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What had she done? What madness had her Minion tits bewitched her into? There was no boyfriend, no date. Not unless she ran back into the kitchen and made one out of snickerdoodle dough.
The silence descending while Mira slowly melted down shattered as the bell above the door dinged. Even though she’d heard that sound so often it was ingrained in her psyche, this ding was different. This ding trilled. It sang. It tinkled over her like sound confetti as a perfectly timed dream come true walked into her bakery.
The man’s movements were lithe as an alley cat’s, his hair a soft, silvery-blond tousle. He wore a Cure T-shirt that looked like he’d scored it at one of their concerts in the eighties—faded jeans pulled straight from Cobain’s closet, and dark sunglasses that reflected her shocked expression when he turned to look at her.
Thank you, she offered up to the universe for this rare act of benevolence. Girding her loins, she said, “Oh, here he is now,” while flashing the stranger her bestplease play alongeyes. “Hey, baby.” Her guilty warble was less than ideal. “I’ve missed you.”
Michael Stipe’s voice faded out. No one moved. No one breathed. The planet stopped spinning while Mira waited for her savior to call her bluff. After a pause seismic enough for tectonic plates to inch away from each other and create new continents, he slid his sunglasses up into his hair, set his brown-eyed stare on her, and with a smirk worthy of an academy award, said, “I’ve missed you too, sugar.”
CHAPTERTWO
COLE
Small town hospitalityis massively underrated, Cole thought, barely keeping his feet under him while this beautiful woman with sea-green eyes and jet-black hair reached across the counter, grabbed his shirt in both hands, and yanked.
“I amsosorry,” she said softly into his ear.Damn, she smelled delicious, like lemon-flavored icing. “But can I kiss you?”
When Madigan had asked him to stop by this bakery on his way to Bluebird to “pick up some tarts,” Cole highly doubted this was what he’d had in mind. But semantics had never been his strong suit. Besides, this was hardly the first time a person he didn’t know had asked him for a kiss. A lifetime ago, when he’d drummed for the Makers, it happened several times a night. Even though he was supposed to be older and wiser now, some things never changed. Things like his response, which was the same now as it had always been then—an instinctual, enthusiastic “hell yes.”
The words barely made their way out of his mouth before her lips cut them off.
Her lips.Hot damn, her lips. They were so impossibly full and soft against his that, after the exhausting eight-hour drive from Seattle, a coherent corner of his short-circuiting brain wondered if he’d fallen asleep at the wheel. But then her fingers curled around his neck, long and delicate and trembling, and reality shook him back to his senses. Not only was the kiss definitely happening, but whoever she was putting on this show for, it definitely wasn’t him.
Behaving himself, not giving in to the temptation to tilt his head a single degree, Cole waited to see what might happen next. As soon as her lips parted from his, she tugged him into an embrace so tight the countertop dug into his hip, and whispered, “Thank you.”
Grinning against her ear, he whispered back, “Anytime.”
“I’m Paul.” The tall man who’d uttered these words materialized out of thin air, sprouting like a weed from the black and white tiles to stand beside him. Or Cole just hadn’t noticed him. How could he notice anything aside from the way her thick bangs curtained her big green eyes? Or her long raven layers cascading from a high ponytail down her back, the silver glinting in the crisscrossed patterns she’d shaved into the hair above her ears? Or her heart-shaped face, her straight nose, the bow of her upper lip, the curve of her lower lip—
“Babe,” she said, angling her head sharply toward the man. “Say hi to Paul.”
“Hi, Paul.” Cole held out his hand to the side without taking his eyes off—he squinted at the name embroidered on her apron—Mira. “Name’s Cole.”
While he shook Paul’s hand, Mira’s eyes flared in recognition, her face paling. “C-Cole? Madigan’s Cole?”
If subterfuge was the name of the game, she wasn’t necessarily nailing it. “Nah, sugar. I’myourCole. Remember?”
“Ha!” she barked. “Ha ha. You’re so funny. Isn’t he funny?”
“You’re Cole Sanderson, aren’t you?” Paul asked, deeply skeptical.
“Last I checked,” Cole replied, only then realizing there was another woman in the bakery.
“I’m Chrissy,” the woman with blond hair said, reaching out a hand for a brief shake.
“Hi, Chrissy. Good to meet you.”
Leveling Mira with his still-skeptical gaze, Paul said, “You’re dating Cole Sanderson? You’re dating the drummer from the Makers?”
Cole was dying to hear her answer, but her wide, pleading eyes had him in a chokehold. “I love it when you wear your hair up like that,” he told her, leaning forward, resting his elbows on the counter. “Did you just get it shaved again?”
Running her fingers over the checker-patterned fuzz above her right ear, she said, “Just yesterday.”
When he told her “I love it,” her lips parted and slid into a smile, and Cole’s neck felt a little crispy from the heat of Paul’s glare.
“I was suggesting to Mira that we should all sit together at the wedding,” Paul said through a jaw so tight Cole heard his teeth grinding.
“AndIwas suggesting that Mira would probably be too busy with the cake to worry about us,” Chrissy said, the wedding ring encircling her finger making Cole wonder if the waters he’d just waded into ran deeper than he’d thought. Not that he’d thought of much after Mira had hauled him across her counter. It wasn’t necessarily his forte, thinking, considering, looking before leaping.
