.

  But still…somehow, the truth had been even worse than Gage had imagined. This nameless football player – he’d noticed how careful she’d been not even to mention which position he played – was now in the NFL, eh?

  Sure did make it hard to believe in karma.

  The partygoers were a blurry group around him and a part of him knew he was being rude by not talking to anyone, but it was hard to focus. Everything he’d just heard…

  Well, it definitely made a certain Cady Walcott a lot more understandable.

  More than anything else – and he was dead sure she’d hate this analogy, even though (maybe especially because) it was totally accurate – she reminded him of a feral baby kitten who’d been hurt. Tiny, defenseless, completely untrusting of any human, hissing and swatting and doing its best to fight against the mean world it’d found itself in.

  Underneath all of that hissing and tiny claws, though, was the heart and soul of someone who wanted to be loved.

  But how to make the little hissing kitten trust me? I can’t just slide tuna cans under Cady’s front door, although I’m gonna guess Skittles would appreciate that…

  Emma hurried up beside him, worry stamped across her face, jerking him out of his thoughts. “Is she all right?” she asked. “Where is she?”

  “She…uhhh…she went home.” He paused then, trying to decide what else he could safely tell his sister without breaking Cady’s confidence, and then realized the answer to that was: Nothing at all. “I can’t really say more than that. So, what happened to Dickwad?” he asked, before she could brazenly ignore that statement and press him for more anyway.

  “Abby carted his ass off to jail. We’ll see if the county prosecutor has the guts to go after him, though.” She screwed up her mouth in disgust, clearly doubting the chances of that happening, and Gage couldn’t blame her. No county prosecutor would want to piss off the only judge in town, and to boot, their current prosecutor wasn’t exactly known for his backbone and high sense of morals.

  But still. Waving a gun around at a party? Trying to kidnap Sugar? Surely Dickwad’s father couldn’t fast-talk his son out of that one, right?

  He’s in the NFL now.

  Cady’s simple statement of fact about her attacker reverberated in his head, and Gage winced. If karma wasn’t at play with the nameless football player, why would it be at play with Dickwad?

  “Is Sugar okay?” he asked, needing to hear something reassuring.

  “Yeah. Jaxson took her home, and then went to go pick up the boys from the babysitter.”

  “Oh, shit,” Gage said, surprised. “I didn’t even notice it, but you’re right – Aiden and Frankie weren’t here.” Damn. Sherlock Holmes he was not, at least not tonight. He decided then and there to blame it on Cady being at the party. It seemed only fair. He found it damn hard to think with her around, for reasons he didn’t really want to think about too hard.

  “Rose is too little to be left with a babysitter, of course, but Sugar wanted to have fun and not worry about corralling two little boys the whole night, so they dropped them off at the babysitter’s before coming over. And then…” She shrugged morosely. “So much for having fun.”

  Ga
ge leaned over and gave his only sister a quick squeeze. “I’m sorry Dickwad ruined your birthday party,” he said quietly into Emma’s hair before letting her go.

  Emma shrugged again, not making eye contact, clearly trying to act as if it wasn’t a big deal when it really, really was. Emma was a social butterfly, and her combined birthday party with Sugar was a Very Big Deal in her life. Having Dickwad ruin it for her made Gage want to hunt him down and get in that uppercut to the jaw after all. He was beginning to regret listening to Abby on that topic. Surely one punch wouldn’t change anything, except to make him feel a hell of a lot better.

  “I saw you chatting with Grandma after you and Cady showed up,” Emma said quietly. “She didn’t seem happy. Does she not like Cady?”

  Gage chuckled a little at that. “That’d require Grandma to know Cady,” he pointed out dryly. “No, she’s just…you know how she is about me dating.”

  “Creepily protective?” Emma offered up. He narrowed his eyes at her. She shrugged unrepentantly. “You asked for my thoughts,” she pointed out.

  Gage decided to ignore that. Just because his sister was right didn’t mean he had to acknowledge that fact out loud.

  “You know why Grandma is the way she is,” he said heavily. “Her only child, leaving town after his high school graduation and joining the Marine Corps? She pretty much didn’t get to see her son or any of us grandkids for twenty years, and whether or not she should, she places the blame for that squarely on Mom’s shoulders. It would only make sense that she’d be a little more protective of me.”

  Yeah, his grandmother was a little more protective of him than most grandparents would probably be, but Gage tried to see it from her point of view, even if that viewpoint was a bit smothering at times.

  Emma clearly had more she wanted to say on the topic, but in a rare showing of self-control, she just nodded noncommittally and gestured towards the only remaining item on the dessert table – a huge birthday cake. “Since Sugar isn’t here to blow out the candles with me, wanna help?”

  “You don’t want to ask Chris to help you?” Gage asked with a teasing laugh. It’d always been Gage and Emma together, with Chris as the annoying younger brother who got away with murder just because he was the baby of the family. And baby was what he damn well acted like, too. “Where is our erstwhile younger brother, anyway?”

  “Erstwhile…nice one,” Emma said approvingly. “And, I have no idea. Probably hiding down in the basement and playing video games.”

  “Shocking,” Gage said dryly. “A teenage boy, hiding out and playing video games? I never would’ve seen that one coming. All right, old woman,” and he slung his arm around Emma’s shoulders, “just because you asked, I’ll help you blow out your candles.”

  “You know you’re older than me, right?” Emma asked sarcastically, slinging an elbow into his stomach for good measure as they walked towards the dessert table.

  “Older and wiser,” he said with an air of self-importance, and it was an indication of just how upset Emma was over Dickwad’s appearance that she didn’t have anything better to dish back at him than a dignified sniff.

  Chapter 11

  Cady

  Cady squinted in the quickly enveloping darkness. Dammit all, another day gone and she still hadn’t gotten half of the things done that she’d wanted to. It would help if she could work past sunset, but even though Idaho Power had been kind enough to get the rest of the town connected back up to power, their help (understandably) only extended to the front doorstep.

  Unfortunately for her, since Watson’s Electric had managed to blow her main breaker box inside of the building past the point of no return, she was now waiting for the only reputable electricians in town, Goldfork Mountains Electrical Service, to make it over. Just like Gage had warned her, they were good, they were expensive, and they were booked. It was going to be at least another week before they could get her up and running again.

  She’d tried buying battery-powered lanterns so she could have light in the evenings, but they’d ended up casting just as many shadows as they did light, and the other night, after fifteen minutes of scrubbing at a particularly stubborn spot, she’d realized that it was just a shadow she’d been trying to scrub off the floor.

  Whoops.

  She’d given up on working past dark after that.

  With a groan, she pushed herself to her feet and headed to the sink in the back to wash up. It’d only been three days since the disastrous birthday party, and she’d been quite happy to spend all day Saturday and Sunday hiding in bed, telling herself that this was her rest time. Her therapy time. She’d be back at it on Monday. She wasn’t slipping into a depression again; she was just taking it easy for the weekend.

  There was totally a difference.

  She didn’t much like to think about how hard it’d been to force herself to actually get back to work that morning. Every bone in her body had begged to sleep one more day. She could tackle the store on Tuesday. People took long weekends all the time. She was entitled after everything she’d been through on Friday night, right?

  In the end, it was Skittle meowing piteously to be fed wet cat food that’d forced her out of bed, and once she was standing up, she’d had to go pee, and once she’d made it into the bathroom and used the toilet and washed her face and brushed her teeth…well, she’d ended up feeling a whole lot better. Going into the storefront and cleaning some more hadn’t ended up being such an overwhelming idea after all.

  “You may be an atrocious listener and a complete asshole when I try to put a leash on you,” she’d told Skittles after he’d finished his wet cat food and had begun his daily routine of napping for hours in the sun, “but you’re at least good for getting me out of bed.”

  One ear had twitched.

  She’d taken that as his hearty congratulations on a job well done for not slipping back down that bottomless pit, just as he’d intended it, she was sure.

  Now that she’d gotten at least a few things done, and all of her light was quickly disappearing for the night, it was time to head home. Ugh. With a mental sigh, she reviewed what was in her fridge, but from what she could remember, it wasn’t much. Her two-day bender of not getting out of bed except to go pee and stumble to the kitchen to eat some breakfast cereal, hadn’t also miraculously included a trip to the grocery store.

  It was definitely one of the major downsides to living out in the middle of Nowhere, Idaho – unlike Boise where she could order her groceries online and they would be delivered automagically to her doorstep, that just wasn’t an option here.

  Why did you want to live in Sawyer, Idaho again?

  Dammit, she really wasn’t in the mood to cook, but going out to eat by herself was always awkward as hell. Everyone else in a restaurant had someone to talk to; someone to laugh and chat with. It seemed like the waitresses always had a slightly pitying look in their eyes when they served her just by herself. Maybe it was all in her head – God knew so much else was – but still, it took all of the fun out of eating out. Last Friday – when she’d been downright desperate not to cook – that’d been the exception, not the rule. Usually, she hated going out to eat more than she hated cooking, and the lesser of two evils tended to win out in her world.

  She was digging her purse out from underneath the back counter so she could find her keys and lock up for the night, when she heard someone loudly open up the front door. “Hi, Cady!” she heard Gage call out, and the panic that’d begun to bubble up inside of her instantly dissipated. It wasn’t lost on her that he was making a big production out of coming in to keep from scaring her in the process. It was damn thoughtful, and honestly more appreciated than any gift he could ever give her.

  She swung her purse over her shoulder and headed through the swinging door up to the front. “Hey, Gage,” she said, flashing him a quick smile, fiddling with the strap on her purse, not quite able to meet his eye. She’d spent the weekend in bed, sure, but she’d also spent it thinking over Fr
iday night, so she’d consoled herself with the idea that it hadn’t been a complete waste of time.

  And after two days of thinking about almost nothing else, she’d came to the conclusion that as tough as it’d been to talk to Gage, she’d also realized that having him simply listen and not judge her had been a Damn Big Deal in her world.

  She wasn’t blind, or ignorant, or stupid. She’d seen all of the online comments on news articles whenever a woman came forward with accusations of rape. She’d heard the unspoken questions in the commentator’s voices when discussing it during the evening news. Had it really happened? Or was the woman just overreacting? And even if it had happened, had the woman somehow brought it on herself through her own actions?

  But none of that had been there with Gage. It’d taken her the whole weekend to process that, and to truly realize how much that meant to her.

  That hard-on thing, though? It still made her as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, and she was pretty damn sure that wasn’t gonna change anytime soon. Lust and her just didn’t mix.

  “I wanted to stop by and see how you were doing today,” he said by way of greeting, pushing a hand wearily through his thick dark blond hair. “I kept meaning to come over earlier, but it was nuts at the bakery. Every person in town wanted to come over and congratulate me on taking Dickwad down,” he sent her a laughing grin at his proud usage of such a terrible nickname, “and to tell me that his dad got him out of jail already.” At that, his smile had disappeared and he looked downright pissed. “He’s out on bail, but everyone thinks the prosecutor is just going to drop the charges.”