passes me another photograph of a beautiful woman. She’s handing a plate across the counter to a customer. And smiling. That smile always made me stupid. I wanted her so badly.
But all I got was a single kiss. And then a whole lot of trouble.
I let out a groan and toss the picture back to Max. “No. You can’t be serious.”
He puts the photo away. Then he just sits back and watches me.
“You really think I’m going to apply for a job at her bakery? That’s stupid.”
Max waits.
“I can’t do that. She hates me. And given the way things ended, the feeling is mutual.”
Max sips his scotch.
“She does not want to see my ugly mug every day. And she does not need an incompetent barista. I mean—I’m sure I could figure out how to make coffee. How hard could it be? But that’s not the point. I don’t need to stand around in a bakery for hours on end just to follow up on this stupid lead you’re getting from some dark web forum. Even if the perp knows too much about …” I swallow. “A string of murders.” Grizzly, horrible murders.
A violent criminal is using Posy Paxton’s shop to boast about killing people? Shit. Posy isn’t equipped for that. She’s about as fierce as a kitten.
I let out a sigh of resignation.
Max watches me take all this in. “I knew you’d see it my way. You cared for this girl.”
“Did not,” I lie. “Fine. What if I did? I was young and stupid.”
It was fifteen years ago, for God’s sake. I worked at Paxton’s—her family’s swanky uptown restaurant—as a bartender. Posy turned up the summer before my senior year of college. It was the first time in my life I ever felt lightning-struck by a girl. She had bright, intelligent eyes. And her quick smile did unexpected things to my body. Every time she walked into the room, my heart rate sped up, and my skin felt too hot.
It didn’t even matter to me that she was a horrible bartender. Every time she smiled at me, I forgave her incompetence. Hell, I think I liked it. Because Posy needed a lot of help from me to do the job. I taught her a lot, even though we were competing for the bar manager’s job.
I wasn’t that worried, though, because I’d been working my way up the Paxton’s ladder since I was sixteen. I knew ten times more than she did. I used to tease her about it, too. But even as my mouth was saying, you call that a margarita? my heart was saying, will you please get into my bed?
She felt it too. At the end of the summer we shared the most outrageous kiss. Afterward, I walked on air, feeling like a game show contestant who’d just won a new car.
Until the next day, when she got me fired.
Posy turned out to be the same kind of unforgiving rich kid I’d spent my teenage years avoiding. And I guess I’m still bitter, because I think I’d rather crawl through a sewage pipe than work for her shop.
“Here’s an idea,” I say to Max. “I don’t have to work there. I can just loiter.”
“At your former rival’s place of business. Because that’s not creepy at all.” Max smiles slowly.
Fuck.
2
Posy
“Did you set the oven timer?” I ask Ginny, who’s filling in as my kitchen assistant.
My sister rolls her eyes. “Uh huh. Forty-two minutes. Just like you told me three times.”
“Excellent,” I say calmly. I love my sister. I would do anything for Ginny and her five-year-old son. But neither of us is thrilled with this situation. My shop is desperate for labor, and Ginny is strapped for cash. So we need each other.
Unfortunately, last week she burned two full racks of pastry. Margins are tight enough around here without throwing away sixty bucks worth of ingredients and two hours of my labor.
Since it's two o'clock, I've been baking for ten hours already. I’ve made a hundred breakfast pastries, a hundred meat pies, and thirty full-sized pies for the shop. I’m dead on my feet, and closing time is still two hours away.
Opening a cafe is a lot of hard work and risk-taking. I knew it would be. I've had a lifetime of watching how the restaurant industry operates. I opened Posy’s Pie Shop with eyes wide open. Newly divorced, and burnt out on my desk job, I needed a new challenge.