My bakery is still called Etta Jean’s after the previous owner, and while I wait for Joey to get back, I’m taking inventory of how many cookies, muffins, and tarts I have left and debating how early I need to get here in the morning. Saturdays are pie days, so probably pretty early.
I hate pretty early.
It’s been harder this week, because apparently getting pregnant immediately makes a woman revert back to needing more sleep than teenagers.
But the hormones will be worth it.
Because I’m having a baby. A little family of my own. I catch myself before I rub my tender lower belly, because if everyone doesn’t know yet, I’m not ready to tip them off.
Not yet.
Nancy’s refilling coffees for a group of regulars who pull second shift at the data center just outside town. Joey’s not back yet, but I know she will be, because she never breaks her promises or her threats. The normal Friday night gaming club is getting set up in the corner by Nancy’s daughter, Tammy. She’s pulling four-top tables together over the scarred wood floors to reserve the usual spot for the motley group of cut-throat gamers who play interesting games like Fluxx, Forbidden Island, and Pandemic, just like she has every Friday night for the last five years.
I’ve worked at the bakery since I was old enough to pass for sixteen. When Etta Jean passed on three years ago, I waltzed a pineapple upside-down cake into the bank as my loan application to buy the bakery, along with my announcement that this town needed its bakery, and I needed a place to work. I’m not all that great with numbers, but I’m good with food and people.
If I didn’t have the bakery in Goat’s Tit, I didn’t know what I’d do with my life.
Now I have something bigger than Goat’s Tit. I have a baby on the way.
And I can say I can do this on my own until I’m blue in the face, except the truth is, I won’t have to. Because I have Nancy. And Tammy. And Ginny Jo and Ted and everyone else in town who has been so, so good to me since Joey left for college and then more recently when Daddy passed away.
I blink quickly and push aside the regret that my baby will never know her grandfather. Even though it’s been two years, I still picked up my phone to call him when I got home from Copper Valley. He wasn’t perfect, but who is? And he would’ve loved her with everything he had, because that was what Daddy did.
He loved.
Even when he knew he wouldn’t be loved back. Can’t make somebody love you back, he always told us. Joey would quit listening then, but I always stuck around for the last half. Doesn’t mean loving is ever a mistake.
Sarah Gringbach steps in the door with her two little ones in tow. Ariel is four, and Greyson is six, and if I know the Gringbachs, they’re coming in for Friday afternoon cookies. “Hey, guys,” I say. “Who ate all their carrots at lunch today?”
“I want a carrot cookie!” Ariel says.
“I want a cinnamon roll with chocolate chips dipped in honey and milk! And I got a booboo,” Greyson announces.
“A booboo?”
He proudly holds out a bandaged finger. “There was almost blood,” he tells me solemnly.
“I bet you got a kiss with that Band-Aid, didn’t you?”
“And Mama says she hopes I learned not to stick my finger in my sister’s mouth, too.”
Sarah herds them both to their usual table beside the game table. “I need a double café mocha and a slice of banana bread.”
I pull out two milk cartons for the kids and bend over to grab the cookies and banana bread while the doorbell tinkles again. “Be right—oh, shi—itake mushrooms,” I gasp as a tingle of pleasure unfurls itself deep in my gut.
Stupid backstabbing lust. We’re supposed to be furious with him.
“Hoo-ly gator bait,” Tammy whispers.
Sarah visibly chokes on her own tongue.
The second shift guys all straighten in their seats as though they’re trying to be larger too, bless their hearts.
And Manning strolls right up to the counter, while his guard—Viktor, I think, because it’s not Kristofer but he still looks familiar—casually settles into the two-person table beside the door, dark eyes alert, posture deceptively relaxed.
I watched him snarl down Joey on a dark golf course about two months ago. And I wasn’t sure which one would walk away standing. Thankfully they both did, but she’s coming back.
Probably within minutes.
And she knows I’m pregnant with Manning’s baby.
She probably doesn’t know he’s engaged to another woman though.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
“Lovely town,” Manning says in that British-Viking accent. My nipples pucker and my thighs clench and I hiccup.
His pale eyes light up, his smile spreads wider, and I wonder if he’s thinking about me, or about me carrying his child.
Which he’d better not say a word about here, or I’ll take him down with a cake platter, because I am not ready for this conversation to happen in public.
And I don’t care how down-to-earth and normal he looks in that gray Henley and those worn jeans that hug his long, muscular legs. Because he’s off-limits.
Hot, worldly, athletic, and off-limits.
I’m pissed at him. I am. And I’m working hard on being even more pissed, because of all the places in the world, he had to come to Goat’s Tit today?
Shit damn fuck hell.
“All out of scones,” I tell him while I grab the pastries for the Gringbachs, “but I have oatmeal raisin cookies and sweet tea. Give me two shakes, and I can have that boxed up to go lickety-split so you can get out of here as fast as you arrived.”
“She’s all out of manners today, too, honey,” Nancy purrs. She fluffs her short, curly silver hair—dyed intentionally to go all-in on going gray—and offers him a hand while she leans against the glass case. “I’m Nancy. And I’m so sorry, shug, but I missed your name.”
Shug. Short for sugar. Because she’s freaking flirting with him.
“Manning,” he says, taking her hand and pressing a kiss to her knuckles.
She titters. “Oh, honey, y’all aren’t from ‘round here.”
His smile warms, and I have to remind my traitorous hooha that he’s a taken man.
“I am not, though it seems quite the pity,” he tells her.
“What brings you to Goat’s Tit?”
“Your lovely proprietress.”
I think he means me, but I hate big words. Based on the way Nancy’s green eyes scuttle toward me while I carry the tray of cookies and milk to the Gringbachs, who are also openly staring, I think she thinks he means me too.
“Y’all know Gracie?” Nancy asks.
“We met at that charity golf tournament Joey did a couple few months ago,” I tell the room at large.
Because the room at large is listening.
And now the women in the room are all zeroing in on Manning’s package, because we met at a golf tournament is apparently code for we got it on like bunny rabbits.
Or possibly we met at a golf tournament and this man with this exotic accent and killer smile and hot as sin body tracked me down in little Goat’s Tit, Alabama is the full code for and we got it on like bunny rabbits.
If all of Goat’s Tit knows I’m pregnant…dammit. I think one of the second shift data guys is googling Manning as we speak, which means it’s only a matter of time before everyone knows everything.
That, or he’s playing one of his games on his phones. They do all kinds of Star Wars light saber battle games. I had to declare a no-light-saber-noises rule to keep from hearing the zoom shoom betang! noises in my sleep.
“Don’t eat those cookies all in one bite,” I tell Ariel and Greyson. Greyson insists I inspect his bandage, which I declare perfectly wrapped around his finger that’s not nearly as short and chubby as it used to be, because kids grow up so stinking fast, and shit, now I’m going to cry again. I clear my throat. “Sarah, Nancy’s getting your mocha.”
She’s not paying attention—no one is—because Manning’s talking again.
“Lovely tournament. Played a round with Joey. Rather enjoyed a round on the links with such pleasant company.”
Nancy clucks her tongue. Tammy and Sarah share a look, because Joey’s loved in her own strange way here, but no one overestimates her social skills. “Of course it was, if your company was Gracie here too,” Nancy says. I give her a pointed look and a head jerk toward the counter, and she sighs and moseys over to make Sarah’s mocha. But she keeps talking. “Did you know Gracie’s cheese grits win best in show every year at the Grits Festival?”
“I did not.” Manning’s smiling broader now, and I wonder if he even knows what grits are.
“That’s because she’s so modest. Fine quality in a pretty young lady, you ask me.”
“You need cookies? Muffins? Tarts?” I ask Manning. “I’ll get you a to-go bag.” Because he needs to leave. Now. Before Joey gets wind that he’s in town, which will happen in approximately four point three seconds, since Sarah’s pulling her phone out and there are two more phones out now at the second shift table. Those nerd buster guys—they have mad gossip skills. We thought we could gossip well before, but then that internet cloud storage whoop-dee-doo center opened up here in the abandoned cotton warehouse a few years back, and we’ve taken gossip to a whole new level.
A level I’m aware of, but rarely participate in, because the fonts on so many of those blogs and social media sites are all wrong and it’s not worth it just for gossip.
Not when you have a Ginny Jo.
Who probably gets half her information from the internet and the town blog, now that I think about it.
“I do enjoy your cookies,” Manning tells me. “Would love to try your muffins too.”
I barely resist fanning myself, because that’s flirty-talk if I ever heard it, and my body has yet to get the memo that he’s completely and totally off-limits even if my brain is fuming so hard I could fry an egg on it.
Being flirted with by the father of my baby? I liked him well enough to bang him in a smelly locker room, didn’t I? Of course I’d be interested in seeing if we were compatible.
If he weren’t a prince engaged to another woman, and if I weren’t a backwoods lady who likes to say fuck and print genitalia on sugar cookies for a living.
“And have you considered my proposition?” he continues.
I blink.
“In my text message?” he prompts.
His text—oh. Right. “It wasn’t a good time to have honey badger read it to me,” I whisper.
His lips part.
“Honey, you don’t talk about honey badger to gentlemen with fancy accents,” Nancy admonishes while trying not to move her lips or make a sound. It’s this talent she has—or so we tell her. She’s actually louder when she tries to talk without moving her lips. “What kind of proposition was it?”
“Ohmygod, he’s a prince,” Tammy squeals.
“And we’re going back to my office,” I announce. I grab him by the collar. Sparks race from my fingertips to my shoulder and zoom across my chest as I pull him around toward the kitchen. “Nancy, I’ll be back. Viktor—Viktor, right?—you should probably come with us.”
Viktor doesn’t wait to be asked twice.
“Viktor, you may stay right where you are,” Manning says.
“No, he can’t.”
“The lady is correct, Your Highness.”
“We could be such jolly good friends, Viktor,” he sighs.
“No, Your Highness, we can’t.”
I march them both through the kitchen, past my wall of ovens and cooling racks and the sink and into my office, where my computer is no longer displaying glittery pussy and my icing printer has no evidence of my afternoon accomplishments but where my office is small enough that having two giant men standing in it—one of whom is making my feminine parts forget the mess he got us into the last time we got naked together—makes the room feel cramped.
And I don’t want to talk about all of the pictures on the walls of Paris and India and the South American rain forests and the Saharan desert, because being in here with someone who’s probably seen them all when I most likely never will is making my heart ache for other reasons too.
“What are you doing here?” I hiss at him. I’m reasonably certain Nancy and half the customers will be sneaking through the kitchen to listen in, but at least Joey won’t see him.
“I wished to see you.”
“There’s video chat for that.”
“You won’t answer my phone calls.”
True enough. I’m not fond of staring temptation in the face, and dog, that smile, his warm blue eyes, and those muscles are temptation incarnate. As it is, I’m having a hard time remembering why I’m pissed at him. “Don’t you have a game or practice or something?”
“Tomorrow. In northern Virginia, against the Nighthawks. As my text message said. Would love for you to come.” His voice is so smooth and proper and exotic with that accent. I want to be immune but I’m not. Especially with the smile on top of it. His crystal eyes are sparkling, and his lips are spread wide.
It’s not that there wasn’t happiness in my little family growing up—we might’ve been poor in the pockets, but we had each other, even when Joey annoyed the shit out of me and Daddy struggled to find steady work—but there’s something so addictive about a man who’s so friggin’ smiley all the time.
“Northern Virginia. That’s close to New York, isn’t it?”
“Yes, but Zeus is out in Colorado, if that’s your concern.”
“You checked?”
“Naturally. So I’ll send a plane for you.”
“Wait. What? Plane? Why?”
“So you can meet my stepsister. She’s coming for a visit.”
Meet his family.
Like we’re something. Which we aren’t. Because he’s engaged. I glare at him. “I think you’re misunderstanding something here. Or possibly I am.”
“Willow’s far less terrifying than your sister,” Manning offers. “Unless you smush your cupcakes in your hair. And then I fear she’d get her pantaloons in a rather tight twist.”
“Pantaloons? What is she, a time-traveling governess?”
“Close. Teaches preschool. Never cusses. Or gets caught with her knickers about her knees at the wrong party. It’s bloody annoying.”
Great. His stepsister would be a more appropriate mother to his child than I would. But then, so would his fiancée. And come to think of it—“Have you been caught with your knickers about your knees at the wrong party?”
“My knickers don’t drop and tell, Miss Gracie.”
“I’d hope you’d wash them before they could.”
He chuckles, and there I go again, getting warmer and tinglier between my thighs.
When you live with the same men day in and day out for most of your life, getting turned on by a guy isn’t exactly something that happens every day.
Or every week.
And the nerd busters—the only relatively new guys in town, and there’s enough turnover that we get new nerd busters a few times a year—are all perfectly nice, and some of them are kinda cute, but they’re so smart, and I’m so…not.
I know of plenty of dyslexic people who’ve overcome their learning disabilities and gone on to do great things in the world.
But I’m not one of them. I’m just a small-town girl destined to be popular rather than smart, and I’m okay with that.
Usually.
Until I’m faced flat-out with the stark reality that I might carry a prince’s baby, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever be welcome in the royal palace as anything more than the entertainment.
“I’ll send a plane tomorrow afternoon,” Manning says.
“No.”
“Gracie—”
“You’re engaged.”
“Betrothed. Through no fault of my own.”
I’m appalled that I can’t help smiling back at his broad grin and wink. I try to stay stern, but dog, this man is so damn tempting. “That’s a horrible thing to say.”
“I’m attempting to rectify the situation.”
“Not any better.”
His smile drops away, and a surprising seriousness glows to life in his pale eyes. “I have no wish to be forever tethered to a woman I will never love.”
I suppress a shiver that goes from my skin to my heart to my ovaries. He told me two nights ago that he doesn’t not love me, but he very clearly has no plans to fall in love with Maleficent. “Then just say that.”
“Love of country dictates political marriages. Which means extracting myself from the commitment will take finding a more advantageous arrangement for at least one of us.”
And love of country most likely dictates that he shouldn’t marry a woman like me even if he weren’t engaged to someone else. Because I am not an advantageous match.
Also? I don’t want to get married.
But I can’t deny the appeal of getting to know Manning better. Even if I weren’t having his baby, his engagement aside, he’s fun and he’s chivalrous and for a few hours on a golf course two months ago, he made me feel like I was something more than a dumb backwoods hick who grew up poor in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nowhere town.
“I’ve put plans in motion.” He steps toward me, his hand going to my waist.
Though it’s like trying to wrench two massive magnets apart, I step back even before Viktor clears his throat. Because I can’t do this. I can’t touch a man when I know he’s off-limits, and I can’t let him touch me either.
Manning’s eyes pinch briefly before his smile comes back. “Come to the game. I’ll host several new friends from all about the country. You shan’t stick out, and you’ll have an enjoyable evening away.”
“You’re smooth, aren’t you?”
“Determined, my lady.” His gaze drifts down my body. Every inch of my skin flushes, and my lower belly clenches.
“I—” I start, and my office door swings open.
“Far from home, your freaky cheerfulness?” Joey says dryly.
Manning’s smile amps up to four thousand degrees. “Had a craving for a muffin.”
Before she can deck him—because I have no doubt she thinks muffin is code for Gracie—Viktor clears his throat again and levels a go ahead, make my day look at her that should be accompanied by knuckle-cracking and some caveman grunts.
Which Joey would undoubtedly answer without hesitation, because Neanderthal may as well have been her first language.
Her skills did keep me safe from bullies growing up. And when you’re the slowest kid in the class, you’re definitely bully bait.
I do love her. It’s just complicated.
Oh, dog. Who’s my baby going to have if she’s dyslexic too? It’s not like Joey’s going back to grade school, and I can’t volunteer every hour of the day and still make enough money to get us by, and—and I need to not freak out about this yet.
One problem at a time.
My current problems are Manning and Joey.
“Don’t start,” I tell her.
She folds her arms over her Weightless Corporation polo shirt and holds Manning’s gaze without speaking.
Double fuck. I hate it when she goes silent.
Nancy peers in. Tammy’s behind her, and Ginny Jo has appeared out of nowhere too. Probably she was gossiping over at the beauty shop, which is—you guessed it—only five minutes away.
“Are you busy tomorrow evening?” Manning asks Joey. “I’m having a party in Arlington to introduce my stepsister to all of my new friends in the States. Would love to have you join us.”
“We aren’t friends,” Joey says.
Nancy sighs, Tammy rolls her eyes, and Ginny Jo hits her phone. She’s either recording this or—more likely—posting it to the town’s blog or Facebook page.
“I see no reason we couldn’t be,” Manning replies.
“Might be a big one sitting in your penthouse back in Copper Valley.”
Fuck fuck fuck. She knows about his fiancée.
She’s going to kill him.
“Stop talking about Ares like that,” I say, because it’s really all I have. Ares is living there too, from what I could gather. “I thought you two got along.”
“I didn’t like his last message.”
“Joey…” I warn.
Her dark eyes swivel to me.
“Can you not be overprotective and judgmental for just once?” I whisper.
“Not today,” she replies. “Ask me again tomorrow.”
Manning ducks his head with a grin. Fine for him to be amused. He doesn’t have to—
No, wait.
Maybe he should have to. I pull my phone out and hand it to my sister. “Here. Just take his phone number so you can harass him directly and leave me out of it.”
“Honey, you can’t harass him,” Nancy hisses at Joey. “He’s a prince.”
“Not of my kingdom,” Joey says as she sends herself Manning’s contact information. “I’ll say anything I damn well please.”
“Shall I send a plane for both of you then?” Manning asks.
“No,” Joey says.
“Not necessary,” I agree.
Joey’s not the boss of me—most days, because some days I get tired of fighting and just give in—but she does have a few rules I agree with.
Mostly it’s the boring stuff. Don’t go check out strange noises in your basement when a serial killer is loose and you’ve just lost your virginity. Sniff milk before you drink it. And never accept airplane rides from men with potentially nefarious intentions.
Or, you know. Who are already engaged to someone else.
“It would be no trouble,” Manning says.
“I wouldn’t say no to you,” Nancy offers.
His phone dings. We all look at Joey. She gives us her straight-faced you’re damn right that was me and I will haunt him until he cries uncle expression.
I frown at her. “Have you ever heard of the benefit of the doubt?”
“No,” she replies.
I’d be exasperated with her, except she probably not only knows about his betrothal, but also his entire medical history, the names of every one of his teachers—and probably governesses too, because as a prince, he would’ve had governesses, wouldn’t he?—and if he has any secret tattoos that I haven’t found yet.
That I won’t be finding. Because seeing him naked again would be inappropriate.
“Does it cost you anything to be nice?” I counter with instead. Because it’s all I have.
“Yes,” she replies.
Manning’s smile is widening again. “I concede your point about the bodies,” he tells me.
“Thank you. Now all of you, go away.”
“Hey, where is everybody?” someone calls from the dining room. “Hello? I brought Catan.”
“Catan?” Manning straightens, and rainbows shoot out his pores. Seriously. He’s like a kid in a candy store. “You’re playing Catan?”
“You play Catan, Your Highness?” Nancy asks.
“Not here, he doesn’t,” Joey growls.
“Rather fond of the game,” he says. “Do you play, Gracie?”
“No, she doesn’t,” Joey answers for me.
“I do too,” I correct.
“Terribly.”
“I’m a nice person.”
“Which leaves you open and vulnerable to being walked all over and trading away all of your resources before you can build a damn thing. You move the robber to the desert every time you roll a seven. You don’t play Catan. You let Catan play you.”
“You’re a nice person,” I tell her sweetly, because I know it’ll annoy her.
“I am not. Shut your pie-hole.”
Please note that the only time Joey ever tells me to shut my pie-hole is when I accuse her of being a nice person.
Also please note that she’s the only person other than me that my cat will sit on, the first person to leap into action when a tractor carrying baby pigs crashes on Main Street, and she still cries during Julia Stiles’s poem in Ten Things I Hate About You every time she watches it. Which I’m not allowed to repeat, apparently even to Zeus, under threat of death and dismemberment.
But not in that order.
Probably. Because what fun would it be to dismember me after I was already dead? Then she’d miss the screams.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell her, “because I’m not playing Catan today. And I’m not getting on an airplane to anywhere tomorrow. And I’m throwing every last one of you out of my office and my kitchen because you’re giving me a headache. Except you, Viktor. This isn’t your fault. I’ll get you a cookie. Or seven. Or even a whole cake. Do you like carrot cake? What about a latte?”
“Not necessary, my lady,” he says.
I shoo them all, taking care to not get within breathing distance of Manning, who focuses on me with a single-minded intensity that gives me goosebumps. My toes curl, my belly flutters, and my clit throbs.
I’m pretty certain that look means I want to peel you out of your clothing, lick you from head to toe, worship your pussy for days on end with every tool at my disposal, and make you come so many times you forget your name.
“I will solve this,” he tells me softly, and the determined flare in his eyes is even more arousing than the idea of him stripping me naked and taking my body on a week-long orgasm joyride.
I might not be the smartest or most worldly person, but I have absolutely no doubt that he does not want to marry Maleficent. Or whatever her name is.
I get a brief flash of the future, of Manning and me and a red-headed little girl tipping ourselves over in a canoe on the river in deep summer, going home with the sting of a sunburn on our shoulders to feast on peach pie and ice cream, and dancing to old Johnny Cash songs in our pajamas.
Grief for what will never be clenches my heart and holds tight.
And then I picture him on a porch with Maleficent, all the joy gone out of his eyes while she harps at him to pay more attention to their horde of emotional support monkeys, and my heart cramps so tight my eyeballs burn.
“Out,” I order stronger.
“Trust me,” he says.
“Your Royal Highness, it would be our honor to have you join us for pizza and Catan,” Tammy says.
“T’would be my honor to join you,” Manning replies cheerfully.
Joey growls.
I shove her out of the kitchen too, knowing full well she’ll just circle back around the building and meet me at the back door in thirty seconds anyway, which I’m totally fine with, because I need her to hug me and tell me it’s going to be okay. I pull off my apron and go through my normal leaving-for-the-night routine.
And I don’t care how many hiccups that Rocky Road ice cream gives me, I’m gonna eat the whole carton after we have pizza.
Because I’m pregnant and I can.
