Dream On

by Keith, Stacey

  Right. Another stupidly good-looking cheater like her bronc-busting, rodeo-circuit ex-husband. That was exactly what she needed.

  Maggie gave Mr. Lipsky his coffee. Sweetly, she said, “Not if you paid me.”

  An hour later the customers were gone, and she and Coralee looked at each other with a united sense of having accomplished something. The lipstick red café tables were askew. One chair lay upended. The gilt letters spelling out the name of the bakery, Sweet Dreams, twinkled serenely on the front window, mocking her.

  Maggie heaved herself up and trailed back to the kitchen. “Next time a member of my family gets married,” she told Coralee, “Please remind me to just take the day off, will you?”

  While Coralee sprayed down the display case and swept up discarded napkins, Maggie scooped fresh butter cream frosting into her pastry bag. She went to work finishing the row of pale pink florets. Once the cake was finished, Donny and his brother were coming over to carry it to the venue. The cake weighed about a ton. Afterwards, she’d run upstairs, grab a shower and her Maid-of-Honor gown, and then meet Cassidy and the rest of the bridesmaids for makeup. Dutifully, she told herself it might actually be fun.

  Coralee came into the kitchen and set the dustpan and the broom in a corner. “I just saw a news truck with one of those big satellite thingies on top. Do you think maybe they’re sending news stories about Cuervo to aliens in space?”

  “If they are, that pretty much explains why aliens almost never come here.” Maggie tilted her head to one side to assess her handiwork. “Does that row of florets look bigger to you? I can’t decide.”

  The bell above the door rang. Coralee rolled her eyes. “What do you want to bet it’s the same group as last time, come back for seconds?”

  “I’ll take care of it. Why don’t you get started on the dishes?” Maggie wiped her gloved hands on her apron and glanced at herself in the mirror next to the walk-in freezer. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a baker’s snood. Flour streaked her left cheek. She wiped it with the back of her wrist and then went out front, where two men and a woman waited, looking wildly out of place in her cozy country bakery.

  The taller of the two men wore a tux and the woman wore a full-length apricot silk Cubana dress. Maggie saw the clothes before she saw the faces. When she glanced up at the man, her heart nearly stopped.

  Wow.

  Maggie realized suddenly that her apron had cake batter on it and she wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup. She couldn’t breathe properly because all the air had left the room. There was a fluttering in her chest she hadn’t felt in a long time, coupled with an insane desire to turn around and run back into the kitchen. But that was stupid. What was she now—fifteen?

  “I’m guessing you folks are here for the wedding,” she said with her best professional sparkle. “May I help you?”

  The man frowned at her, which brought his piercing blue gaze off the menu on the wall above her head and directly to her flushed, perspiring face. God, how she hated her reaction to him, hated that while he assessed her coolly, everything inside her heated up like a thermometer plunged into boiling water.

  “You have coffee here, right?” the second man asked. He wore an expensive-looking suit with a red power tie and a matching pocket square. His nails were spotless, which wasn’t something you saw all that often in farm country.

  “We have coffee, espresso, cappuccino and iced coffees,” she said, wishing suddenly that she had a nice outfit on. And didn’t smell like a doughnut. And knew more people who dressed like this.

  “Two coffees,” Power Tie replied. “Both black.” He turned to the blonde woman, who shrugged slightly. “Make that three coffees.”

  Just being near the man in the tux made her nerve endings stir and tingle. Nobody that sexy had passed through Cuervo in a long time. She practically had to force herself to remember that good-looking men were bad news. If a man was handsome, you could count on him for two things: to screw you over and to break your heart.

  She gave her tingly feelings a violent shove to the side.

  It was hard not to feel sorry for the woman he was with. Poor thing. She’d never see it coming.

  Maggie inserted a portafilter into her Italian espresso machine. She turned the portafilter to the right and locked it into place. The machine was a thing of beauty, all chrome and knobs and levers. Even with her back turned, she could study the guy in the tux in the machine’s reflective surfaces. Yet the longer she looked, the more annoyed she became with herself. Men were trouble. A lot of trouble. She knew that. So why keep torturing herself?

  But there was something mysteriously self-assured about him that drew her in. He struck her as a man used to giving orders and to getting his own way. His hair, sandy blond, was cut short on the sides and slightly longer on top. His face was broad across the jaw and cheekbones, which saved him from being merely pretty.

  Maggie didn’t like pretty. She liked men who looked like men—who could wear work boots as well as tuxes.

  Mostly, she liked men you could depend on not to cheat on you the minute some woman flashed them a smile.

  She pressed the tamper down on top of the coffee grounds and squeezed hard, wishing she could do the same thing to her brain. It had taken her over three years to get her life back together again, and now it was exactly what a life was supposed to be: boring. The formula was simple, really. You worked. You spent time with your family. You knitted ridiculous sweaters for your pug. Rinse, lather and repeat. What you didn’t do was let yourself eyeball other women’s boyfriends.

  Rule #1: Never look twice at a good looking man who had a woman of unspecified importance standing next to him.

  Rule #2: Never look twice at a good looking man, period.

  Maggie finished making the coffee and then turned around with the three coffees wedged inside a cardboard carrying tray. She was aware that his eyes were on her and felt an electric sizzle zinging beneath her skin. But he practically oozed the kind of alpha maleness that set her teeth on edge. And he clearly had money.

  Men with good looks and money? You’d have to be certifiable to date someone like that.

  “That’s quite a cake,” he said, surprising her.

  He had a deep voice, like Sambucca mixed with cream and then set on fire.

  Maggie made the mistake of gazing directly into his eyes and felt the hair rise on her arms. His eyes were glacier blue and surrounded by dark bristly lashes. A woman could lose years of her life swimming in those things. “I beg your pardon?”

  He nodded toward the kitchen where the cake sat like a parade float. Coralee stood next to it, staring at him.

  Maggie didn’t like what was happening to her. His intense gaze felt as though he could see through her somehow, past the bossy efficiency, the big mouth, and her tendency to keep all men at a distance. For a second, the world fell away and it was just the two of them. She felt his lazy, dangerous maleness like she felt her own heartbeat. Then she blinked and the moment was gone.

  “It’s for the wedding,” Maggie said stiffly. “My sister’s wedding.”

  “You’re Cassidy’s sister? I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  What, did he think a woman like her, a woman who worked in a bakery, couldn’t possibly be related to a beautiful girl like Cassidy?

  He must have seen that the remark made her prickly, but instead of apologizing, he smiled. “You look nothing alike.”

  Coolly, she rang up three coffees on the vintage cash register. The total popped up on both sides of the display window. As a tall curvy brunette, she knew she looked nothing like her petite blonde sisters. So what? No need to make it sound as though she were adopted. And what did she care what his opinion was in the first place?

  “Five sixty-seven,” Maggie said, forcing herself to be pleasant. “Will that be cash?”

  Power Tie handed her a twenty. She m
ade change and then passed the tray of coffees over the counter, meaning to give it to him. Instead, the man in the tux took them from her. Briefly, their hands touched and she suppressed a shiver.

  She stole a guilty glance at the woman standing near the door, but the woman’s beautiful face seemed as though it were a gate through which nothing passed.

  “You ready, Jake?” Power Tie said. “There are some people I’d like you to meet. Commercial property investors out of San Antonio. They might be able to answer some questions for us.”

  Jake, was it? Maggie watched him collect his date and open the door. He looked even more impossible sexy in the pale April sunshine, which brought out the blond streaks in his hair and cast shadows beneath those Calvin Klein model cheekbones.

  The guy had cheater written all over him.

  “Wow,” Coralee said. “I didn’t know men who looked like that actually existed in the world.”

  Maggie turned away from the window and then marched back to the kitchen. “You can take it from me. The world would be a whole lot better if they didn’t.”