Chapter 21 #2
I don’t look back. I can’t. My body is already moving, set on one singular mission: get to Jack before his plane leaves. Tell him I’m sorry. That I’m an idiot. That while my head convinced me we were temporary, my heart always knew he was the forever I didn’t dare plan for.
Bursting into the back lot reserved for shop owners, I nearly collide with someone standing there.
“Mom?” I skid, breath fogging in the cold.
She looks up, startled. “Audrey! Sorry I’m late. The roads around town are fine, but right outside—icy.” She brushes frost from her camel coat. “Took me longer than I thought to get here.”
For a beat, all I can do is gape. “But why are you here?”
As if realizing not is all right with me, she drops her hands. “Jack invited me.” Her words slow as her eyes travel the length of me, trying to figure out what’s wrong.
Of course he did.
Inside, the bell rings and voices swell, muffled but insistent. My mother’s gaze cuts to the back door still ajar then back to me. “Where are you off to?”
My words tumble out just as sharp as the air is cold. “To leave work in the middle of the day, let go of a week’s worth of money, all so I can go beg the man I love to stay with me in a small town where I’ll probably always worry about my bakery’s bottom line but I’ll be happy to do so.”
She blinks, then nods once, as if that’s exactly the answer she expected. “I see.” Digging into her bag, she pulls out her key fob and presses it into my palm. “Take my SUV. It’s safer on the roads than your delivery van.”
For a heartbeat, everything inside me swells with words—gratitude, fear, love, the kind of confessions you only think of when you know you’ll regret it if you don’t say them. But instead I just wrap my arms around her tightly.
She squeezes back, warm and fierce.
Then I slip away, running across the icy lot in my Crocs, praying my socks don’t soak through before I even make it to the driver’s side. I throw myself into the seat, crank the ignition, and grip the wheel.
Jack
The truck fishtails—tires skidding across a patch of ice that might as well be greased glass. I wrestle the wheel, jaw tight, muttering curses that fog up the windshield.
Whoever plows Hideaway Harbor’s local roads should be promoted straight to state level—hell, national level. Because if the drive from the airport through the mountains is any indication, the rest of Maine must be limping along on sled dogs and prayer.
At this rate, I’ll miss Whoopie Pie Appreciation Day altogether.
I smack the heel of my hand against the steering wheel, the thud echoing in the barely insulated cab.
Nice move, Lourd—waste time at the airport after Felix and Sofia finally talked sense into you because clearly you’re a glutton for punishment.
And why? Because I had to change. Literally change.
Into flannel, jeans, and boots—a costume straight out of central casting for “small-town boyfriend.” After all that big self-talk about it not mattering if I wore suits or not, that I’d show Audrey I was the right man for her without the Hallmark vision she has her heart set on—I caved.
Years of lurking on movie sets taught me one thing: Costumes sell the story.
So if Audrey Nouel wants a Christmas-tree-farmer fantasy, fine.
I’ll play the role long enough to deliver my closing argument—that while she thinks she wants flannel and firewood, what she really needs is me: legal pads, contracts, all of it.
And just to be extra—because apparently that’s what Audrey Nouel does to me—when I couldn’t find a vintage truck at the rental counter to complete the scene, I bought the desk worker’s. Cash. For the price of a brand-new BMW.
The big red monstrosity better be worth it.
'Cause here I am, bouncing on a bench seat older than I am, wrapped in a wardrobe I have no business wearing, and praying I don’t end up in a ditch before I make it back to Hideaway.
I glance down at myself—rolled-up flannel sleeves of my unbuttoned shirt that reveals the Henley underneath.
My denim stiff. My boots scuffed from exactly thirty minutes of ownership.
All this and I am still wondering if I look like a man who belongs in small-town America or just a lawyer in disguise.
God, I hope she knows. I hope Audrey sees past all this. That it isn’t about the props. It’s about her. About us.
Because if Audrey doesn’t believe me when I show up looking the part and declaring that I’m here to stay, then maybe I deserve every pothole this road throws at me.
In the distance, I spot headlights cutting through the trees—an SUV barreling toward me, faster than any sane person should drive on these roads.
I ease the wheel, trying to hug the side and give them space, but the old truck jolts too far right, tires crunching over a frozen rut. My hands yank left by instinct—right into the SUV’s path.
“Fuck.” I wrench the wheel back the other way to avoid clipping them—
Snow sprays across the hood. The bench seat bucks under me. The engine sputters in protest as the tires spin uselessly against ice and mud.
My breathing huffs in time with the tick of the cooling engine.
Fucking figures.
Figures I’d end up in the one place I swore I wouldn’t—the literal ditch I’d been mentally cursing for the last ten miles.
And like the universe thought I needed a cherry on top of my wild mountain Oldsmobile adventure, an avalanche of snow slides off the towering evergreen above me, burying the cab of the truck under a wet, heavy sheet of white.
Perfect. Just perfect.
Audrey
What the actual?
I’m idling, heater blasting against my frozen ankles, staring through the windshield in stunned silence.
I just watched an ancient truck—one that looks like it bribed its way through state inspection—skid sideways until its front right tire disappeared into a ditch.
For a second, I can’t quite believe it happened. My brain needs an extra beat to catch up. Then the shock fades, and reality creeps in.
If I stop, I could miss Jack.
And if I miss Jack, that’s it. Next stop: LAX, where I’ll be the pathetic woman camped outside his celebrity compound, begging for him to talk to me like one of those reality TV reruns that make me cringe.
Blurry movement stirs behind the frosted glass—the driver.
They wouldn’t be moving if they were hurt. Right? And while I have no faith in that truck’s tires—as evidenced by their ice-skating demonstration—I’m sure he can reverse out of that ditch and be on his way without me.
Right?
I grip the wheel tighter and consider just driving past.
But then the pine above the truck shrugs off its load, dumping an avalanche of snow over the cab, burying the thing like a frosted cupcake.
“Son of a…”
With a sigh heavier than a snowbank, I throw the gearshift into Park, grab the ice scraper off the passenger seat, and shove the door open with a curse about vintage trucks and their drivers. Cold slaps me in the face, the kind that instantly chaps your lips and stings your nose.
One step and my Crocs sink into the snow, socks soaked through immediately.
I can’t. I just can’t.
But I do.
Stomping up to the half-entombed truck, I flip the scraper and use it like a shovel, attacking the driver’s side door with all the vehemence of someone who was just personally wronged by snow. Which, frankly, I feel like I was.
My arms burn, my forehead beads with sweat, and my mouth mutters words that would’ve gotten me grounded for weeks as a teenager.
A flash of plaid appears through the ice-crusted window, a shoulder shoving against the door until the hinges give way with a groan—like even the metal knows this is a bad idea.
I step back, breathless, snow dripping down my wrist, Croc charms sacrificed to the snow gods.
The door swings wider.
And then—because fate has a wicked sense of humor—Jack unfolds himself from the cab. Except it can’t be Jack. Jack doesn’t wear oversized flannel button-downs, worn Levi’s, or boots scuffed like he’s worked with something other than movie stars and subsidy clauses.
“Audrey?” Jack blinks at me, confusion knotting his features.
Holy crap.
I stumble back, right into a pile of slush. Cold seeps through my Crocs, but I barely feel it. Because it’s him.
The man I’ve been chasing down the mountain, desperate to catch before his plane left. The man I pushed away when I should’ve pulled him close. The man I swore I could live without—only to find every day since hollow and aching.
His coat is dusted with snow, his hair mussed like he’s fought the same storm I have. But it’s his eyes that undo me. Steady. Searching. Like I’m the thing he came here for all along.
My throat tightens, my breath snagging in the icy air. My heart slams against my ribs, louder than the ticking engine, louder than the scrape of snow slipping from the branches above. Louder than the voice in my head that still whispers I don’t deserve him after sending him away.
I toss the ice scraper—and every bit of caution in my body—aside, then launch myself at him, lips crashing onto his.