Sweet Love

by Lauren Accardo

  “Why’s that?” Mila asked.

  “You know,” Sydney said. “The hotel thing?”

  The group blinked at her, no one having a clue as to what she was talking about.

  “You guys haven’t heard about this? The new hotel going up outside of town?”

  “Great,” Sam grumbled. “That’s all we need. A hotel.”

  “Actually, it’s great for the area,” Sydney said. “It’ll lighten the burden on rental properties. Provide jobs. Anyway, they’re sponsoring the bake-off this year, since it’s the fiftieth anniversary and they want to get on the town’s good side. The winner gets a big cash prize, and their recipe will be featured at the hotel’s properties all over the country. They’re getting a celebrity judge, too. It’s supposed to be amazing exposure.”

  Mila’s full lips parted, her eyes locked on Sydney. “Wait . . . seriously?”

  “Yeah,” Sydney said. “How cool is that?”

  “God damn it, Aunt Georgie,” Mila muttered. “That’s sort of terrifying, right? I bet ten times more people will enter this year. And a celebrity judge?”

  “Only you would be turned off by this,” Nicole said. “What are you afraid of, anyway? You love to bake. It’s as easy as putting a pie in the oven.”

  Mila swallowed, tucked her chin, and glanced around the circle like the scared little mouse he knew she wasn’t.

  “Maybe she just likes to bake,” Sydney offered. “Not everything in life has to be a competition.”

  Jared and Nicole both looked at Mila, knowing it wasn’t true. Mila had flirted with the idea of selling pies, writing recipes, and taking the next step in some as-yet-undetermined culinary adventure for as long as they’d known her. A combination of cynical family and a lack of funds kept her in her place. But she’d always wanted more.

  “I need some air,” Mila said. She placed her empty beer bottle on the kitchen counter and slipped past Jared, a faint breeze of diner grease and lilac perfume trailing after her.

  “She acts like her pies aren’t the best thing since sliced bread,” Nicole said. “I should just sneak into her freezer, steal one, and enter it myself. She’d win even with a six-month-old apple tart.”

  “You know how she gets,” Jared said. “You gotta lay off her sometimes, Nic.”

  Nicole’s brow knit as she shrugged, a whisper of regret crossing her face. Jared snagged two more beers from the fridge before following Mila to the back porch. The icy wind stole his breath, and he hunched against the below-freezing temperatures. The thin flannel shirt he wore did little to protect him against the Adirondack spring.

  Despite the cold, he breathed deep, giving his lungs a break from the stuffy party air. His eyes slowly adjusted to the inky darkness surrounding the porch, the dense trees just beyond the railing concealing all sorts of bright-eyed creatures. Tonight the air and the woods stood perfectly still.

  “Where’s your coat, you dope?” She spoke without turning around, knowing it was him and knowing—probably by the chatter of his teeth—he hadn’t bothered with outerwear.

  “I’m fine.” But he knew if he didn’t go back for a coat, he’d likely die of hypothermia out here.

  In one swift motion, she tugged the scarf from her throat and tossed it at him before zipping her big blue parka up to her nose. He wrapped the soft wool around his neck and shoulders, breathing deeply as her clean, flowery scent filled his head.

  “Better guard your fridge,” he said. “Nicole’s threatening to enter one of your old, frozen pies.”

  She shot him her warning glare, the tiny diamond stud in her right nostril catching a thin shaft of moonlight. “She doesn’t understand how I could not want to enter a competition. You know her. Captain of the soccer team, valedictorian, leader of her Adirondack Mountain Rescue team. She’s the queen of Why-do-anything-if-you’re-not-gonna-be-the-best? And that’s just . . . not me.”

  He swallowed down the rest of his thoughts on the matter. That’s all he’d get out of her. Mila didn’t trash-talk her friends. Never had, never would. “I don’t think she tries very hard to understand you.”

  She shrugged, leaning back against the porch railing and tucking her face deeper into the coat. Only her eyes were visible, and they glowed like the lake in moonlight.

  “Where’s Chloe tonight?” She said Chloe’s name the way she always did. Like she had a gnat on her tongue.

  “Who knows?”

  Her narrowed gaze darted to his face. “You guys broke up again?”

  He waited for the delicate pang in his stomach that told him he was bummed that Chloe had finally ended things for good, but it wouldn’t come. Hadn’t come. Maybe this time he really, truly didn’t care. “Yeah. For good, I think.”

  She nodded slowly. “You seem devastated, J.”

  “Don’t let this stony facade fool you. I’ve been crying to Adele on my own time.”

  A short, sarcastic huff escaped her lips. “What happened?”

  “The marriage shit again. She’s waiting for a ring.”

  “Five years together and she still doesn’t know you at all, does she?”

  He shrugged, the frigid temperatures sneaking beneath his shirt and burrowing under his skin like a ghost. “It’s for the best. I mostly feel bad I wasted her time.”

  “She’ll get over it.”

  He cracked a smile. Was Mila happy about this? She’d never been particularly fond of his ex, but he’d always thought it was because they came from different worlds. In high school, Mila drew punk band names on her sneakers with Sharpies during class while Chloe sat in the front row and volunteered for extra credit. Mila was Hot Topic and the Ramones, beer in the parking lot on weekends. Chloe was Britney Spears and Forever 21, pep rallies and pom-poms and yearbook editor.

  He’d always thought he was meant to be with a Chloe. He gravitated toward Mila.

  “So what do you think about this bake-off?” she said. “Am I acting like a baby about something that doesn’t even really matter?”

  Half a laugh escaped his mouth. “First of all, I’m not sure I agree it doesn’t matter. I think it’s very cool, and it could be huge for you. Second of all, you’re totally acting like a baby.”

  “And Nicole’s the bully?”

  He licked his lips. “Nicole needs to learn how to tell the truth but be gentle about it.”

  “Was calling me a baby your attempt at gentle?”

  His brain skipped like a stone to something dirty that he’d definitely be gentle about, and he blinked to shake the vision. Why did that keep happening around her? For twenty-five years she’d been an asexual figure in his life, a buddy he’d go to for advice on first dates and girlfriends’ birthday gifts.

  One stupid pink bikini and he crumbled like a cookie.

  “I think,” he said, “instead of thinking about the prize money, the celebrity judge, the press coverage—”

  “Press coverage?” Her face twisted up, her brow creased.

  “Yeah. The hotel will want maximum exposure out of this if they’re putting money into it.”

  An exhale passed her coat, forming a white crystallized cloud in front of her face. “Great.”

  “My point is, forget the big, scary what-ifs. Focus on the first step. The pies. You’ve got that down.”

  She slipped a hand past the neck of her coat to gnaw on her thumbnail. “Not when it matters, I don’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Baking for fun is one thing.” Her gaze shifted, her mind traveling someplace else. “I just . . . I freeze up when it counts. It might seem like small potatoes to you, ruining a pie, but it’s embarrassing to watch someone eat something you made and make a face. Or worse, get sick.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Dude, stop. That was one time. And it turned out that Cruz kid had a gluten allergy nobody knew about.”

&n
bsp; “It’s more than that.” She paused. “I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t want it. Now I feel like I have to do it. I don’t know what made Aunt Georgie think I could succeed at it anyway.”

  “Maybe because you’ve got an insane amount of talent? Maybe because you shortchange yourself all the time?”

  She dropped her shoulders and glared over the narrow bridge of her nose at him. “Shortchange myself?”

  He shrugged. Did he want to bring this up now? She never took criticism very well, no matter how well-intentioned. “It’s just that sometimes the things you think you’ve failed at are just the things you never really gave yourself a shot at.”

  “Like all the other baking contests I’ve passed up?”

  “You’re joking, but . . . yeah. You’ve lived in Pine Ridge your whole life and never once entered the annual bake-off. You were eighteen before you got your license because you were convinced you’d be a terrible driver.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m still not a great driver.”

  “You didn’t apply to Brown because you somehow knew before you applied that you wouldn’t get in.”

  Her brow pinched, her eyes crinkling at the corners. He’d touched a nerve. “I didn’t have the money for Brown. I could barely cover the application fees for SUNY Potsdam.”

  “Sure, Lee. If that’s the story you want to stick to.” His breath came quicker. He forgot about her inherent ability to drag any conversation from optimistic to cynical in three seconds flat.

  “Well,” she said with a sarcastic lift of her brows. “This is one opportunity I can’t run away from. If I did, I’d basically be flushing Aunt Georgie’s life savings down the toilet. Happy now?”

  “You know what?” A smile twitched on his lips. “I am. I can’t wait to see what you come up with. You’re gonna kill it. I know you are.”

  She licked her lips, her eyelids lowering as she settled her intense stare on him. Despite her propensity for the shadows, once she set her sights on something, her gaze never wavered. When those eyes found him, they stripped away his bravado. The air around them grew thick with tension, and he shifted his weight.

  “You need a taste tester? I’m available.”

  “You’re a terrible taste tester,” she said. “You like everything.”

  “Nah, that bacon thing you made last year was disgusting.”

  With both hands, she shoved him, her tangle of curls brushing the delicate curve of her jaw. He laughed as the dull impact landed.

  “All right, fine,” she said. “We’ll come up with a scoring system from ‘bacon thing’ to . . .”

  “Caramel apple.” Just the mention of the decadent creation made him salivate. She’d made the pie for his birthday one year, apologizing because the filling had turned out thicker than she’d hoped. The dessert she’d inadvertently created became his all-time favorite, and he’d polished off the last quarter of it alone on the couch before he went to bed.

  “I call that one the happy accident.” The bridge of her nose wrinkled.

  “Hey, that’s what my mom called me.” He grinned. “Or was it the unhappy accident?”

  “Oh, stop. She loved you so much.”

  Angry sparks flared up in his chest, but this pain originated somewhere deeper. Sure, his mother loved him. But she’d never stopped demanding more of him. No grade he brought home was high enough, no article in the school paper had good enough placement. He’d felt like the disappointment since birth, and even after she’d passed, the shame hung over him like a December storm cloud.

  The grin melted from his lips. “Not where I want to go right now.”

  The door opened behind him, party noise spilling out into the formerly blissful quiet of the porch, and a couple of his brother’s drunk friends stumbled toward them.

  “Yo, Kirks,” Greg said. “You got a lighter out here?”

  Mila raised her eyebrows at him and moved toward the door. She unzipped the big blue coat, slipped it off her slight shoulders, and handed it to him. “Here. So you don’t catch pneumonia.”

  He took the coat and watched the door long after she’d disappeared through it.

  chapter two

  Heat accumulated inside Mila’s heavy down coat as she darted around her apartment, snagging her purse from her bedroom floor and biting back the curse words threatening to erupt from her lips. No time for bitterness now.

  She slipped her feet into trusty black leather boots, reached for her keys, and instead scraped her nails against the dingy white paint of the apartment walls where her keys should’ve hung.

  “Shit.” Panic prickled at her throat. Had her mother not dropped in this morning unexpectedly, interrupting her recipe testing and trying her patience all at once, she’d have had an extra moment to look for the keys. Now she had to decide if it was faster to search or jog the mile and a half to the diner so Benny didn’t rip her a new one.

  She trailed through her bag with fingers tense from kneading pie crust all morning but came up empty. One last check of her bedroom. An empty wineglass and a handful of Ferrero Rocher wrappers littered the nightstand, but still, no keys.

  She gritted her teeth, unable to push out her mother’s voice. Don’t waste too much time or money on this bake-off thing, hun. You don’t want to get your hopes up.

  How many times had she heard it over the years? Basketball tryouts, school musical auditions, the time she alone had prepared a huge Christmas Eve dinner for the whole family and openly told her mom she hoped everyone enjoyed it.

  Don’t get your hopes up. The Bailey family mantra.

  Mila’s eyes swept the apartment one more time before she huffed out a frustrated sigh, swapped her leather boots for running shoes, and headed off to work.

  She arrived at the diner twenty minutes later, rogue curls clinging to her neck and jaw, and her white T-shirt stuck to her skin underneath her heavy coat. It had been years since she’d sprinted. Her lungs burned, her heart slammed against her ribs. A trip to the gym seemed long overdue.

  “There you are!” Amy, her teenaged coworker, rolled her big green eyes and yanked off her apron. “I’m gonna be late for my doctor’s appointment. I told you I had to leave at noon today.”

  Mila tossed her bag and coat under the counter, wishing she had a single moment to catch her breath. But those moments were few and far between these days.

  “I’m sorry,” Mila said. “I couldn’t find my keys—”

  “Anyway.” Amy cut her off. “I gotta run. Oh, and Ethan called. He’s got a cold, so he’s not coming in today.”

  Amy slipped into her jacket and sent Mila a sorry shrug. God damn it. Ethan LaMotta had begged for the busser job, told Benny he needed the extra cash for drum lessons his mom couldn’t afford. In the three months since the kid had taken the job, he’d called out four times. She’d wanted to rat him out to Benny so they could hire someone dependable. And yet, she held her tongue.

  The lunch rush came in a deluge, and Mila zipped around the restaurant, filling and taking orders, checking on regulars, clearing plates, and gritting her teeth against complaints. As soon as she had one table settled, another needed more soda, a clean fork, more napkins.

  Freaking Ethan. She’d chew him out next time he was in.

  “Excuse me, miss, I’ve been waiting twenty minutes for a coffee refill.” Mila spun on her heel, the word understaffed hot on her tongue and ready to snap out.

  Instead, she grinned. Jared leaned over the counter, a smirk hanging on his lips. He wore his Saturday casual clothes—fitted, faded jeans; a worn blue-and-green plaid shirt; and a navy peacoat—with his fawn-brown hair swept back in one tidy swoop. The lingering spring chill lent a pink tint to his cheeks, and Mila swallowed down the giddiness fluttering in her chest.

  “My deepest apologies,” she said. “As you can see, we’re short-staffed today, and customers who tip
most get priority service.”

  His grin faded, but the sparkle in his eye did not. “Oh yeah? Cash, or do you accept creative tips?”

  “I’ve served you here before,” she said. “Your most creative tip was a pile of nickels.”

  “I was hammered,” he said. “I thought you’d think it was funny. I mean, I had to go out of my way to collect nickels from everyone in the restaurant for that gag. No props for effort?”

  “Mila! Can I get a side of bacon, hun?”

  Mila’s gaze flickered to where Annette Bethel waved at her from a corner table, a single egg with toast in front of her. Annette ate at Black Bear Diner every single day. She spent twenty minutes poring over a menu that hadn’t changed in twenty years and eventually ordered the exact same thing. As soon as the egg and toast were delivered, she remembered she wanted something else.

  Mila leaned toward Jared. “Get your own coffee, yeah?”

  He sat up on his counter stool like a puppy that had been offered a treat. “I’m allowed behind the counter?”

  “This one time,” she said. “Don’t make it a habit.”

  With a joyous little-boy glow on his cheeks, he hopped off the stool and scurried around the counter before retrieving the coffeepot and filling a mug.

  “Kirkland! Fill me up, will ya?”

  Jared shot Mila a See what you started? grin and poured dark roast brew into the customer’s waiting mug. He shed his coat, tossed it under the counter, and filled another coffee cup. And another. As Mila entered Annette Bethel’s side of bacon into the register, she watched her best friend saunter around the diner, the coffeepot held high like some sort of award.

  He rolled up his sleeves and continued his rounds, leaning over tables, his shiny white teeth gleaming and drawing smiles from waiting customers. No wonder he’d gone into sales. Even tables with full mugs waved him over to chat.

  Mila jotted down orders on her notepad, but her eyes drifted back to Jared. The prickly mood in the diner shifted with his presence. Each table he visited lightened somehow, and as the carafe emptied, he slipped behind the counter and set to work making a fresh pot.