Suddenly Yours (Silver Cove #9)

Prologue

Missy

My whole life, starting back from my first clear memories at eight years old, was planned out by my controlling, very wealthy parents. Elizabeth and Gerald Sharpe couldn’t help it. They’d been raised in wealth and felt they needed to meet certain standards.

When I was told at the tender age of eight what my future was going to be for the hundredth time, I decided to do everything in my power to defy them and set my own course.

So naturally, I spent as much time as I could in the one place in our house that they never stepped foot in. The kitchen.

By the time I was nine, I could bake all of my favorite desserts by myself.

Well, okay, I had a little help from Ellie, our French bakery chef.

By thirteen, however, Ellie let me take over most of her tasks while she focused on her online classes.

It was her dream, since coming to New York from Paris, to become a certified pastry instructor.

At that point, she only had a few more online classes to finish her degree.

My dream at that time? To soak up every skill she was willing to teach me and pretend, just for a few hours at a time, that I wasn’t being raised to become the perfect Sharpe daughter with a perfect future laid out by my parents.

After all, Sharper Image Dance Company was New York’s most elite dance school and supplied all the best dancers in the city. My parents had once been dancers themselves, but after they married, they started the lucrative business with help from a small loan from my mother’s parents.

Both my brother and I were being raised to someday take the reins. Max was being trained as a dancer, thanks to his sheer talent. I was expected to take over the business side of things.

However, by the time I hit seventeen, I’d already decided my version of “perfect” had nothing to do with dance classes or choreography and everything to do with buttercream.

So when my parents announced that I’d be attending their alma mater to take classes in finance, marketing, and business, I shocked them—and honestly, myself—by informing them I had already applied to culinary school.

In Boston. Where Ellie was now a tenured teacher.

Ellie cried with pride when I told her that I had applied. My mother had cried with disappointment. My father didn’t cry at all; he just informed me that “pastry chef” wasn’t a real career, and that I’d eventually come to my senses. That was after all the yelling, of course.

Spoiler alert: I did not come to my senses.

And Boston… Boston was everything I had dreamed it would be. I enjoyed my early mornings at school and the late nights covered in flour, surrounded by people who lived and breathed food as passionately as I did.

Boston is where I met Levi.

Levi Stanton.

Perfectly pressed shirts. Perfectly styled hair. Perfect promises whispered over shared textbooks and cheap coffee. He came from a long line of lawyers and was dutifully following that legacy. His father owned his own firm and expected Levi to take over someday.

Of course my parents adored him right up until the moment I fell in love with him, then they didn’t need to, because I was so busy falling head over whisk for him that I didn’t care what anyone thought.

Except Cade.

Cade Walker had been my shadow since grade school.

Loyal, stubborn, always there with a grin or a granola bar when I forgot to eat.

While my parents mapped out my future, Cade was the one who told me I could carve out my own life.

Since his parents were a lot like mine, rich and controlling, we were like glue growing up.

It helped that our parents somehow became besties, which meant our families shared everything, including vacations.

He supported my Boston dream before I even understood how big it was.

He also took one look at Levi, literally one, and muttered, “Nope.”

I should have listened. Hindsight is rude like that.

It turned out that Levi’s obsession with perfection didn’t stop at med school. It extended to his girlfriend, too. The tighter he held on, the smaller my world became…

It didn’t matter to me at the time. After all, I was too busy studying and focusing on my career to keep connections with friends. Even someone as close as Cade.

Then one day I caught Levi “studying” with someone else. Someone prettier. Someone apparently more perfect than I was. She was even a med student.

My heart broke clean in two. My pride shattered right along with it.

So I did the only thing that had ever made sense to me: After graduation, I packed up my knives, my cookbooks, and what was left of my dignity and headed north to Silver Cove, Maine. Max, my big brother, had found his happiness there with his new wife Cora.

If anyone deserved a fresh start, it was me.

Cade had moved up there the previous year shortly after Max had and started his own construction company.

He had created a small neighborhood named Harbor Ridge Estates that he was building one home at a time.

He’d moved up there to reinvent himself after his parents cut him off when he refused to bend to their wishes.

I told myself that it was just a coincidence that we were both a disappointment to our parents. I, of course, remembered the way he had always shown up for me when the rest of the world fell apart.

And Silver Cove?

Well, it felt like a place where I could finally breathe again. A place where I could build something of my own. A place where no one expected perfection from me except myself.

A place where Sweet Expectations, my tiny dream of a bakery, could finally become real.

Besides, I got to be close to my brother, his new wife, and my best friend in the entire world. Cade had been right about everything in life so far, including Levi. Not that I was going to tell him that. I didn’t want him to get a big head.

For the first few months after I’d moved into town, we had worked side by side on turning my building into my dream bakery.

I’d sold my shares of my parents’ business to my brother, who had taken over Sharper Image Dance Company the year before. I had just enough money to open my bakery and rent a couple-room apartment a few blocks away.

Was I going to live there forever? No. Did I have enough money to purchase my own place? No. But that was a problem for another day.

Today was the official grand opening of Sweet Expectations and I had more than enough problems to deal with. Such as the fact that my daydreaming about the bakery had just been interrupted by the sound of my mixer breaking.