“Did he take your puzzle piece along with your treat?” Bitsy asks me as the door shuts behind him.
My nod is jerky.
She tsks.
I feel a heavy weight drilling into the back of my head.
Sabrina’s watching me grim-faced from the kitchen.
Zen’s beside her, even more grim-faced.
Both of them watching me like they want to know what I’ll do next.
Answer’s pretty simple.
I will fucking destroy everything he loves. But apparently not while I’m face to face with the bastard.
Sabrina looks at the door.
At the carved wooden bear.
Then back at me.
She saw too.
She knows this café means something to him.
She ducks her head and retreats back to the kitchen.
Jimmy, one of the older guys, looks at Zen. “He gives you any trouble, you let me know.”
Zen blinks once, then also retreats to the kitchen.
Jimmy looks at me and nods.
I nod back.
The very worst thing about being here? About what I want to do here?
I’m starting to like it.
For me. For Zen.
For the fucking café.
But I can build something better. I can, and I will, and I’ll do it with bees all over the place so that the Cheese Turd never dares set foot in here again.
For all of our sakes.
18
Sabrina
Work is awful.
I hate it, and I hate hating work. Even on the hardest days when things break and customers are cranky and food trucks don’t come in on time and I burn myself with coffee or a hot pan, I generally love my job and still wouldn’t trade it for the world.
But since Chandler finally showed his face this morning, nothing’s the same.
Grey’s moody and quiet through finishing his puzzle.
When he’s done, he leaves it on the table with one piece missing in the middle.
Zen barely says a word. Willa murmurs to me that Chandler needs to eat a bag of dicks. Cedar kicks me out of the kitchen, and he’s so furious that I don’t argue, even though it means I fake my way through being cheerful while running the counter with Willa during the lunch rush.
At least two dozen people ask me if I’m okay. I lie and put on a perky face and say that I’m great.
More ask me if I’ve heard from Emma.
My shift takes forever to end, and when it does, I pick up Jitter and the two of us head to one of my favorite summer spots for those rare moments when I want to be alone.
I crunch over the short path from the two-car parking lot to the gazebo that overlooks both downtown and the lake and train station, and then I have to clear snow off of the picnic table inside to get a place to sit.
Good sign that no one else has been here. Also a good sign that everyone else will stay away.
Jitter’s in heaven. He can lay in snow forever.
I know I won’t make it more than half an hour—not when it’s this cold and I’m sitting still—but I need to recenter myself.
When I hear a car on the road behind me, my shoulders twitch. When it stops and a door shuts, I get ready to pretend I’m already freezing and bolt.
Except Jitter beats me to it, and the only thing he’s doing is woofing once in absolute glee and darting off to greet his new favorite person.
“Go away,” I say.
Grey ignores me, carefully navigating the trail I cut with my snowshoes and still sinking into the path halfway up his calves while Jitter hovers near him. When he reaches the gazebo, he lifts a Bean & Nugget coffee tumbler. “Peace offering.”
“Are you giving up on turning my café inside out?”
He sighs and sets the tumbler on the picnic table bench between us.
I smell vanilla and cinnamon.
That’s low.
That’s very low.
“We could build something better together,” he says without looking at me.
“You realize how insulting that sounds to someone who’s incredibly proud of how hard she’s worked to make it what it is today?”
“Didn’t mean it that way.”
I know what this is. This is him trying to find common ground. It is a peace offering.
And I’m grateful.
But it still hurts. Bean & Nugget might not be perfect, but it’s where I belong. With coffee and Grandma’s scone recipe and the history and the community and everything we can keep doing in the future.
“I’m sorry Chandler took your puzzle piece. And your scone.”
“Not your fault. And I got another scone. You might’ve been there.”
This sucks. It just does.
“What are you even doing here?” I ask.
“Café got a call from a concerned citizen who said you were headed this way and shouldn’t be alone.”
I slide a look at him.
“Zen took the call. Couldn’t even begin to tell you what they sounded like.”
The coffee aroma is teasing me.
I’m usually a straight black coffee person. Dessert coffee—anything all doctored up—is reserved for special occasions and bad days.
Today is definitely a bad day.
So I give in to temptation and pick up the mug, sniff it—definitely cinnamon and vanilla—and I sip, and I get everything.
This is good.
Better than good.
It’s sweet and creamy and just the right spicy. A little piece of joy in a dark, dreary, ugly day when the sun still had the nerve to shine.
Dammit. “Can we pretend we’re in Hawaii and you’re Duke again for just five minutes?”
His blue eyes make a slow perusal of the landscape around us, then settle back on me with more warmth than I’m expecting.
My thighs clench. And not because it’s cold.
More because all he had to do was look away, and then look back, and I swear he’s everything he was in Hawaii.
He inclines his head while Jitter keeps wagging his tail and pushing his head into Grey’s hand. “As the lady wishes.”
I sip my latte again, then I point to the far end of Main Street. “See the big log cabin?”
“City Hall?”
“It was a general store that sold mining supplies and food back in the eighteen hundreds. When the gold rush dried up here, they built around it. If you get a tour, Vicki will point out the original walls. They’re around the county clerk’s office now. So anyone who wants to get married has to get their license in our original general store.”
He slides me a look like he wants to ask if I’m talking about marriage for any particular reason, but all that comes out of his mouth is, “Fascinating.”
“The statue of Ol’ Snaggletooth in front of City Hall was put up in the 1980’s. Legend has it that he was the first man to find gold here in the Tooth, but if you go on the tour at the mine, there—” I point in the opposite direction, to the old wooden building rising out of the mountainside above the lake “—they’ll tell you that we have the largest mine to never actually find any gold, and that Snaggletooth was likely a scam artist. But he gets credit for the railroad coming through here.”
“What was his real name?”
“You’ll have to take a tour of both the mine and the railroad depot by the lake to find out all of the different people who are suspected to have been Snaggletooth himself. And some people will tell you that the real Snaggletooth was a shop owner in town who had a tooth with the same snaggle shape as the creek if you look at it from the top of Bobcat Peak behind us.”
“So you come by having nicknames for everyone here naturally.”
“Exactly.”
“Ms. Donut came in yesterday, didn’t she?”
I pause. What did I—oh. And who—oh again.
I try to hide my heating face behind a casual sip of coffee, but I don’t think he’s buying my attempt at a non-committal hmm.
He grins, and dammit, he’s still adorable when he grins.
“Stop talking about that,” I order. “You’re Duke. You’ve never been here. I’m giving you the grand tour.”