“Said like someone who’s never lived in a small town.”
“Said like someone whose bitterness has taken over,” I shot back.
Gideon tilted his head to concede the point. “You want eggs?” He lifted one up as if I needed extra help understanding what an egg was.
I considered being snarky, but he’d gotten me a matcha latte and was offering to make me food, so I just nodded. “Sure. Thanks.”
Gideon made deliciously creamy scrambled eggs and perfectly golden toast. He even cut it into triangles and didn’tjudge me when I smothered my eggs in ketchup. Well, he might’ve judged me, but he had the decency not to say it out loud. Henry had hated my liberal use of ketchup as a condiment. He thought it was uncivilized. And why was I still thinking about my ex-fiancé? We’d broken up half a year ago, and I was now married to another man. I should’ve been over the pain of it by now.
“Ready?” Gideon asked when we’d put our dishes in the dishwasher.
I frowned. “For what?”
He looked at me like I was dense. “For the fair?”
“You’re coming?”
His lips twitched. “I’m driving, babe. Wouldn’t want to miss your reaction to the biggest event of the summer.” His sarcasm was so thick I could’ve cut it like jello.
“They should really put you on the Marswood Harbor marketing committee,” I snarked. “You’d have droves of tourists flooding the town with that attitude.”
He laughed, and we went out to the car. It was an easy drive along the coast, and I was once again captivated by the beauty of the region. The ocean was a wild crash of waves against the shore, and the hills were a tangle of dense forest. The air smelled so clean I wondered what poison I’d been inhaling in the city all my life.
We stayed on the coast road and parked on the far side of Main Street. The Pier was just visible behind us where it overlooked the ocean on top of a bluff. Gideon waited as I hooked my cross-body bag over my head, then nodded toward the seaside road.
And then we were at the fair.
It was about a hundred feet of ragtag stalls. Half of themwere empty. To my right, the words “Petting Zoo” were spray-painted on a piece of plywood that leaned against rickety-looking pens. Two angry geese were in the first one, followed by a goat, a llama, and finally someone’s dog. A small stage had been set up at the far end of the road, with a small cluster of people setting up microphones and speakers.
As far as fairs went, it was pretty pathetic. Gideon’s aunt, Angela, sat behind one stall full of frankly mediocre floral watercolor paintings. There was a stall selling little pucks of hard-looking bread. An angry woman sat at the table, glaring at the Knead More Bread stall across the road. I spotted another stall of secondhand clothes, and one final one with beeswax and honey products. The rest were empty.
“So?” Gideon asked.
He wore sunglasses, but I could see the crinkles at the side of his eyes. “Are we early?” I asked.
His lips spread. “Nope.”
“Why are there so many empty stalls?”
“It’s a first-come, first-served kind of thing, and the people of Marswood Harbor are optimists.”
“Other than you, you mean?”
He laughed. “Where do you want to start?”
I nodded at Caroline manning the bakery’s stall. “Might as well get another drink.”
We ambled up to her stall, and she arched her brows at me. “I don’t have matcha capabilities here, I’m afraid,” she told me, and put her hands on two big silver carafes of coffee. “I have dark roast and darker roast.”
“I’ll go with dark,” I answered, then glanced at the bread stall across the way. “What’s the story with that bread lady?”
“Eat at your own risk,” Caroline answered, and Gideon snorted.
We got our coffees, paid, and then faced the fair. “I was expecting more,” I admitted, which made Gideon laugh again. I couldn’t help staring at him when he did, my own lips curling in response.
“This is as good as it gets in this town, I’m afraid,” he said, looking down at me. The sun gilded his dark hair, and I couldn’t help the yearning that ached in my chest. I still wanted him as badly as I had two weeks ago, when we were married. He arched a brow. “Regretting your decision to stay?”
“No,” I answered, and turned toward the pens. “Let’s go see the animals.”
