by Sophia Gray
He continued to study the little bakery. It was a small space wedged between a bicycle repair shop and an insurance office—not the most ideal location, a little off the main street downtown—but it looked busy enough. There were a handful of customers even now, in the middle of the morning.
The business sign hanging above the door was impressive, too. It was obvious to him that some work and thought had gone into it. The script was elegant but not overdone, the colors pastel without seeming too delicate. He looked at the logo and he saw Bridgette there.
Bridgette. Having her in front of him last night, even mad as hell, had sent him into a frenzy. Her skin had been so close to his at one point that he could smell her perfume—the same musky yet sweet scent she’d always worn.
She’d grown up in six years. The shallow slopes of her teenage body had deepened, and now she was a series of tempting curves that seemed to beg for him to caress them. She’d let her hair grow longer, too; he liked that. He’d always loved her red locks, and now they tumbled wildly past her shoulders.
Her face was older now. That had caught him off guard. In his mind, whenever he thought of her, her slender features were lifted in laughter. That was how he’d remembered her—young, carefree, teeth always flashing in a wide, beautiful grin, her eyes crinkled with joy or half-lidded with passion.
But now…now he could see the shadows of lines on that face and deep rings beneath her eyes. She’d been shut down, closed off, wary, and her face had been hard and unforgiving. It made her look older and sadder. The change made him uneasy.
Falcon drew out a cigarette, lit it, and pushed in through the front door. A few of the customers—an older, heavier woman, a man in a pressed suit, and a mother with two young kids in tow—turned to give him a dirty look. He just grinned at them and exhaled slowly, filling the room with a stinking cloud of smoke.
“Excuse me, sir, but you can’t smoke in here.”
Falcon glanced up to see Bridgette behind the counter, dressed in a blue button-up blouse and a white apron, an apologetic smile stretched across her face in a thin veneer of civility. But he could see the hatred burning in her eyes. She wanted him gone.
She looked okay, he thought, taking another slow, deliberate drag on his cigarette. Martin’s guy hadn’t hurt her, it seemed. She was wearing a high-collared shirt, though, so he couldn’t see if there was any bruising.
He pretended to examine the cloud of smoke for a minute. “Huh. Seems like I can. Oh, do you mean you don’t want me to smoke in here?”
Bridgette ignored him, muttering what looked like a quick apology to the customer she was serving. Falcon hung near the back, pretending to be browsing the pastries in the glass display while she took care of all the customers. Once they’d paid and left—glaring at him one last time on the way out—and the shop had emptied out, Bridgette’s attention flickered right back to him.
“What the hell do you want?” she demanded. “Was I not clear enough last night? I don’t want you anywhere near me. Get out.”
“It’s a free country, isn’t it?” he replied coolly. “Can’t deny me service. That would be discrimination.”
“We reserve the right to not serve assholes,” she retorted. “And it’s illegal to smoke inside a business. That’s grounds enough to get you thrown out.”
Falcon snorted. “Who’s gonna throw me out? You have a bouncer hiding out in the kitchen back there? Or are you going to do it yourself?”
Bridgette picked up the phone. “One call down to the station and you’re gone.”
Falcon just stared her down. Her eyes were fiery, betraying no hesitation, but he knew her well enough. She wouldn’t follow through. He was sure that hadn’t changed over the years. She’d had run-ins with too many patronizing, entitled cops during her younger years, and she’d told him too many times how any interaction with the boys in blue unfailingly left a bad taste in her mouth. She was bluffing.
“Go ahead. I’m sure they’d love to make a doughnut run.”
She continued to hold the phone in her hand for a while longer, clutching it too tightly, her gaze boring into him. Then she seemed to give up and dropped it back down. “What do you want?”
“To talk to you. To see you.”
“To piss me off. To antagonize me. Is that about right?”
Falcon sidled up to the counter and ground his cigarette out against the surface before flicking it into a nearby trash can. “Maybe I came down to buy a cookie.”
“So buy a damned cookie and get out.”
“I save your ass and you’re going to make me pay for my own cookie?”
Bridgette leaned over the counter toward him.
That was the thing with her. When she was mad, she could scream and shout and go red in the face. She used to wake up the whole building when she was telling him off.
But when he really did something asinine, whenever she was really, truly upset, she would drop her voice down so low he could barely hear her. And the absence of volume and emotion made her words all the more potent.
“I can’t afford to give things away. I had a jackass boyfriend, you see, who took all my money and skipped town and left me flat broke. And now I have rent and utilities and daycare fees and a shit ton of other bills piling up. So if you want a cookie, yeah, you’re going to pay for it.”
Falcon felt a needle prick of guilt at her words. But what he felt most was the heat of her skin and the brush of her breath on his cheek. He itched to feel her pressed against him again, to go back to that time when they were still together, running around like every corner of the town belonged to them and only them.
He missed waking up with his face buried in her hair, smelling her shampoo. He missed the thousand times he’d grabbed her and felt her melt into him, eager and greedy for his touch.
It hadn’t gone away, that magnetism. He knew she felt it, too. It was too powerful a thing to be one-sided. Everything they’d had years ago was still there, waiting to be reawakened. All she needed was a little nudge.
He grabbed her head and pulled her to him, meeting her lips with a demanding kiss. She seemed startled. Her lips parted automatically, and he took the moment to delve into that warm, wet cavern, darting his tongue over hers. He relished the velvety texture of her lips against his as he explored her mouth, refamiliarizing himself with territory he’d once known so well.
She didn’t resist at first. It was like nothing had changed, like the years dividing them hadn’t even existed. For a few blissful seconds he was twenty again, hovering over the top of her on the mattress in their shared apartment, kissing her awake like he would almost every morning.
Then she pulled away—not gradually, but sharply, all at once. One second her mouth was there and the next it wasn’t. Her green eyes met his, shocked and livid.
She slapped him. Hard. Right across the cheek. Hard enough to make his head ring from the impact.
He pulled back, but he couldn’t help but grin a little.
“What in the hell do you think—where do you get off—,” she sputtered, too angry to string words together in to a coherent sentence.
“Oh, come on,” he exclaimed, reaching for her hand.
She withdrew it violently before he could even touch it.
“You know there’s still something between us, baby. We were good together. And we could still be good together. You felt that. I know you did.”
“Yeah, I felt your snake tongue down my throat, if that’s what you mean. How stupid are you? I tell you I want nothing to do with you, and you think that’s an invitation to kiss me?”
“You put up this act all you want, Bridgette, but I see right through it. I left because I fucking had to, not because I wanted to. You and me, we were always like this.” He held up his crossed fingers to her. “We can start over. Pick up where we left off.”
“Christ, you sound like a daytime soap. But this isn’t television. I live in the real world, Kyle, with real bills and real problems. Your lines aren�
��t going to work on me. I don’t have time to waste on soul-searching to find some way to forgive you. I picked up the pieces and I moved on. You should do the same.”
Falcon didn’t answer her. It was clear to him that he wasn’t going to make her see the truth. Not today, at least. She’d always been stubborn, always one to hold a grudge.
But she was still here. He didn’t believe much in fate, but if there was ever a clear sign, here it was. He had a chance to make it right with her, to recover what he thought he’d lost forever when Martin had gotten ahold of him.
She should have moved on after he’d left. There was nothing for her in this town—no family, no friends. Just memories. But she’d stayed, and maybe it was because of him, because she wanted him to find her.
Bridgette was damn stubborn, but she would forgive him. He would make her understand why he’d left. And then everything would be right again.
“By move on, I mean get the hell out of my bakery and don’t come back,” she clarified, her tone caustic.
“I haven’t decided what cookie I want yet,” he mocked. He couldn’t resist. There was something irresistible about her when she was pissed off, or there was some sadistic part of him that enjoyed her frustration.
She grabbed something sprinkled with nuts, shoved it into a white paper bag, and thrust it over the counter at him.
He took it, smiling pleasantly. “What’s the damage?”
“It’s on the house, with the condition that you skulk off to wherever the hell you were before last night and leave me to live my life in peace.”
“And if I don’t agree to that condition?”
“I file a restraining order,” she hissed, “and then the next time you pull this shit, they lock you up so you’re no longer a problem.”
“I’ll think about it. See you around.” He blew her a kiss and sauntered out the door.
As soon as the bell jingled and the heavy glass door slammed closed behind him, he turned his thoughts back to Martin. There was no way in hell Bridgette’s bakery had anything to with his drug operation.
Either the kingpin was confused or there was something he was missing. Either way, things were looking suspicious. And after last night, he wasn’t about to take the chance of Bridgette getting caught in the crossfire.
He’d call for backup. Bill, Leo, and Shark—three of the Reapers who’d run some business out of the area where Martin was based—had agreed to help him do whatever he needed to do to take care of things. Between the four of them, he knew they’d get things sorted out.
He cast a glance back at Bridgette’s bakery. What he wouldn’t give to have her again, to take her back to the house he was staying at and explore every inch of her, to see how much she’d really changed. She’d come around, he knew. Eventually she’d see.
He had a feeling that coming back like this, getting tangled up with Martin again, was him coming full circle. It was a chance to eliminate the drug lord, whose shadow he’d lived in for too long.
There was a feeling of finality in this return. A sense in him that this would all end with him facing down the man who’d set in motion the last hellish years of his life, and his transformation from Kyle to Falcon.
He was better now. Stronger. Capable of protecting what was his. He wasn’t the same scared little shit whose only option was to run. He was a man now. Martin had threatened him, forced him to abandon his girl and his life with her. The drug lord owed him for that, and Falcon intended to collect.
And once that had been set straight, and the wrong repaid, there would be nothing standing in the way of sharing his life with Bridgette.
God, it was good to see her again.
Chapter 5
Bridgette
Bridgette paused, her hand hovering on the car door latch. She stole one final glance at herself in her rearview mirror, trying to assess how she looked.
Like shit. Still. The coffee hadn’t helped her at all. And she didn’t have time to run to the drugstore for concealer. She had to open the bakery soon or she’d start the morning behind, and she couldn’t handle that stress on top of everything else.
It hadn’t been a good night. Kyle coming back to town had left her head spinning, and she’d agonized until the early hours of the morning about how she wanted to handle things. Sure, she’d told him that she wanted nothing to do with him and that he should just fuck off, but part of her wanted him to stay.
As much as she wanted to lie to herself about that kiss—that he’d forced it on her, that she felt nothing—she knew there had been a spark there. The taste of him was addictive, and she wanted more. The past be damned.
For the first few hours of lying awake she’d almost convinced herself to take him back and just see what happened. It would be like letting go and letting gravity do its work, she thought. Because her attraction to him seemed like a natural law of the universe—a force beyond her power to control. She’d missed him so much for those first months.
Not that she wasn’t still pissed at him.
She’d shaken herself out of those plans, though, when Gabby had come to crawl into her bed, claiming she’d had a bad dream. Bridgette had stroked her little girl’s red curls until she’d drifted back off to sleep, Gabby’s tiny body curled against her side.
Kyle may not have been good for her, Bridgette thought, but she was a big girl capable of dealing with the fallout.
Kyle definitely would not be good for Gabby. He was too rough, too wild. He wasn’t a father—only a baby daddy—and she was determined to keep it that way. She wasn’t about to let him into her life only to have him walk back out. She could survive another heartbreak, but she wouldn’t put Gabby through that.
That should have been the end of it. But the decision to keep Kyle out of her life, even when he was so close, had unsettled her. She’d tossed and turned for hours, desperately trying to devise a way to reconcile everything—her lingering anger at him, her desire to be with him, her need to protect Gabby.
And now she saw the price for her fitful night. Deep, bruise-colored rings under her eyes, a thin spider web of red over the whites of her eyes, and a dead stare fit for the walking dead. She’d seen better days.
She turned from the mirror and forced herself to leave the car. No time to worry about it now. There was too much to do. She was almost looking forward to losing herself in the monotony of her morning routine, making up the doughs and batters she would need for the batches of sweets scheduled for the day.
She made the trek from the parking lot to the street her bakery was on, already starting to break down and organize the tasks she’d have to accomplish in her mind. But as she rounded the corner onto the street, she found herself face to face with Kyle. Again.
He was in the middle of a call, phone pressed to his ear. “I don’t know, six or seven,” he was saying. He locked eyes with her, and the warning she saw flashing there was enough to arrest her in her tracks. “I have no idea.”
Bridgette tried to shake herself from the paralysis his dangerous expression had induced. She stalked over to him, fuming. What in the hell was he doing here again? Christ, did she have to bash him over the head with a frying pan before he got the message?
“You need to leave,” she spat, “this instant—“
He raised his brow at her, seeming to dare her to continue. There was an intensity in his expression that seemed to hold some kind of power over her, because her words died in her throat.
“You might have to,” Kyle replied to whatever had been said. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, but it doesn’t smell right to me. Okay, man, thanks. See you soon.” Kyle hung up the phone and slipped it back into his kutte.
Something caught the corner of Bridgette’s eye. She shifted her attention from Kyle to the door of the bakery, searching for whatever detail had set her off. The glass was cracked a little, the door pushed open, and part of the welcome mat caught in the door….
Her heart seemed to stop in her chest. She�
�d locked up last night. Hadn’t she? Yes, of course she did. She always locked up. It was a habit. When the door closed behind her for the night, she would reach back and give the handle a little tug just to feel the resistance of the deadbolt. It was one of the little rituals she’d developed over the years, something that gave her reassurance.
So why was the door open?
“Bridgette,” Kyle began, but she ignored him.
She flung the door back and hurried inside, her eyes searching the whole place over, checking for signs of damage. Nothing had been shattered or rearranged—not that she could tell. She rushed over to the cash register. It looked completely undamaged.
She fumbled for her keys, searching for the little stubby one that would unlock the register. The money had to be there. She couldn’t be short this week. She hadn’t had a chance to run to the bank yet to make her cash deposit.