Chapter 34
Thirty-Four
Wren
I’m mopping the shop floor at closing when I look up, and Rhett Maddox is standing on the other side of my glass door, not knocking, just looking at me like the knocking’s the hard part.
My stomach flips, hard. I tell it to knock it off. It doesn’t listen. It never has, where he’s concerned.
It’s been a hell of a week. A week of baking myself stupid so there’s no room left to think, a week of the Mr. Delgado voice, a week of not-replying to an email I also can’t make myself delete.
And now the one man in town I’ve got the least defense against is standing on my step at closing, when I’m tired, floury, and down to my last brick.
I could pretend I don’t see him. I’m good at pretending. But he’s already caught me catching him, so I prop the mop against the counter, cross the floor, and open the door six careful inches, mop still in reach, wall fully up.
“We’re closed,” I say.
“I know.” He doesn’t do the grin. That’s the first thing that’s wrong.
Rhett leads with the grin like other men lead with a handshake, it’s the toll you pay to get a sentence out of him, and it’s just not there.
His hands are shoved deep in his pockets.
His shoulders are up around his ears. He looks, for the first time since I met him, like a man with nothing funny loaded and ready.
“Can I come in. Two minutes. Then I’ll go, I swear. ”
Then it hits me, before he gets another word out.
The smell.
That burnt-sugar sweetness, the one I chased through my whole heat and could never pin down in the daylight, the one that lives buried way under his smoke and pepper where nobody’s meant to find it.
It’s pouring off him. Right here on my doorstep, stone-cold sober, not a lick of fever anywhere in the building.
It’s the most naked thing I’ve ever smelled on a person, and he’s just standing in it, letting me have it, not hiding a scrap.
That scares me worse than anything he could actually say.
I open the door.
He steps in and stops dead when he sees where we’re standing.
Because of course it’s the counter. It’s always the counter.
Scene of the crime, still faintly floury, the exact spot where he wrecked me for daylight and then strolled out whistling.
He looks at it. He looks at me. He lets out a breath like it costs him money.
“Okay,” I say, because somebody has to drive, and it’s not going to be the man vibrating on my welcome mat. “Two minutes. Go.”
“I’ve been trying to work out how to say this without a joke in it,” he says. “Turns out I don’t know how. Never learned. So it’s going to come out clumsy, and I need you not to let me off the hook when it does. Don’t laugh. Don’t let me make it funny. Please.”
Please. Rhett Maddox said please, no wink attached, and my wall, my good sturdy lifetime of a wall, develops a hairline crack right down the center.
“Rhett—”
“The counter,” he says, before I can patch the crack back over. “That afternoon. You’ve got a version of it in your head, and I know exactly what it is, because I’m the one who handed it to you. Fun. A laugh on a slow day. Guy has a good time, guy strolls out light, no harm done. Right?”
I don’t answer. My silence answers for me.
“It’s a lie.” Flat, plain, no music in it anywhere.
“It’s the biggest lie I’ve ever told, and I’ve told some real beauties.
That afternoon wasn’t nothing to me, Wren.
It was the exact opposite of nothing. I came in here to flirt with the pretty new baker.
Instead, the floor went out from under me.
I felt a thing I had no tool for, and I got so scared I did the only trick I know when it turns real. I made it a joke, and I bolted.”
I stand there with the counter between us and feel the whole story rearrange itself.
For weeks I’ve carried that walk-out around like evidence.
Proof. He had me, the best of me, right here.
Then he buttoned his shirt and left whistling, and I filed it exactly where I file everything shaped like that.
Under: see, this is what you are. A nice enough time.
Nobody’s keeper. The one they enjoy and then don’t think about twice.
My ex used to call me no trouble at all like it was a gold star, and I built a whole quiet life around earning it, easy to have, easier to leave.
God, I got good at it. I got so good at being no trouble that a man could take me apart and I’d hand him his coat after and thank him for the visit.
Now the man who taught me that lesson hardest is standing in my dark shop telling me he ran because I scared him. Not because I didn’t matter. Because I mattered too much and he didn’t know where to put it.
I don’t know what to do with that. It doesn’t fit anywhere. There’s no drawer for it.
“You’re a flirt,” I hear myself say, and it comes out weaker than I want. “That’s not, Rhett, that’s just who you are. You flirt with everyone. You flirted with Mrs. Alder last week. It doesn’t mean—”
“I have never once run from Mrs. Alder.” He takes a step closer to the counter, and the sweet smell rolls off him stronger, and God help me my whole body tips a half inch toward it before I catch it.
“I flirt with everyone because it’s a wall, sugar.
Same as yours. You bake, I joke, we both build the thing out of whatever’s handy so nobody gets close enough to leave first. I know a wall when I’m standing on the wrong side of one. I built the twin of yours.”
That lands somewhere I don’t have defended.
For a second, neither of us says a thing.
The shop ticks around us, the oven cooling, the case light buzzing.
He’s close enough now that I could reach across the counter and put my hand on him.
My fingers actually twitch on the mop handle with wanting to, which is humiliating, and which I grip back down hard.
Because touching him is how this whole damn thing started.
And touching him is exactly how a woman like me talks herself into believing a thing she’ll be billed for later.
“I’m not here for another random day,” he says.
“That’s what I came to say, and I’m saying it terribly, but I’m saying it.
I don’t want the fun version. I’ve had the fun version my whole life, and it’s a cold way to live.
I want the one where I’m still here when the flour’s swept up.
I want you for keeps, Wren, and it scares me worse than any fire I’ve walked into, because if you turn down the real me, there’s no pretending it was just a laugh.
No joke to duck behind this time. I took it down. On purpose. For you.”
And there he is. The man I wanted and wouldn’t let myself believe in, standing in my shop with his hands out of his pockets for once, holding out the exact thing I’ve spent my whole life dead sure I don’t get to have.
Every instinct I own says take it. Every scared reflex I’ve got says it’s a trick, or a fever-echo, or a kindness he’ll regret by morning, and if I reach for it I’ll be the idiot who reached.
“I can’t,” I say, and it comes out cracked and wrong. “Rhett, I can’t just, I’ve got—” The email. The exit. The whole tidy escape I’ve been keeping warm for exactly this moment. I don’t say it. “It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple,” he says, gently, which is a word I have never once hung on Rhett Maddox. “Simplest thing in the world. It’s just not easy. Those two aren’t the same, sugar, and I think somewhere back there somebody taught you they were.”
He’s right. I hate that he’s right. I hate more that he’s the one who saw it, the flirt, the joke, the man I was surest never looked one inch past the end of his own punchline.
“Two minutes are up,” I whisper.
“Yeah.” He steps back and gives me room, the whole pack’s fatal talent for it.
At the door, he stops, and for one second, I brace for the exit line, the wink, the thing that lets us both off the hook.
It doesn’t come. “I’m not going to chase you,” he says.
“You’ve had enough people crowd you for one lifetime.
But I’m not taking it back, either. It’s yours now. Do whatever you want with it.”
Then he’s gone, and I’m alone in my shop with a mop, a cracked wall, and the fading sweetness of the truest thing anyone’s ever handed me.
I don’t sleep that night.
The email sits in my inbox where it’s sat for days, the exit still propped open.
For the first time, I can’t quite make myself look at it.