She also wanted to sit the hell down, because these last twenty-four hours had beena lot.
“You screwed things up with someone you care about?” Bez shook her head, her brow scrunched in feigned disbelief. “Wow. That seems so unlike you.”
Johnathan snorted.
Karl ignored his employees and everyone else watching the tableau in rapt silence.
“Dearborn.” He crooked a finger. “Get over here.”
“I don’t take orders from you, Dean,” she reminded him. “Never have. Never will.”
But when Johnathan flipped up a hinged section of the countertop for her, she squeezed through the narrow gap. She edged around a rolling cart full of cooling bread on silver trays.
And when Karl opened his arms, she walked straight into them.
3
Molly fucking Dearborn had come back to him.
To Harlot’s Bay, anyway. But she’d come backforhim. She’d only come because she’d thought he was dead, because the most bizarre series of events imaginable had happened, but none of that shit mattered.
She’d cared enough to revisit a place she hadn’t been in twenty years. She was in Karl’s arms, cheeks still damp with tears for him. And she was clutching him like she’d never let him go, which suited him just fine. In fact, it damn welldelightedhim.
Karl wasn’t sure he’d experienced delight since senior year. Feltgreat.
But then she pulled away, and he had to let her go. After dashing away the remaining wetness from her rosy cheeks with the heels of her hands, she breathed deeply several times, until her hitching inhalations turned even and silent. Straightened the cuffs and smoothed the front of her rumpled men’s-style button-down. Arranged a serene expression on her pretty face.
It was like watching a cracked egg fuse itself back together, until it lay on the worktable dry and pale and untouched again.
Back in high school, she was the most controlled person he’d ever met. In flawless command of every gesture and expression. Apparently that hadn’t changed.
It was impressive. Always had been. But goddamn inconvenient too. After two endless decades, this was his chance to make thingsright, and he wasn’t a fucking telepath. He needed to be able to read her reactions.
A throat cleared near him. Loudly. He jerked so hard, his head almost whacked the doorframe, and even Molly twitched a little.
“Um...” Bez tilted her head toward the other side of the counter and raised her brows.
Which was when he saw the cluster of nosy-as-shit customers watching him. Some of them with their phones out and aimed his way.Molly’sway.
“Karl,” she asked quietly, expression inscrutable, “why are people filming us?”
He directed a scowl at the crowd. “Because this town is full of busybodies who need to mind their own damn beeswax.”
“I see.” Her voice remained entirely neutral. “Your mere emergence from the back room appears to have enthralled said busybodies. In much the same way a Bigfoot sighting might.”
Ignoring that, he raised his voice, so the entire shop could hear him. “Listen up, assholes. If you don’t stop recording, I’ll get my cleaver. Take your phones. Chop them into pieces so tiny, even a goddamnantwouldn’t bother eating them. And then I’ll personallyshovethose piecesdown your throats.”
A few people hurriedly tapped their screens and deposited their phones into their pockets and purses. Others—the ones who’d grown up with him—just grinned and kept recording.
When he glared at his kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Dix waved cheerfully back at him, then squinted to adjust a camera setting on her cell.
“Ants don’t consume electronics, Dean.” Molly sounded unperturbed. “And as far as the logistics of shoving cell phone shards down your customers’ throats—”
“Logistics can go fuck themselves.”
“That’s technically impossible.” Molly raised her forefinger. “Anyway, as I was saying, there are three main problems with your plan. Shards that tiny would be hard to gather and probably quite sharp.” A second finger joined the first. “Your fist wouldn’t fit down your customers’ throats.”
“I’d make it fucking fit,” he muttered.
