Chapter Six
Fourteen years earlier…
“Hey. It’s Magda, right?”
“I… yeah… yeah, that’s me. I’m…” Magda flushed as she stammered.
Mac grinned, his smile seeming to shine right on her as he took the stool next to hers. “Didn’t expect to run into anyone else from Pine Hollow.”
“Yeah, no, me neither,” Magda managed, glancing around the kitchen at King Arthur while a single thought kept ringing loud in her head.
Mackenzie Newton noticed me.
No one noticed Magda. Sometimes it felt like her single most remarkable trait was how singularly unremarkable she was. To most people in Pine Hollow, she was “one of those Miller girls”—not the oldest, not the youngest, not the prettiest or the smartest. Just an average sort of Miller offspring.
Her unremarkableness might not have been quite so glaring if her two best friends hadn’t also been so distinctly remarkable. Charlotte had skipped two grades and was already finishing up her sophomore year at Dartmouth, and Kendall was well on her way to being a freaking Olympian—and then there was Magda, with no particular skills or ambitions, just an average sort of girl who graduated at the normal time and was going to go to a perfectly average state school in the fall.
“You taken one of these before?” Mac asked, tying on an apron as he surveyed the room, his muscular arms flexing with the motion.
Magda managed to stammer out that she hadn’t.
She liked to bake—she used to try out new recipes with her aunt Lena—the only one of her aunts who didn’t have kids of her own, and who had decided for some reason that Magda was her favorite. It had felt so special, those afternoons making cakes and pies and cookies— she had felt so special. And when her aunt had offered to pay for her to take a real professional baking course at King Arthur as a graduation present, Magda had jumped at the chance.
But she’d been wondering what she was doing here, among the real bakers, her hands shaking with nerves, long before Mackenzie Newton had swanned in and tossed himself onto the stool beside hers.
She knew Mac—sort of. He was six years older, and friends with her best friend’s older sister, so really she knew of him, in the sort of vaguely familiar way she knew everyone in Pine Hollow. She was pretty sure they’d never spoken more than two words to each other, and if anyone had asked her fifteen minutes ago, she would have sworn he didn’t know her name. But here he was, sitting beside her, chatting up a storm.
“Yeah, me neither,” he said, exuding confidence in a way that was frankly a little daunting.
Where were his nerves? Why wasn’t he worried he was going to mess up and burn the entire place down?
“I’m thinking of adding a few muffins or something to the menu at the Cup,” he continued, mentioning the little espresso shop he’d opened up a couple of years earlier.
“I heard you make good coffee,” Magda offered hesitantly.
Mac’s eyebrows bounced up merrily as his smile widened. “Not good enough to get you to check it out?”
Magda flushed hotter. “I’m not much of a coffee drinker,” she mumbled. Which was a spectacular understatement. Coffee was one of the most singularly disgusting beverages ever invented as far as she was concerned. People kept telling her she was going to develop a taste for it, but it still tasted positively foul to her.
“That’s why I’m expanding into muffins,” he said, his smile still shining on her like a spotlight. “After this course, I expect to have the best muffins in Vermont.”
Maybe it was the way he was smiling at her, but Magda suddenly found playful words tripping off her lips. “Why stop at muffins? Be really daring. Go for apple turnovers.”
Mac laughed—and the sound felt like it streaked right down to her stomach and bounced around there. “One step at a time.”
Then the instructor called the class to order, before Magda could figure out the answer to the question that was suddenly pinging through her brain.
Was Mackenzie Newton flirting with her?
He had auburn curls and incredibly dark brown eyes in a combination she’d never realized was incredibly sexy—but then Mackenzie Newton had never smiled at her like that before. Like he couldn’t imagine anything more fascinating than sitting there chatting with boring old Magda Miller.
All through the class, as they learned about different kinds of cake sponges, Magda kept stealing glances at Mac—and more than once he’d looked back at her, winking or smiling or making an exaggerated woe face at his own less-than-fluffy cake.
It was an eight-week intensive. All summer long. With two two-hour weeknight classes each week and a four-hour block on Saturdays for the longer bakes.
Magda had been overwhelmed before the class began—eager to learn but also convinced she was completely out of her depth, and considering running out the back door before anyone saw what a pathetic amateur she was.
But now she was looking forward to every single session over the next few weeks, wondering if she would have many more chances to chat with Mackenzie Newton.
And that was before he turned toward her as they were walking to the parking lot at the end of the night and said, “You know, since we’re both coming from Pine Hollow, we should carpool. For the environment.”
Her heart had exploded into sugar sprinkles and she’d agreed—for the environment, of course.
By the following week, she was looking forward to the drives to and from King Arthur almost as much as the courses. She loved baking—she was good at it too, she was realizing. Good in a way that made the instructor’s eyebrows go up as he tried her pastries and had him mentioning scholarship programs to fancy French academies.
She was so happy —and a big part of that was Mac.
He was so easy to talk to, and such a good listener. He shared with her his plans for the Cup, and she encouraged him to think bigger—why not add even more desserts? And why stop at desserts when he made the best fresh bread in class? People would come from all over for his baguette sandwiches.
He was addicted to coffee and kept trying to convince her that she actually liked it; she just hadn’t found her perfect drink yet. Every time she hopped into his car to drive to King Arthur, he would hand her a new to-go cup with a new fancy coffee drink that was going to convert her—and every time she made exaggerated gagging noises after the first sip.
Until one day he handed her a chai latte—and she realized she was completely in love. And not just with the chai.
Magda had never dated before. She was what her sisters patronizingly called a “late bloomer” and what her friends called “too shy for her own good”—which meant she faded into the wallpaper at every high school party. Aunt Lena assured her that her time was coming—that she was the kind of girl who would thrive in college—but now Magda realized it was only that she hadn’t met the right person yet. Maybe it was a symptom of too many rom-coms, but she’d always had this sense that she would know . When it was right.
And then she had. With Mac.
They were so perfect for each other. She’d never felt so perfectly in sync with another person—even though they couldn’t have been more different. He was always so confident, and he never took his mistakes to heart. He messed up constantly in the kitchen at King Arthur, but he would just laugh and say he learned “by trial and error, with an emphasis on the error.” But he had good instincts for daring flavor combinations, encouraging her to expand beyond her tried-and-true chocolates and vanillas.
They balanced each other. And for the first time in her life, Magda finally had someone she wanted to make her grandmother’s legendary “man-catching” maple cake for.
He made everything seem possible. He didn’t even laugh when she told him she might actually apply for that fancy French pastry academy after week three—though by week six, she was pretty sure she didn’t want to go. It would be too far away from Mac.
And they had plans. One time when she’d been talking about marketing partnerships with other businesses in town for the Cup, he’d said, “You know what we should do…” and her heart had beat so loud in her ears she hadn’t even heard the rest of the sentence.
We .
Her future was so clearly with him. At the Cup.
He was her soulmate. And nothing was going to happen to change that.
Nothing.