Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Andrea hung up her phone and immediately hit redial. It went straight to voicemail. Again.
She’d been trying to reach Paige for over an hour, leaving increasingly urgent messages that had gone from politely concerned to barely controlled panic. Where the hell was she?
The sound of construction next door had gone quiet—probably a lunch break—but Andrea barely noticed.
Her mind kept spinning with everything Lainey had told her and what she’d found since hanging up the phone.
William hadn’t merely posted about the pop-up sweets shop, but teased a forthcoming rave review in his Sunday column.
And again … where was Paige?
“This is ridiculous,” Andrea muttered, snatching up her coat and purse. She couldn’t just sit here waiting for Paige to finally call back. She needed to do something, anything, to feel like she wasn’t completely powerless.
Her ankle twinged as she took the stairs too quickly, but she ignored it, fumbling through her purse for the car keys.
“Andrea!”
She glanced up to see Wes jogging toward her from the work truck. He was smiling and bursting with golden retriever energy, but she couldn’t muster anything to give him in return. The dread seemed as though it were pulling at her every facial muscle.
“Good news,” he said as he reached her. “We’re almost wrapped up next door.”
Andrea tried to summon a smile. “That’s … great.”
His smile faltered slightly. “You okay? You look…” He stopped himself, searching for the right word. “You look distracted.”
Andrea’s laugh came out thin. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.” She found the keys and yanked them free, hitting the button to unlock the doors and deactivate the alarm. “I just need to pick up some things at the store.”
“Fair enough.” Wes studied her for a beat, as if he knew there was more but wasn’t going to push. “We’re still on for tonight, though?”
She almost said no, her heart too mixed up, her mind too busy. But she tilted her face up just long enough to look into those brown eyes, and memories of the night before stirred, reminding her of the way she’d felt so safe and at peace.
“For the festival?” Wes added in her beat of silence.
“Yes. Of course.”
“Good.” His smile returned and he leaned in just long enough to brush a kiss to her lips. “See you tonight.”
Andrea nodded and slipped into her car before he could look any closer. She didn’t trust herself to keep the mask in place.
The grocery store was nearly empty, which suited her mood perfectly. She grabbed a bag of flour she didn’t need and drifted down the baking aisle, staring blankly at shelves of sugar and vanilla and boxed cake mixes.
From the depths of her purse, her phone rang. Andrea jolted, nearly dropping the flour, and snatched it up before the second ring finished.
It was Paige.
“Paige, thank Gaia!” Andrea answered, awkwardly shifting to put the flour on a shelf. She scurried down the aisle, forcing herself to lower her voice. “I’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”
“What’s going on? I just got back to the bakery and everyone said Lainey was in here with her hair practically on fire, and that I needed to call you right away. Did something happen?”
Andrea’s eyebrows shot up her forehead, her ears struggling to register both the words and the almost nonchalant tone of her business manager.
“I don’t know, Paige. Why don’t you tell me?
Lainey said there’s some kind of pop-up cupcake shop squatting across the street, and apparently William is shining his big-ass spotlight on it, all the while Sunset is a ghost town! ”
Paige hesitated, and after years of working together, Andrea didn’t need to see her to know what her expression looked like: a wrinkle between her otherwise smooth brows and a bit of her bottom lip tucked under her two front teeth.
“Ghost town isn’t fair,” Paige said, her tone terse. “And yes, I saw William’s post, but since there isn’t anything we can do about it, I figured you didn’t need to know.”
“Didn’t need to know?!” Andrea sputtered, her efforts to keep quiet failing. A few customers in the produce section turned as she emerged from between two rows.
“I knew this would be your reaction,” Paige said. “What do you want me to do, Andrea? Run over there and throw tomatoes at them?”
“This isn’t funny, Paige. This is my entire life on the line here.”
“I know it’s not funny, and I wasn’t trying to make a joke.” She sighed heavily. “Andrea, look, they have a permit. There’s nothing we can legally do. And William can write about whatever he wants. Short of complaining to his editor, I don’t think we can stop him. And you already did that, right?”
Andrea shook her head, a second wave of regret rising over her decision not to badger William’s editor. Everything with the trip had happened so quickly, there hadn’t been time.
“Look, the good news is they’re only here for two days. I pulled the permit and checked the details,” Paige continued. “So I figured we’d just ride out the storm. It wasn’t worth bothering you.”
“But how are things? I don’t know anything. It’s like I’ve been shut out of my own business. I can’t even get into the customer database! Did you put some sort of password on it or delete me from the admin panel?”
“No, of course not!”
“Well, it won’t let me in. I’ll send you a screenshot when I get home. Maybe Tyler can fix it. He’s good with the tech stuff.”
“I’ll make sure he looks into it,” Paige said, but her voice had grown distant, as though she’d put the call on speakerphone and wandered off.
“Can you send me a screenshot from yours? Or email me a PDF?”
“Andrea, everything is fine. I promise. You’re supposed to be working on the cookbook. How’s that going, anyway? Any new recipes you want us to trial in the shop?”
“Yeah, I could do that.” She absently wondered if she could overnight some of Sonny’s maple syrup to LA. “Although, it involves pecans.”
Paige groaned and Andrea smiled for the first time since getting off the phone with Lainey. Though it faded quickly. “I just feel like this trip was a mistake. Maybe if I was there I could do something—I could fix it.”
A beat stretched between them, and Andrea frowned.
“You’re not thinking of canceling the rest of your trip and coming home early, are you?” Paige asked.
At the question, Wes’s face rose in Andrea’s mind. She squeezed her eyes shut, remembering the warmth of waking next to him that morning, the scent of his cologne, the promise to visit the festival together, dreams of stealing more kisses under the mistletoe before it was time to leave.
Leave. There was that word again.
Earlier, she’d been mostly joking with Lainey when she talked about running away and becoming a farmer in Vermont. The idea was absurd—bakery troubles or not. But now it felt like she was stuck in a game of tug-of-war, and she was the rope.
“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Andrea admitted, her tone flat.
“I’ve made some good progress on the cookbook, but I’m still not there yet, and I have to send it to Martina by Monday.
Taking a day off to travel wouldn’t help.
I doubt I’d get anything done on the flight—I’ve never been able to work on airplanes.
” She paused, exhaling slowly, willing her pulse to slow and her thoughts to settle.
“You’re sure you’ve got it under control? ”
“I’ll see what’s going on with the spreadsheet, and if we can’t get you back in, I’ll send screenshots with updated figures. That should put your mind at ease.”
Andrea nodded, still not fully satisfied, but she decided it would have to do for now.
“Please, Andrea, try to relax. Take a bubble bath, or do some retail therapy—whatever you need—but leave things to me. I’ve got it in hand.”
“All right. But I seriously want those spreadsheets.”
Paige sighed again, her voice more distant than before. “You’ve got it, boss.”
The call ended.
Neither Wes nor his crew members were outside when Andrea arrived back at the townhouse, and she was a bit relieved to scurry inside without another encounter.
If Wes gave her that puppy-dog look and asked if she was all right, she was liable to have a full breakdown and start crying.
Something told her Wes was the kind of guy who could take it, but at the same time, she wanted to be vacation Andi, not weepy, stressed-out Andi.
Inside, she put away her groceries, offered Phantom and Crumpet a snack, then shoved aside all thoughts of Paige, Sunset Sweets, William, and pop-up bakeries with rip-off branding.
She turned her phone on silent and left it in the kitchen, far from reach, before settling into her place on the sofa and opening her notebook and laptop.
Blowing her deadline would only make things worse, so she forced her mind to focus on the final write-up of the recipes she’d cultivated since arriving in Maple Crossing.
One by one she read through the typed versions and compared each line to the notes from her final rounds of testing.
She found a few minor errors, but nothing earth-shattering, and her confidence built a bit with each checkmark on her list.
The hours passed quickly as she continued her work, and by the time her alarm chirped from the other room, she’d nearly reached the end. The only problem? There were still three blank spaces.
“Ugh,” she moaned, pressing her face into her hands. “Three more recipes in three days?”
Crumpet lifted his head and nudged her leg with his wet nose. Absently, she set about stroking his soft ears, even as her mind fluttered and bashed into mental roadblocks, one after another, like a bird stuck in a chimney.