Chapter 14
Emmaline
Sasspatch Society Group Text
Delilah:
Darlings, we have a situation.
Mo’nique:
The only reason you start like that is if a hem ripped or a man begged. Which is it?
Delilah:
Neither. Worse. Bodie just texted. He forgot to make a plan to break the news of his nuptials to the town.
Glory:
Well well WELL.
Bea:
Lord have mercy. The hens in this town will be clucking before lunch.
Mo’nique:
Correction: they’re already clucking. Just got three texts asking if I “heard the news.”
Glory:
Emmaline’s bakery is gonna be a circus. That girl does NOT need vultures pecking at her.
Delilah:
Which is why we are suiting up. Bodie asked for cover.
Bea:
You mean to tell me the chief of police came to us for crowd control? I feel twenty again.
Mo’nique:
I’ll bring samples. Distract the masses with sugar and keep them too busy chewing to pry.
Glory:
I’ll run point. Lines, schedules, boundaries. You know I love a clipboard.
Bea:
I’ll take the door. Questions come through me first. If they’re nosy, they can go stew in their own casserole.
Delilah:
And I shall provide sparkle and gravitas. Every battle needs a general.
Mo’nique:
Translation: you’re wearing that gold smoking jacket again.
Delilah:
Obviously.
Glory:
Let’s move, ladies. By the time the gossips hit the bakery, we’ll have the place humming like a Sunday choir.
Bea:
And Emmaline won’t have to face it alone.
Mo’nique:
Sasspatch Society, ASSEMBLE.
The morning rush had gone mercifully smooth.
Steady orders, no machine tantrums, no last-minute wholesale calls.
For fifteen whole minutes, the bakery ran like a normal Friday: coffee hissing, cases gleaming, cinnamon sugar sparkling under the lights like it had its own agenda.
I had sticky bun glaze under one fingernail and a quiet, grateful hum in my chest that felt almost like peace, which was far better than I’d expected for how little sleep I’d gotten.
The bell over the door jingled. I glanced up with my customer smile already in place and found Adalyn beelining for the counter like she’d run a red light to get here. Her hair was up in a messy knot, her scrubs were lavender, and the look on her face could’ve stripped paint.
“Oh my God,” she whispered, not even pretending to order. “Is it true?”
My brain didn’t catch up fast enough. “Is what true?”
Her eyes widened comically. “Don’t mess with me, Emmaline.” She leaned across the glass and mouthed, “Did you marry Bodie Gibson?”
My heart stuttered. The chain at my throat suddenly gained ten pounds.
Crap. Crap. Bodie and I hadn’t talked about this part.
About letting everyone else know. I’d thought—insofar as I’d considered it at all—that maybe we’d keep it on the down-low until we’d made a plan.
Maybe announcing it after I’d already moved in with him tomorrow.
Clearly, it was far too late for that.
“Adalyn—”
She grabbed my forearm, fingers ice-cold with adrenaline. “Back,” she hissed. “Now.”
I glanced at the line—three customers and a mailman who pretended he didn’t have a two lemon bars a day habit—then flicked the “be right back” sign and hit the door to the kitchen with my hip.
The cooler exhaled against the wall; the big mixer thumped a slow heartbeat as it kneaded a batch of sourdough.
I braced my hands on the stainless steel counter and faced my best friend.
“How did you find out?”
“Miss Birdie from the water office.” Adalyn’s hands windmilled.
“She came through the clinic with Mrs. Spence and said Mrs. Grady heard at the station this morning that Chief Bodie ‘isn’t single anymore, bless his heart.’ You know how Miss Birdie blesses people when she’s basically setting off fireworks?
Word hit the group text before I finished charting.
Emma…” She searched my face. “Please tell me you didn’t do this because you had to. ”
I schooled my features into something that would read as wry instead of brittle.
The metal of the chain was cool against my sternum when I slid a finger beneath it, lifting out the rings so she could see.
“I married him.” I only prayed she didn’t press on the detail that I hadn’t denied the “had to” part.
She stared, mouth a little open. Then—because she was Adalyn—she blinked hard and recalibrated. “Okay. Okay. Then… congratulations?” The word sounded like she was trying on shoes that might blister. “Are you—” She swallowed. “Are you happy?”
The honest answer clogged my throat. I managed something sideways. “I’m… handling it.”
Her mouth flattened. “Were you coerced? Because I swear to God—”
“No. No. I know it’s sudden, but I went into this with both eyes open.”
Her nostrils flared as I watched her reel in half a dozen plans to hide a body. “I hope like hell he’s a better man than his asshole brother.”
My fingers froze on the chain. I didn’t have to ask which Gibson brother she meant. “Dean isn’t so bad. High school was a long time ago.”
“Yeah, well, some of us have longer memories.” She made a face, then softened as she took my hands. “I mean it. I hope Bodie’s good to you.”
I squeezed her fingers back. “He’s a good man, Addie. Trust that.”
Before she could answer, the kitchen door banged open hard enough to make the sheet pans rattle. Mrs. Talbot—hair sprayed into geological permanence, lipstick like an exclamation point—barreled in, ignoring both the STAFF ONLY sign and the concept of boundaries.
“Holy sweet mercy, Emmaline Maddox, you married Bodie Gibson?” she crowed, voice pitched to carry. “Is it true?”
Adalyn closed her eyes like she was praying for patience. I pressed my lips into what I hoped resembled a smile. “Mrs. Talbot, the kitchen—”
Too late. Her proclamation had turned the bakery into a bell tower, the news pealing out across tile and glass. The murmur in the front swelled into delighted chaos. The door jangled three more times in quick succession as people who hadn’t even wanted pastries came in to be part of the spectacle.
I pasted on my public face and herded everyone back out front. The line doubled inside a minute. Someone clapped. Someone else whistled. Congratulations came at me like confetti—bright, well-meaning, impossible to catch all at once.
“When’s the party?”
“Where’d y’all go?”
“Show me the ring!”
I touched the chain at my collarbone and offered a quick, apologetic smile. “I’m keeping it safe while I’m elbow-deep in dough.” Not a lie. Not the whole truth. The diamond was warm against my skin, a secret I wasn’t ready for the whole town to paw at.
A little boy pressed his nose to the case, fogging the glass, then looked up at me with chocolate on his chin. “Does this mean Officer Rubble is your dog too now?”
The laugh that escaped me startled my own ears. “I guess it does.”
“Do you need a caterer for a reception?” Mrs. Moore chirped. “I do a very tasteful deviled egg.”
“It’s a bakery,” someone else said. “They can cater themselves.”
“It’s their wedding. They shouldn’t have to work their own party.”
“What about a honeymoon?” Mrs. Mayfield gasped, then looked like she’d scandalized herself.
Heat crept up my neck. “We’re… we’ll let you know.” I slid a dozen cinnamon rolls into a box, my hands moving on muscle memory while my brain tried not to seize. My cheeks hurt from keeping my smile in place. It felt like trying to hold a door shut against a tide with just my palm and hope.
Adalyn materialized at my elbow like a bodyguard, intercepting the pushiest with candied charm. “One question per pastry,” she declared. “House rules. You gotta eat to interrogate.”
Bless her.
I kept moving, kept breathing, kept offering thank yous in response to all the congratulations like I meant them. Underneath, my pulse skittered. Every “How did you two finally get together?” set a match to tinder I was working very hard not to notice.
The bell jangled again. Conversations tipped, then rebalanced, and the air changed in that way it does when a storm crosses the ridge.
Bodie filled the doorway.
He looked… not like a groom. Not like a police chief, even.
He looked like a man who’d wrestled the morning and lost. There was a scuff on his cheekbone, a smear of dirt on his sleeve, and an undeniable hoof print on his thigh where a farm animal of some variety had clearly voiced its opinion of law enforcement.
He caught my eye over three heads in line and winced, apology written from the set of his shoulders to the pinch at the corner of his mouth.
A cheer sounded from the left, spontaneous and ridiculous, and my ribs squeezed around my lungs.
He made his way along the wall, past the coffee station and the gift card rack, nodded hello to two grandmothers and a mechanic, then slipped behind the counter with an ease that said he belonged anywhere he decided to.
He angled toward the swinging door. I followed, feeling every set of eyes ricochet between us.
In the kitchen, quiet fell the way flour settles—slow, everywhere. I braced my palms on the stainless counter again because my hands didn’t know where else to go.
“I’m sorry,” he said immediately, voice low. “I meant to get here before the rumor mill. I—” He glanced down at his thigh like he’d just remembered the evidence. “The Henderson’s goats had opinions about being evicted from the hood of Mrs. Grady’s vintage Buick.”
Despite everything, a laugh broke free. “Of course they did.”
“I was so focused on the legalities, I didn’t consider—” He shoved a hand through his hair. The one where his gold wedding band glinted. “Clark saw my ring this morning, and then there was no containing it. I’m sure you’d have preferred a more controlled release of the information.”
I swallowed. “It’s fine.” It wasn’t. But there was no damming this river. “Today or tomorrow, it was going to be like this. It’s not like we were gonna take out a press release.”
He nodded once, contrition settling into resolve. “I called in reinforcements.”
“What?”
“Give me thirty seconds.”
He pushed back through the door, and I stood there with my heart in my mouth and the mixer thumping a steady beat like it was scoring the moment. I wiped my hands on my apron. I told myself not to need whatever came next.
The bell trilled. The front filled with a new kind of order, like someone had begun to clap and the entire room found the rhythm.
Delilah’s voice rose above the chatter, smooth as a bow across strings.
“Darlings, darlings, please—one line for coffee, one for congratulations. Miss Glory has a schedule, and she is not afraid to use it.”
I peeked through the crack in the door to see Mo’nique sweep in like a one-woman cavalry, a tray of bite-sized samples balanced on one palm. “You get a nibble if you keep the aisles clear and your questions respectful. We’re not The View.”
Miss Bea installed herself at the table nearest the door, fanning like a Southern magistrate. “All wedding-adjacent inquiries shall be submitted to me for triage. If your question starts with ‘why didn’t you,’ the answer is ‘because it’s none of your beeswax.’”
The volume didn’t drop so much as change key—from shrill to bright. People laughed. The line sorted itself with startling speed. The Sasspatch Society had taken the field and turned my bakery into an event they knew how to run.
Bodie slid back through the door long enough to tip his head toward the sound. “Thought they could buy you some breathing room.”
I didn’t plan the way my body moved. One second we were two people in a too-small kitchen; the next I had my arms around his middle, my face against the rough line of his uniform shirt, and the smell of sunshine and goat and him filling my head.
“Thank you,” I said into the fabric. “I didn’t know I needed—” I broke off because if I said the rest I might unravel.
His breath hitched just enough for me to feel it.
His arms came around me, slow and careful, as if I was made of spun sugar.
For a heartbeat I let myself sink into the solidity, the way his chest rose and fell under my cheek, the way the world quieted at the core even with what felt like a hundred voices on the other side of a swinging door.
The oven timer dinged. The spell snapped like sugar pulling into threads.
He eased back first, palms sliding away. There was something startled in his eyes that matched the fizz in my veins. He cleared his throat. “I’ve gotta get back to the circus. Mrs. Henderson’s goats still owe me an apology.”
My lips twitched. “Good luck with that.”
“Mm.” A corner of his mouth kicked up. He reached past me for the back-of-house sink, ran water over a towel, and swiped at the dirt on his sleeve like he couldn’t help fixing one more small thing before he left. “I’ll see you tonight.”
He touched his fingers to the chain at my collarbone—a question, not a claim—then let them fall and slipped out, taking some of the charge in the room with him.
I stood for a second with my hands braced on the counter, breathing. I could still feel the faint heat of his touch long after he’d left.
Fine. Everything is fine.
Then I slid a sheet pan into the oven and stepped back into my front-of-house with my head high.
“Alright, y’all,” I said, stealing Miss Bea’s tone because it was the only one that would hold. “Who’s next?”