She almost mentioned the pie pageant as well, but thought better of it. Better to break him in easily.
“It seems like I heard someone mention some kind of pie pageant,” he said.
If Justine’s eyes could pop out of her head, Burke’s comment would have made that happen. Her jaw dropped open. “From who?”
A slight hint of pink washed over his face. “There’s no such thing?” he said with a laugh.
“No, there—”
“Good!” He sighed out a breath of relief.
“I wasn’t finished. I was saying, no, there is such a thing.”
“Ooh.” The pink shade in his face turned red. He was nodding a lot. And it seemed his expression looked caught between one of amusement and…fear?
“Listen, I haven’t been the biggest fan over the years. It is about who can bake the best pie, but in some ways it felt more like a beauty pageant than a bakeoff. Only women between the ages eighteen to thirty can enter, providing they’re single, that is, and they get crowned as Pie Princess with an actual crown…” She shook her head. “So when I got a job with the city, I tried to change it. I thought I’d constructed a good compromise—a simple bakeoff where anyone could enter—but I was dead wrong.”
“What happened?”
Shadows flickered over the windshield as they wove further into the wooded area, the many tree branches creating a canopy over the dirt road.
“I got shut down at a city council meeting. Imagine a room full of pageant moms, many of whom were crowned Pie Princess back in their day, insisting that the tradition be upheld and that they’d do everything in their power to see that it was.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, not worth it.” She shrugged.
“Guess not. I, uh, head up this road here, right?” he asked while coming to a slow.
“Yes,” she said. “Then just follow it all the way back.”
“So I’ve got another question for you,” Burke said, a slight tug at the corner of his lips. “Have you ever been crowned the Piney Falls Pie Princess?”
She shook her head adamantly. “No. I suck at pie-baking, remember?”
“Well it’s too bad men can’t enter…”
Her eyes went wide as she remembered. “That’s right! You made pies with your mom. She taught you how to bake—”
“The best apple pie ever.” Burke shot her a conspiratorial look. “Do you want to win the pageant?”
“Uh…I don’t think a regular apple pie is going to do that.”
He tipped his head. “Did I just call it The Regular Apple Pie? No, I called it The Best Apple Pie Ever. Regular apple pie wouldn’t win it, but trust me—this one will.”
“That’s a lot of confidence,” she said with a laugh.
“So what do you say?”
“I say we’re going to be at the festival until pretty late tonight if we want to stay for the bonfire.”
“Oh, we want to stay for the bonfire.” He lifted an insinuative brow.
Justine felt her cheeks fill with heat. “That doesn’t end until eleven.”
“Which means we have the rest of the night to make the pie,” Burke said.
“You want to pull an all-nighter for pie?” she asked, unbelieving.
They were at the lodge now. Burke brought the car to a full stop before turning to fix his gaze straight on her. “Absolutely.”
“But I already have a pie.”
“A non-winning pie,” he said. “You said yourself that you’ve never won.”
“I didn’t say I enter every year,” she countered.
“Do you?”
Crap. “Yes, but I’ve never really wanted to win before. I enter because I’m in charge of the events, not because I want the title.” Except that didn’t feel as true as it might have had she been saying so last year, or even the year before. But hadn’t she just been thinking about how much she wanted to take the title from Brittany?
“Except,” Justine added, feeling the conspiratorial vibe growing between them. “This year, I actually wouldn’t mind winning.”
There went that brow lift again. “Why’s that?”
“Remember the mean girl I told you about? The one who bugged me about not having a mom?”
“Yeah, she was a jerk at the grocery store too,” he said with a nod. A smile stretched over his lips before she could add to it. “Wait, is she gunning for it too?”
Justine nodded. “And guess what? If she wins this year, she’ll be the first girl to win Pie Princess three years in a row.”
Burke’s jaw went hard. “That’s not going to happen.”
“It’s not?”
“Not a chance. I’m telling you, this pie is something else. But…” His eyes went wide with worry. “You guys probably don’t have a store