Zane chuckled softly, which did amazing things for his features. “So make it less scary. What do you say?”
It didn’t seem polite to punch the air in victory or fall at his feet, but she definitely couldn’t hold back her smile now. Instead, she let it spread as wide as it wanted to go, come what may.
“If you’re going to insist, I suppose I’d better go along.” She found herself shaking her head, her cheeks already aching, even as she tried to roll her eyes. “I was planning on going to the bakery after this for some cocoa and a pastry.”
His eyes narrowed. “Your family’s? Across the street?”
“That’s the one,” she confirmed. “Chocolate and carbs, if you will. If that’s on your athletic diet, I’d be happy to have you meet me there on purpose.”
The smile Zane gave her as he straightened did unspeakable things to the backs of her knees and up her thighs. “I don’t care what’s on my diet, Mara Matthews. Chocolate and carbs is perfect. It’s a date. Meet you there in fifteen.” He pushed his cart forward to continue his shopping, keeping his eyes on hers until he passed her.
If the burning along her spine was any indication, he kept looking at her as he moved away. She wouldn’t look, couldn’t look, as she continued down the aisle towards the peanut butter. Her shaking fingers reached for a jar, hefted it in her hand for a moment, and then her traitorous eyes slid back down the aisle towards the end.
Zane was still there, cart turned in the process of leaving the aisle, but stopped. And he was still looking at her. Smiling.
Mara smiled back, quirked her head in a show of a dare, and tapped an imaginary watch on her wrist.
Zane’s smile spread, and he placed two fingers at his temple before dropping them in a salute. Then he pushed the cart out of her view and was gone.
Holy crap . . .
Mara bit her lip and screwed up her eyes on a high-pitched squeal, then raced out of the aisle, away from the direction Zane had gone, and headed for the registers, not caring that she hadn’t gotten even half of the things she’d intended to.
She had a date in thirteen minutes, and no time to waste.
The bakery smelled heavenly as Zane entered, running a hand through his hair quickly before taking a hair tie and pulling it back. He didn’t think Mara was the sort to care, but without product at hand, styling his hair wasn’t an option, and leaving it down would make him look dingy.
He couldn’t look dingy with Mara.
Something lurched in the center of his chest, and he swallowed in discomfort, one hand going to his sternum involuntarily.
Was he nervous? He hadn’t felt like this in years, if ever, and he played hockey professionally. To be fair, out there he knew what he was doing, what to expect, and could move with confidence.
This was much worse.
He was completely out of his depth, and there was no way he could let Mara see that.
Chocolate and carbs, she’d said. Sounded simple enough.
One look around the place told him he didn’t have to worry about meeting fans or reporters here. It was the most homey, cozy bakery he had ever been in, almost sleepy in its mood, despite being half full and the staff behind the counter and in the kitchen clearly bustling. The displays up front were incredible, mouthwatering for any dessert lover, carb lover, or flat-out food lover. Hope would have had her fingers and nose pressed to the glass in awe, and he’d have used that as an excuse to stand closer to it himself.
Pictures hung around the walls, mostly of family, friends, and famous people who had been in, though there were some classic Southern touches in the decor as well. One photo showed an entire collegiate team dressed in their travel warmups all giving thumbs-up to the camera while Mr. Matthews sat at the end of their table with a little girl on his knee.
A closer examination proved the little girl to be Mara, unless she had a sister who looked almost identical to her, but for the sparkle to the eyes, the hint of dimple in one cheek, and the dusting of freckles, though they were more prominent in the photo than they were now.
Zane smiled at seeing it, then allowed himself a brief exhale as he started further into the bakery. He glanced over at the counter, smiling politely at the teenager there, oddly grateful to not see Mara’s parents.
He’d liked them well enough; he just didn’t want them to know this was happening.
Yet.
His phone buzzed in his back pocket, and he pulled it out, glancing at the screen automatically. He smirked to see a string of texts in his group chat entitled The Pit, meaning his pals from his Northbrook Hockey Elite days were fired up about something. There was no telling what that could be.
Clint: Z! That was a sick hit on McClaine!
Declan: I watched it like 5 times. Some serious air.
Rocco: I give it a 7. No twists.
Trane: It was a thing of beauty. Made highlight reels this AM, anyone catch those?
Jax: Nah, bro, the trick play in OT was the beauty. Gonna be studied in film all week, guaranteed.
Clint: I’m already practicing it.
Zane shook his head, grinning to himself, and typed out a quick response.
Zane: You’d have to practice, Fido, to even come close to making it work. Takes skill. BRB, got a meeting real quick.
There was no way he was going to let them know what was really going on. He was the one who usually gave them grief about personal lives, and he knew full well he would be getting punishment back in full once word got out.
If it got out.
If this became something.
He slid his phone back into his jeans pocket and began to scan the room again, this time looking for a very particular brunette.
A smile flashed across his face as he saw her sitting in a corner booth drumming her fingers on the table. She’d redone her hair since the grocery store, and he thought he detected a sheen of lip gloss or balm on her lips. She didn’t need it; he found her mouth distracting enough as it was.
At least she hadn’t changed her clothes. There was something he loved about the black leggings and oversized gray sweater combo on her, something easy and laid back. Natural, even.
Real.
He kept coming back to that word, and it just seemed to fit. Mara was real.
But how real?
He headed towards the table, smiling when her attention fell on him, and thinking about what her quick, almost shy smile made him feel.
“Hey there,” Zane greeted her, sliding his hands into his pockets. “This seat taken?”
Mara’s smile spread for just a moment, and she shook her head. “No. Please, take it.”
“Thank you, I will.” He slid into the booth next to her and sighed as he settled in, looking at Mara and smiling. “Hi.”
She snickered softly and propped her elbow on the table, her hand at the side of her head, looking at him. “Hi. Long time, no see.”
“Cute.” He scoffed and made a point of looking around the bakery, even though he’d made a study of it already. “This is nice. Really, this is a great place.”
“You’d been here before, you said.”
“I have.” He returned his attention to her, crooked smile in place. “Drive-thru.”
“Ah.” Mara nodded in understanding. “Figures.”
He chuckled at the gentle ribbing. “I’ll have you know that Hope loves the drive-thru. Asks for it all the time. Better I bring her here than some fast food place.”
Mara’s eyes narrowed. “He says to the girl who happened upon him at the mall in the middle of a fast food meal . . .”
“Okay,” he protested, giving her a look. “Just take the compliment, will you? We’ll discuss my potentially terrible meal tendencies another time.”
“I’ll pencil it in,” she quipped. She smiled again, then raised her head and looked around. “No, you’re right, it’s nice. I tend to forget that, since I’ve grown up here. Every day after school, any time I was home from college, we were here. I was working here.”
Zane made a low sound of acknowledgement. “It’s surprising you didn’t go into business, then. Or baking.”
Mara’s mouth curved to one side. “Oh, trust me, the pressure was there. And I know my way around the kitchen, but I didn’t want to be stuck here forever. I mean . . .” She rolled her eyes, laughing at herself. “Here I am anyway, but my job is my own, and so is my life.”
“And your folks were okay with that?”
She nodded, her eyes coming back to him. “Yeah. I think the pressure I was feeling was more of what I thought they wanted than what they actually wanted. I did it to myself. And anyway, my brother and his wife want to take over. Heaven help us when they do, Ashley is terrible in the kitchen.”
Her expression made Zane laugh, and he would have pressed her on that, had a teenage waiter not appeared at the table.
“You guys ready to order yet?” he asked, grinning between the two of them in the polite manner every waiter is trained on. “Hey, Mars.”
Mara gave him a tiny wave. “Hey, Chip. Cocoa and pain au chocolat.”
Chip nodded before turning his attention to Zane. His eyes widened, recognition dawning. “And for you?” he asked faintly.
Zane glanced down at the menu on the table. “Coffee, black, and a berry-berry scone.”
“Coming up,” Chip said quickly before dashing off, bumping into a table in his hurry.
“Wow,” Mara commented dryly as she watched him go. She turned to Zane with a quizzical look. “Does that happen often?”
Sensing he was being teased more than genuinely asked, he only shrugged and made a face.
She laughed and sat back against the booth. “What it must be like to be a big shot.”
Now his face contorted into one of distaste, which made Mara laugh more. He liked that laugh, he decided. It wasn’t giggly or bright, it didn’t squeak or squeal, and it was fairly infectious. And well used.
Mara laughed a lot.
With a laugh like that, he would too.
“Not all it’s cut out to be,” he assured Mara on an exhale. “Everything you say or do is captured and discussed, and people expect you to be larger than life.”
Mara gave him a wry look. “I’ve seen you play. You are larger than life.”
He looked down at the table, tapping his finger on the top absently. “On the ice, maybe. Off the ice, I’m just me. Still the scrawny late bloomer from Chicago just trying to keep up.”
“Scrawny?” Mara tilted her head back to laugh once. “No way. Not that build.”
Zane smirked and raised a brow. “You noticed, huh?”
Her face flamed, and she clamped down on her lips hard. “Might have . . .”
“Hesitation and . . . guilt?” he prodded. He leaned closer, giving her a friendly wink. “Don’t worry, Josie lit into me before I got here. I know you thought we were married.”
“Oh, good,” Mara groaned, putting her face into her hands. “This just gets better and better.”
Zane chuckled and scooted closer, rubbing a soothing hand on her back. “Oh, stop, I’m just giving you a hard time. It’s my own fault, I rely on Josie way too much. It’s too easy having a cousin as the nanny.”
Mara dropped her hands and folded her arms on the table, cheeks still bright, and looked at him. “Nanny? I wouldn’t have pegged her for that.”
“She’s pretty much the stand-in mom for Hope,” he told her bluntly. “When I got picked up by Tennessee, she was the first call I got. Insisted that I let her help with Hope, since she lived here, and when I’m on extended trips, my aunt and uncle host Hope for sleepovers.”
“How does she manage that, though?” Mara asked, her brow creasing. “Is Hope her full-time job?”
It was a fair question, but it made Zane laugh anyway. “No, although with Hope, you never know. Josie is a graphic artist, so she does most of her work on the computer. AKA she can work from home.”
“And home is . . .?”
“Sometimes with us at our house,” Zane allowed. “She has a room there, of course. She also has her own place. With my in-season schedule, I don’t know how I would manage without her.”
Mara hummed a short, noncommittal sound. “Well, now that I know who she is, I can honestly say that I like her.”
That was an interesting way of putting it, and Zane leaned back a touch, considering Mara in all her glory. “So you didn’t like her before you knew who she was?”
Her blue eyes widened, and she wrenched her gaze away. “Okay, moving on. New topic.”
“And what should that be?” Zane wondered aloud, his hand slowly moving along Mara’s back again. He felt her shiver beneath his hand, and the sensation rippled up his arm and into his chest.
Mara gnawed on her lower lip for a moment, sending a jolt of awareness into Zane’s stomach. “You were scrawny, you said. So how’d a scrawny kid wind up being an animal on the ice?”
Zane sat back once more, thinking back with a nostalgic smile. “Self-preservation. Pure and simple. I’m from Chicago, and there’s a hockey program there, Northbrook.”
“I saw the write-up about that gala in November,” Mara murmured, not looking at him. “And the all-star game last month.”
Had she been looking him up? That was the only way he could think she would know about those things. Big news though they were, it wasn’t much outside of the sports world.
Mara had looked him up. Why did that make him satisfied somehow?
“Yep, those were for fundraising there,” he went on, letting the point go. “It’s in trouble now, but back in its day, it was huge. Best team in the nation, and I’m not just saying that; we took titles on a regular basis. I had skills on the ice, but I wasn’t big enough to be much of a threat. One day, I got tired of getting pushed around, and I decided to use my body as much as I used my head.”
“Um, ouch.”
Zane chuckled. “Not so ouch then, but it made a point. I gave everything I had in every play. Every minute of every game or practice, I was in it. Had to be, if I wanted to stick around. Made myself a force to be reckoned with, small as I was. Then I grew, and . . .”
Mara did look at him now, somehow amused by something he had said. “And the habit stuck.”
He met her eyes squarely. “Guess so. No sense going backwards, right?”
Slowly she shook her head. “No sense.”
His hand continued to move along her back, and that connection was suddenly powerful, the touch of fabric against his skin electrifying, and he would swear he could feel the beat of her heart through it.
But her eyes . . . He couldn’t look away from them, his mind shuffling through various things to compare their shade to and coming up short. They were amazing, though, in a way that reminded him of this bakery.
It felt like home.
And that was terrifying.
“Cocoa for Mara,” Chip said, announcing his presence with perfect timing.
Zane scooted back to his original place in the booth, clearing his throat. Then he saw the massive mug of hot chocolate and gaped. “Now wait a minute . . .”
“Too late!” Mara crowed in victory, taking the mug from Chip. “No take-backs.”
“And coffee for you, sir,” Chip told him, a laugh in his voice as the usual-sized mug of coffee was set before him.
Zane looked at the differences, then up at Mara. “This is so not fair.”
She shrugged and lifted her cocoa to her lips, sipping loudly before sighing dramatically. “Too bad, so sad.”
“You’re loving this.”
“Oh yeah, I really am.” She grinned brightly, then looked at Chip. “Thanks, pal. How long for the pastries?”
Chip nodded at her. “Coming right up.” He turned and left them, this time at a normal pace and without hitting the table.
Zane heaved a noisy exhale and shook his head at Mara. “You did that on purpose, Mara.”
“I did not,” she retorted. “I would never dictate what you should get. It’s not m
y fault you missed the massive hint when I said chocolate and carbs . . .”
“Unbelievable.” He groaned playfully and made a face as he took a sip of his comparatively pathetic-sized coffee. “At least the coffee is good.”
Mara’s brows rose. “I’ll have you know everything is good here.”
On cue, Chip brought their pastries and set them before them. “Here you go, guys. Enjoy!” He turned to go, then spun back around. “Hey, Mars, that work drama cleared up yet?”
Mara’s expression completely changed, and Zane watched it with interest. “No,” Mara all but growled. “I don’t think it will, so I’ll just deal with it.”
“Sorry,” Chip said with a click of his tongue. “You could always quit and come back here!”
“Funny, Chip,” Mara told him with full sarcasm in force. “Really, so funny. Table twelve wants you. Bye now.”
Chip held up his hands in a helpless gesture, spinning around and heading towards the table she’d indicated.
“So that’s what you get from your dad,” Zane commented in the most offhand way he could manage while grinning.
Mara’s eyes flicked to him. “What?”
He lifted one shoulder, halfway to a shrug without fully committing. “I heard the exact same tone from your dad last night. It’s funny, actually.”
“You’re not laughing,” she pointed out.
“I’m curious about what he said,” Zane told her. “‘Work drama.’ Your entire body language changed when he said that. Everything okay?”
He could see Mara stiffening before him, and he didn’t like it one bit.
“No,” she said flatly, averting her eyes. “But it’s fine. We all have our things, right?”
She didn’t want to talk about it, that much was clear, but it was also clear that things were not fine. He wanted to know what it was, and more than that, he wanted to make it right.
Now wasn’t the time. But if he had his way, played his cards right, maybe the time would come.
Maybe.
“Right,” he murmured, digging into his scone without paying much attention. He paused as he really tasted it, and he moaned almost exactly the way Mara had with her burger at the mall. “Oh my gosh . . .”
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