by Molly Harper
This was a bad sign, in terms of her character. Nice Southern women didn’t turn on family members when a handsome-but-judgmental law enforcement officer showed interest in them.
And what was Eric thinking, showing that much interest in her cousin? Surely he had to know that Margot and the local elementary school principal, Kyle Archer, were Facebook-official. Then again, being an outsider with no family in the area, he was cut off from most of the traditional channels for “local news”—the kitchen table, the beauty parlor, the church parking lot.
Oh, what did she even care? She didn’t have any claim on Eric Linden. She didn’t think she even wanted a claim. She just didn’t want him looking like Christmas had come early when he thought about spending time in Margot’s office. Because of reasons. That had nothing to do with Eric’s face. His stupid, beautiful face.
“Just up the stairs. And she was only kidding about the blood oath,” Frankie said, rolling her eyes. As soon as Eric relaxed just the tiniest bit, she added, “She’ll accept tears.”
Eric’s mouth dropped open, making Frankie laugh as she turned to Mr. Watts. When she heard Eric move toward the stairs, she called over her shoulder, “Sheriff?”
His boots scraped against the floor as he stopped.
“The dead, they aren’t scary. Even if they were scary in life, they’re not any particular way in death. Not angry, not sad, not happy. They’re nothin’ at all. They’re not there,” she said.
“And yet you talk to them.”
She turned and smiled at him. “Just because they’re dead is no reason to be rude.”
She told herself the little shudder in Eric’s shoulders was due to the air-conditioning.
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Click here to continue reading Ain’t She a Peach?!
Gimme Some Sugar excerpt
Praise for the Southern Eclectic Series
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"Packed with countless laughs and heartfelt moments....This romance is classic Harper, oozing snark and Southern charm in every scene." (Publishers Weekly on Gimme Some Sugar)
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***Selected for Target Recommends Book Club Pick in April***
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Preorder Gimme Some Sugar here!
(out 4/2/19)
Chapter 1
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NICE SOUTHERN GIRLS did not make money baking penis cakes.
Lucy Bowman Garten was going to hell on a road paved with devil’s food and peach-toned buttercream.
Technically, she wasn’t even supposed to be working in her bake shop, which would eventually be called Gimme Some Sugar, as it wasn’t officially open. Hell, she’d only leased the defunct Hardison’s Meat Shop two months ago, before she’d even arrived back in town. And she’d had to do that under a limited liability company so her mother-in-law wouldn’t find a way to interfere with the rental agreement. Evie Garten had a surprising number of friends around town, despite the fact that she was ten pounds of mean in a five-pound sack.
While the kitchen was cleaned and ready and could easily pass a health inspector’s perusal—if the mealy-mouthed, liver-spotted bastard would ever show up for his damn appointments—the displays were still fitted for the enormous hunks of pork the former meat shop used to sell, and the “café area” looked like a hoarder intervention waiting to happen. Also, as a minor point, Lucy’s business license was still mired in the initial hoops set up by Sackett County’s small but byzantine government. So Lucy was doing this somewhat inadvisable job for a high school friend so far under the table she was practically subterranean. She wasn’t even being paid—Maddie’s fiancé was going to do some plumbing work for her in return for her obscene baking skills.
The next time she got a text message that started with So, I’m hosting a bachelorette party . . . she was going to respond with Do I know you?
Lucy finished the very last swirl on the royal icing E and stood back to survey her work—an eighteen-inch penis lying flat across a silver-foiled cake board, with eat me written across its testicles in hot pink.
She would not be taking pictures of this for her shop’s website.
Lucy did not understand the compulsion to eat phallic baked goods for a girl’s last hurrah before marriage. She re- membered how hopeful and excited she’d been before she’d married Wayne. She’d wanted to start her married life as soon as possible. She’d thought, I can’t wait to spend the rest of my days with the man I love. She hadn’t thought, I better eat all of the buttercream-frosted appendage I can because I might not have the chance again.
Then again, she’d been a hopeful, excited idiot before she married Wayne, so what the hell did she know?
She blew out a long sigh and said, “Well, it’s grotesquely enormous and painstakingly detailed. And baking it has been the most action I’ve seen in years . . . so it’s perfect.”
Wiping her hands on her purple doughnut-themed apron, Lucy crossed to her carefully organized supplies and selected a large, unmarked sheet cake box—which, unfortunately for Lucy, had a little cellophane display window on top. She wasn’t eager to show this cake off, but it was the only box large enough to accommodate it.
Once the cake was secured, she put a Braves cap over her coppery auburn curls and carried it out the front door, carefully propping it against the half-collapsed wooden flower box in front of the shop while she struggled to fit the key in the door’s original and extremely tricky lock.
As usual, Main Street was bustling with midafternoon traffic: people driving home from work, ferrying their kids from school to baseball practice, the usual. She saw a couple of nearby shop owners out on the sidewalk, cleaning windows and hanging up flower baskets. February in Lake Sackett always felt like holding one’s breath, the last few weeks of quiet before the tourists descended on the town’s beautiful waterfront. At least, it had been that way when Lucy had been growing up—locals handed the town off to the tourists with smiles on their faces, happy to get their much-needed cash. However, it was always a relief when those same tourists cleared out in September.
After she and Wayne moved away for school, “mistakes were made” at the Sackett Dam and the Army Corps of Engineers released ten times the amount of water meant to be drained from Lake Sackett, right at the beginning of what became an ex- tended drought. Lake levels dropped to an all-time low. Tourists didn’t want to risk their boats on a diminished, sad lake where they could potentially run aground in areas that used to be safe. That meant less money coming into the businesses, which meant less capital for those businesses to make improvements, which meant dilapidated motels and shops that fewer tourists were eager to spend their time at—and on and on the cycle went. Little extras like discounts and free samples were the first thing to go, followed by friendly smiles and easy conversations. Her dad said that tourists sensed this anxious energy and booked their weekends in areas that didn’t seem quite so edgy.
The town’s economy had stalled to the point where Wayne claimed that visiting their families was becoming “too depressing.” Wayne didn’t want to see their hometown all run-down and empty, like something out of a bad horror movie. He said he wanted to remember it as it was.
Well, he was never that eager to visit Lake Sackett in the first place, but nostalgic sentimentality had been a convenient excuse. If her dad wanted to spend Christmas with them, Wayne had said, he could come to Texas and visit. Lord knew his own parents had accepted enough airline tickets on Wayne’s dime.
Lucy shook her head. Thinking about her daddy, or Wayne’s mama, for that matter, was not going to improve her already tense mood. So Lucy would focus on the positive. Thanks to some very concentrated effort by the recently established Lake Sackett Tourism Board, tourism to the town’s hotels, rentals, restaurants, and quaint little shops was slowly coming back to the numbers enjoyed before the water dump sent the town into a tailspin. Lucy was building a business in a town on the rise, no matter who thought she was a “damn fool” to do it.
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��Would you just lock, you sonofabitch?” she hissed, jangling her keys as she struggled to get the lock to tumble. She leaned her ball-capped forehead against the glass of the door, glad that her four-year-old wasn’t around to hear her using foul language. The little sponge would probably repeat it at some terribly awkward moment, like in front of the local Baptist minister.
“Hey, let me help you with that!”
She turned . . . and screamed internally to see Duffy McCready jogging down the sidewalk of Main Street.
Duffy had been her very best friend in elementary school. She’d neglected friendships with the girls in their grade so she could play trucks in the sandbox with Duffy. She shared the Goo Goo Clusters in her lunchbox with him and only him. And in high school, well, she’d harbored a secret crush on him that reduced her to some very embarrassing diary entries, not to mention late-night-call impulses that made adult Lucy very grateful Pete Bowman had never allowed his teenage daughter a cell phone. Duffy had been one of her favorite people on the planet for years and she was so glad to reconnect with him after their years-long separation. But Holy Lord, right now, she wanted him to either go away or go blind.
Temporarily.
She wasn’t evil or anything.
With the ladies-who-lunch crowd back in Texas, this was the sort of thing she would brazen her way through—smile, laugh it off, pretend it was a big joke. But this was Duffy McCready, her Lake Sackett Achilles’ heel.
Duffy moved to take the keys from her while Lucy tried to angle the box out of his line of sight. This brought her closer to Duffy’s tall frame as he hovered over her to work the lock. Between the warmth radiating off of his body and the smell of leather and cinnamon gum, Lucy had to brace herself against the brick to keep her knees from giving way.
Settle down, girls, she warned them. That way lies madness and tears and a crazy ex-wife who tried to push you down the stairs in high school.
Her knees argued that it had been a very long time since she’d been so close to a nice-smelling man. And Duffy was a reliable, emotionally stable sweetheart who wouldn’t mind a sniff or two between friends. Her knees were a very bad influence.
Duffy grunted and managed to flip the key in the ancient lock. He turned to smile at her, his face only inches from hers. Her breath caught as she got her very first look at adult Duffy up close, and her knees were now giving her very bad ideas. Her childhood friend had turned into a hunk of something.
Long of limb, broad of shoulder, and possessed of dear Lord, don’t even get me started blue eyes, what little baby fat Duffy’d had on his face had long since resolved into sharp cheekbones and a strong, square jaw. She stared at his mouth, somehow soft and inviting-looking even under that scruff of gingery beard. His brows drew together and his mouth opened as if he was going to say something. But his eyes cut toward the cake box, which had shifted during Lucy’s knee failure.
Duffy frowned and tilted his head. “Is that a . . . ?” Lucy cringed, so very hard. Duffy had seen her penis.
She squeezed her eyes tight, even as she felt him move away from her. The blood rushed to her cheeks in a hot, humiliated wave. “Yes, yes, it is.”
“Wha—Who—” Duffy’s laugh burst out of him in a shocked bark. “Why?”
“I don’t know!”
Duffy burst out laughing. Lucy’s shoulders shook with her own giggles, despite the absolute mortification of Duffy knowing she’d spent the past few hours crafting edible genitalia from sugar and butter. “I honestly don’t know. Maddie Paxton is having her bachelorette party and she insists she can’t have a cake unless it’s penis-shaped. I’m just glad I wasn’t asked to order the penis gummy candy.”
“Women are a mystery,” Duffy said, shuddering as if he was imagining those particular confections being consumed. “A beautiful, divine, horrifying mystery.”
She sighed, moving toward her truck to put the cake in the passenger seat . . . far, far out of sight. “Yeah, I don’t think this sort of thing counts toward the feminine mystique.”
“If it makes you feel any better, it looks very realistic.”
“No, that does not make me feel better.” She shook her head and an enormous, blinding-white smile spread over his face, crinkling those big baby blues of his.
“So, welcome back to Lake Sackett,” Duffy said, laughing, opening his arms in what could be construed as an invitation for a hug. She laughed and stepped toward him and he wrapped those long arms around her in an awkward embrace that didn’t quite press their bodies together. A wave of disappointment swept through her, leaving her confused. Duffy was apparently one of those men—meaning pretty much all of them—who considered her a sexless nonentity now that she was a mother.
But that shouldn’t affect her at all, right? Weak knees, lantern jaws, and full-body hugs had never been part of the equation for them in the first place, so why did she feel that keen sense of loss when Duffy kept his distance?
“So, what are you up to?” he said, frowning slightly as she shoved the truck door closed.
“I’m opening a bakery,” she said, gesturing to the meat shop’s windows.
“Really?” he said, the corners of his mouth lifting. “I thought you wanted to be a marketing guru. PR and crisis management, all that stuff? I always pictured you walking around in office buildings, barking orders while people handed you stuff to sign.” Lucy laughed, thinking of her life back in Texas, which had mostly revolved around scheduling playdates for Sam and trying to find inventive new ways to hide Wayne’s phone during dinner.
“Yeah, it was a real rat race.”
“Well, I’m glad you got away from all that,” he said. “So you’re going to turn the meat shop into a bakery?”
“Sure. It’s got the right wiring to support the new ovens, fridge, and cooler cases I’ve had installed, along with a new sink. And it’s got loads of counter space for me to work with.”
Lucy didn’t mention the difficulty getting contractors who would work on the space on any sort of reasonable schedule, or how many she’d had walk off the job because they were distantly related to Evie or because Evie had sent Wayne’s little brother, Davey, to harass them while they worked. She’d finally had to hire a crew out of Atlanta who didn’t give a damn about local connections and made it clear they’d whoop Davey’s ass if he kept coming around. Davey, who usually lost interest once someone his own size made it clear they would put up a fight, skulked away and the work was finally finished.
Instead, she said, “I’ve got all of the kitchen changes made, now I just have to finish prepping and painting the café area.”
“You mean the place where people used to stand in line with deer carcasses waiting to have them processed?”
“It will be very bright paint,” she told him. “People won’t even recognize it.”
“So are you gonna be doing wedding cakes and all that?”
“Sure, wedding cakes, birthday cakes, cupcakes, anything people will pay me to bake. It’s something I started when my son, Sam, was a baby, making cakes for friends, just to relieve some stress, then doing birthday cakes for their kids as Sam got older. I got pretty good at it, took some classes and got some certifications, and now, here we are. I figured it would be a good way to make a living but have the flexibility to keep up with Sam.”
“And you should be pretty popular. Ever since the Dunbars closed their bakery over Christmas, people have been getting all their bought cakes at the Food Carnival. From what I hear, they taste like freezer-burned feet.”
“Which is great, because my slogan is going to be ‘Doesn’t taste like freezer-burned feet!’ ”
He barked out a laugh. “Well, you’re the marketing guru,” he said, nodding toward the storefront, where the former meat shop’s faded weekly special signs and hanging meat hooks were still on display, like an art installation entitled Failed Scary Commerce. “Though the whole Texas Chain Saw Massacre theme, combined with the carb-based porno, might make me take that back.”
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nbsp; Lucy spread her hands over her warm cheeks. “I will never do a bachelorette party favor for a friend. For anyone. Ever again.”
“Good, I hear that’s how bakers get reputations.”
She laughed. She’d missed how easily Duffy could make her laugh. It was like his special talent in high school, taking everything in her life and making it seem like it wasn’t so bad.
Because he’s your friend, she told herself firmly. Duffy is a friend, a good man who deserves a heck of a lot more than being dragged into your mess of a life right now or at any time.
And suddenly Duffy wasn’t laughing anymore. His ruddy cheeks went pale and he looked a bit sick. “Oh my Lord, I just realized, I haven’t even said anything about Wayne. I just—I saw you and the penis cake and I just got so distracted.”
“Oh, no,” Lucy assured him. “It’s okay.”
“No, I was raised better than this,” he said, stepping even farther away from her. “I was really sorry to hear about Wayne. That must have been awful for you. How are you holding up?”
She swallowed thickly. Right, awful. Because she’d only been a widow for six months. And she was supposedly in mourning.
Lucy had her share of regrets about Wayne. In high school, she’d thought he was one of the most interesting, ambitious people she’d ever met. He had a great sense of humor. He was charming and could be so thoughtful when it suited him. But eventually, the sense of humor became as sharp and biting as new vinegar. The charm was worn down by the grind of everyday life, and all the lead showed through the gold plating. She was left with a man who seemed like such a loving husband from the outside, a good ol’ country boy who’d raised himself out of nothing to become a polished prince at Crenshaw and Associates Financial Management; but he couldn’t see her as anything but a member of his “support team,” a convenience, and occasionally, a source of embarrassment—certainly not as sophisticated as anyone they spent time with from his office.