by Stacey Keith
Cover Copy
“It must be great thinking you know everything,” she said airily, “even when you’re dead wrong.”
“Oh, I’m not wrong. I make it my business to know things.”
“Well, you know how to bug the crap out of me. I’ll give you that.”
“Know what else I am absolutely certain of?” Jake turned toward her now that they were out of the barn. The late afternoon sun slanted across his face and lightened the blue of his eyes. “I know that before the night is done, you’re going to kiss me. You’re going to like it, too.”
Of all the things Jake could have said, she was least prepared for this one. The words just sort of hung there in mid-air. She didn’t know what to do with them.
“Are you drunk?” she sputtered. “Or are you that in love with yourself?”
The smile he gave her was indulgent, as though gently chiding her for her silly reluctance. “Oh, I’m much too controlling to drink.”
“Well, news flash, buddy. I would French kiss a water buffalo before—”
“Tonight,” he said, his voice making the hair on the back of her arms stand up. “You may hate weddings, but you’re going to like the way this one ends.”
Also by Stacey Keith
Dream On
Sweet Dreams
Dreams Come True
Stacey Keith
LYRICAL SHINE
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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Lyrical Press books are published by
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Copyright © 2018 by Stacey Keith
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First Electronic Edition: March 2018
eISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0389-8
eISBN-10: 1-5161-0389-0
First Print Edition: March 2018
ISBN-13: 978-1-5161-0390-4
ISBN-10: 1-5161-0390-4
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
My darling John, we have sailed the changing tide in a bamboo canoe. We’ve shared darkness and the truth. Love redeems us all in the end. Thank you for carrying the vision and for not letting go. You are the jazz percussion in my heart.
Acknowledgements:
Sarah Warburton, ask me to bury dead bodies in the backyard and I am there. None of this is possible without your genius. Emily Sylvan-Kim, you’re the REAL dream-come-true! I won the agent-lottery with you. Alicia Condon, there is no such thing as good writing—only brilliant editing. I don’t know where you get the patience, the charm and the skill. Dane and Kate, your stars shine so brightly, they dazzle me. You’re the whole reason I picked up a pen in the first place.
Thank you all.
Visit me at:
www.StaceyKeithAuthor.com
http://theroticallyspeaking.blogspot.it/
CHAPTER ONE
“Celebrity weddings should come with a warning label,” Coralee said as she peered outside. “I’ve never seen such a madhouse.”
Maggie Roby glanced up from the wedding cake she was frosting. Her new employee, Coralee, hadn’t moved from that window all morning. She had a stainless-steel mixing bowl full of buttercream frosting tucked under one arm. The more agitated she got, the faster Coralee whisked.
“I don’t think my sister knew it was going to be this bad,” Maggie said. She used the back of her hand to push aside a curl that had tumbled into her face. “Cuervo’s never had this many people in it before. So of course everyone’s going crazy.”
“Sara Merriweather told me that folks here are renting out rooms in their own houses. Renting! To strangers! What’s next—putting up tents in the municipal park?”
Out of loyalty to her sister, Maggie wouldn’t admit it in a thousand years, but Coralee was probably right: their two-stoplight Texas town was absolutely in over its head. Now all Maggie could hope for was that her sister Cassidy wasn’t in over her head, too. What would happen when Cassidy figured out that love was not only a lie, but that all weddings should come with a warning label?
“Oh, great, here come another pack of reporters,” Coralee groused, trudging behind the counter. “And they look just as hungry as the last bunch.”
Maggie knew better than to wish away customers, but her sister’s wedding cake needed everything she could give it right now. You never could tell what kind of disaster might be awaiting you with these things. Even an experienced baker like her could spend hours piping icing onto a multi-tiered, sandwich-layer cake such as this one only to end up with a hideous, bulging monstrosity.
Sometimes cakes sank. Sometimes they were undercooked no matter how many toothpicks you poked into them. And sometimes, after toiling away on some elaborate creation, you got wildly nervous toward the end because you knew if you messed it up now, it was ruined forever. Her sister’s cake was the most important one she’d ever made. Even if she hated weddings herself, everything had to be perfect for Cassidy’s—and the fact that her sister was marrying Mason Hannigan, the most famous quarterback in the country, only added to the pressure.
Maggie reminded herself it wasn’t weddings she hated. What she hated was watching people make the biggest mistake of their lives. One cheating asshole of a husband followed by a heart-wrenching, finance-busting divorce and she felt like a cake that had cratered. There was a charred ache where her heart used to be.
If Mason hurt her sister, Maggie told herself with grim determination, she was fully prepared to choke him.
The bell above the door jingled. Just as men toting cameras and video equipment crowded into the bakery, her oven timer went off.
Maggie set aside the pastry bag and pulled on the handmade pink oven mitts her darling niece, Lexie, had made her last Christmas. The mitts had pugs on them done in cross-stitch. She slid the cupcakes out of the oven and set them on a cooling rack. Then the phone rang. It always rang when something was about to burn or there were customers out front.
People were pouring in—more people than she’d seen since Mr. Flannigan’s barn caught fire. After the fire was put out, the firemen and the half of Cuervo who had been avidly watching packed her bakery for coffee and doughnuts. But this was even crazier. She undid the top button of her polo and fluttered it, trying to pump air across her chest. These were out-of-towners. You never knew what to expect.
She answered the phone, flipping open her order pad while keeping an eye on the front. Poor Coralee was dashing between the coffee machine, the cash register and the pastry
trays.
Maggie found a pen and test-scribbled it to see if it worked. “You know I can’t accept cake orders two days before an event, Mrs. Connors,” she said on the phone. “We need a week, minimum.”
Alice Connors kept arguing. That woman would argue with a sack of wet hair.
“I have a carrot cake in the refrigerator,” Maggie said, knowing if she didn’t find a solution, she would never get Alice off the phone. “Why don’t we write Happy Birthday, Schnoodles on that one? By the way, you do know sugar isn’t good for dogs, right?”
Alice blasted her so hard, Maggie had to hold the phone away from her ear. It made her think she would almost rather be at the wedding. Out front, one of the reporters emptied a pocketful of change on the counter and sorted through it, one coin at a time. Behind him, the line of reporters loudly groaned.
“I’ll make sure it’s beautiful, Mrs. Connors. Yes, of course. See you then.”
Coralee sent her a look of frazzled relief when Maggie appeared beside her. She gave Coralee a wink. This was nothing they couldn’t handle. Sure, the bakery was jam-packed, but there were few things in life Maggie loved more than a challenge.
“Would you like a sandwich to go with your coffee?” she asked the disheveled reporter across from her. His press pass, dangling from a lanyard around his neck, read Harold Lipsky. “The egg salad is fresh. Family recipe.”
Harold blinked. “Wait. You’re the sister of the bride, aren’t you? Care to comment—for the record, of course—on what it’s like seeing your sister marry America’s favorite quarterback?”
Maggie maintained her brisk, professional smile. “Not even a little. But if you’d like a sandwich or a pastry to go with your coffee, I’d be happy to get that for you.”
“Not one single comment?” Harold pushed a few crumpled dollars across the counter. “Maybe something about how you’re hoping to marry a famous athlete, too?”
Right. Another stupidly good-looking cheater like her bronc-busting, rodeo-circuit ex-husband. That was exactly what she needed.
Maggie gave Mr. Lipsky his coffee. Sweetly, she said, “Not if you paid me.”
An hour later the customers were gone, and she and Coralee looked at each other with a united sense of having accomplished something. The lipstick red café tables were askew. One chair lay upended. The gilt letters spelling out the name of the bakery, Sweet Dreams, twinkled serenely on the front window, mocking her.
Maggie heaved herself up and trailed back to the kitchen. “Next time a member of my family gets married,” she told Coralee, “please remind me to just take the day off, will you?”
While Coralee sprayed down the display case and swept up discarded napkins, Maggie scooped fresh buttercream frosting into her pastry bag. She went to work finishing the row of pale pink florets. Once the cake was finished, Donny and his brother were coming over to carry it to the venue. The cake weighed about a ton. Afterward, she’d run upstairs, grab a shower and her Maid-of-Honor gown, and then meet Cassidy and the rest of the bridesmaids for makeup. Dutifully, she told herself it might actually be fun.
Coralee came into the kitchen and set the dustpan and the broom in a corner. “I just saw a news truck with one of those big satellite thingies on top. Do you think maybe they’re sending news stories about Cuervo to aliens in space?”
“If they are, that pretty much explains why aliens almost never come here.” Maggie tilted her head to one side to assess her handiwork. “Does that row of florets look bigger to you? I can’t decide.”
The bell above the door rang. Coralee rolled her eyes. “What do you want to bet it’s the same group as last time, come back for seconds?”
“I’ll take care of it. Why don’t you get started on the dishes.” Maggie wiped her gloved hands on her apron and glanced at herself in the mirror next to the walk-in freezer. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a baker’s snood. Flour streaked her left cheek. She wiped it with the back of her wrist and then went out front, where two men and a woman waited, looking wildly out of place in her cozy country bakery.
The taller of the two men wore a tux and the woman wore a full-length apricot silk Cubana dress. Maggie saw the clothes before she saw the faces. When she glanced up at the man, her heart nearly stopped.
Wow.
Maggie realized suddenly that her apron had cake batter on it and she wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup. She couldn’t breathe properly because all the air had left the room. There was a fluttering in her chest she hadn’t felt in a long time, coupled with an insane desire to turn around and run back into the kitchen. But that was stupid. What was she—fifteen?
“I’m guessing you folks are here for the wedding,” she said with her best professional sparkle. “May I help you?”
The man frowned at her, which brought his piercing blue gaze off the menu on the wall above her head and directly to her flushed, perspiring face. God, how she hated her reaction to him, hated that while he assessed her coolly, everything inside her heated up like a thermometer plunged into boiling water.
“You have coffee here, right?” the second man asked. He wore an expensive-looking suit with a red power tie and a matching pocket square. His nails were spotless, which wasn’t something you saw all too often in farm country.
“We have coffee, espresso, cappuccino and iced coffees,” she said, wishing suddenly that she had on a nice outfit. And didn’t smell like a doughnut. And knew more people who dressed like this.
“Two coffees,” Power Tie replied. “Both black.” He turned to the blond woman, who shrugged slightly. “Make that three coffees.”
Just being near the man in the tux made her nerve endings stir and tingle. Nobody that sexy had passed through Cuervo in a long time. She practically had to force herself to remember that good-looking men were bad news. If a man was handsome, you could count on him for two things: to screw you over and to break your heart.
She gave her tingly feelings a violent shove to the side.
It was hard not to feel sorry for the woman he was with. Poor thing. She’d never see it coming.
Maggie inserted a portafilter into her Italian espresso machine. She turned the portafilter to the right and locked it into place. The machine was a thing of beauty, all chrome and knobs and levers. Even with her back turned, she could study the guy in the tux in the machine’s reflective surfaces. Yet the longer she looked, the more annoyed she became with herself. Men were trouble. A lot of trouble. She knew that. So why keep torturing herself?
But there was something stern and mysteriously self-assured about him that drew her in. He struck her as a man used to giving orders and to getting his own way. His hair, sandy blond, was cut short on the sides and slightly longer on top. His face was broad across the jaw and cheekbones, which saved him from being merely pretty.
Maggie didn’t like pretty. She liked men who looked like men—who could wear work boots as well as tuxes.
Mostly, she liked men you could depend on not to cheat on you the minute some woman flashed them a smile.
She pressed the tamper down on top of the coffee grounds and squeezed hard, wishing she could do the same thing to her brain. It had taken her years to get her life back together again, and now it was exactly what a life was supposed to be: boring. The formula was simple, really. You worked. You spent time with your family. You knitted ridiculous sweaters for your pug. Rinse, lather and repeat. What you didn’t do was let yourself eyeball other women’s boyfriends.
Rule Number One: Never look twice at a good-looking man who has a woman of unspecified importance standing next to him.
Rule Number Two: Never look twice at a good-looking man, period.
Maggie finished making the coffee and then turned around with the three coffees wedged inside a cardboard carrying tray. She was aware that his eyes were on her and felt an electric sizzle zinging beneath her skin. But he practically oozed
the kind of alpha maleness that set her teeth on edge. And he clearly had money.
Men with good looks and money? You’d have to be certifiable to date someone like that.
“That’s quite a cake,” he said, surprising her.
He had a deep voice, like Sambuca mixed with cream and then set on fire.
Maggie made the mistake of gazing directly into his eyes and felt the hair rise on her arms. His eyes were glacier blue and surrounded by dark bristly lashes. A woman could lose her religion drowning in those things. “I beg your pardon?”
He nodded toward the kitchen, where the cake sat like a parade float. Coralee stood next to it, staring at him.
Maggie didn’t like what was happening to her. It seemed as though his intense gaze could see through her somehow, past the bossy efficiency, the big mouth, and her tendency to keep all men at a distance. For a second, the world fell away and it was just the two of them. She felt his lazy, dangerous maleness like she felt her own heartbeat. Then she blinked and the moment was gone.
“It’s for the wedding,” Maggie said stiffly. “My sister’s wedding.”
“You’re Cassidy’s sister? I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
What, did he think a woman like her, a woman who worked in a bakery, couldn’t possibly be related to a beautiful girl like Cassidy?
He must have seen that the remark made her prickly, but instead of apologizing, he smiled. “You look nothing alike.”
Coolly, she rang up three coffees on the vintage cash register. The total popped up on both sides of the display window. As a tall curvy brunette, she knew she looked nothing like her petite blond sisters. So what? No need to make it sound as though she were adopted. And what did she care what his opinion was in the first place?
“Five sixty-seven,” Maggie said, forcing herself to be pleasant. “Will that be cash?”
Power Tie handed her a twenty. She made change and then passed the tray of coffees over the counter, meaning to give it to him. Instead, the man in the tux took them from her. Briefly, their hands touched and she suppressed a shiver.
