Like Cats & Dogs (Pine Hollow #6)

Chapter One

H is cat was in her apartment again.

Alerted by the sound of Cupcake’s piteous whimpering, Magda emerged from the bedroom, where she had been repacking her bag for the fifth time, and found Satan’s tabby lounging smugly in the middle of an oversized dog bed while the pit bull looked on with soulful puppy-dog eyes.

Cupcake was approximately five times the size of the devil’s cat, but the giant sweetie of a pittie didn’t have an alpha bone in her body. Whenever the tabby snuck in through the window, she would cower in the corner while he swanned around as if he owned the place, seeming to take particular enjoyment in terrorizing Magda’s helpless seventy-pound baby.

Magda glared at the furry orange interloper. “That isn’t your bed. Get out of here!” She flapped the apron in her hands at the cat—which gave her a bored look and began to clean his undercarriage.

The animal hated Cupcake, but couldn’t seem to stay away from her—which made sense in a perverse way, considering his owner. If she didn’t know any better, Magda would think he’d somehow trained the cat to come here and harass her dog.

She didn’t have time for this today.

“Go on!” Magda tried again. “Get!”

The cat paused, as if considering her command—and then deliberately went back to his personal grooming.

Cupcake whined softly, and Magda comforted her with a rub on her silky head.

She knew better than to try to pick up Satan’s tabby—the thing had scratched the hell out of her on multiple occasions, and she had no desire to appear on national television for the first time with welts on her face and arms.

She was going to have to call his owner.

Calling Satan himself was high on her list of Things to Be Avoided at All Costs on any given day, but today especially she had no desire to see her nemesis. Magda eyed the cat, trying to think of another option. Any other option. But nothing was springing to mind, and she really didn’t have time to waste.

In two hours, her best friends were scheduled to arrive to drive her down to Boston to compete in the upcoming season of The Great American Cake-Off . She’d been working toward this day for the better part of three years, and it was finally here.

She was actually going to live her dream. And she was freaking terrified .

She needed to be focusing. Preparing. Packing and repacking and mentally going over her recipes, as she’d been doing nonstop for the last two weeks. She’d barely been able to sleep she’d been so excited.

Or petrified.

It was hard to tell the difference sometimes.

She was normally an early riser—with the bakery she pretty much had to be—but this last week she’d been waking up at three in the morning every day. She’d manically worked during the predawn hours, filling her freezer with every variety of dough she could think of so the bakery wouldn’t completely shut down in her absence. She’d even planned to whip up one more batch of dough to freeze this morning—just as soon as she finished repacking one last time. Magda always had a plan.

And the absolute last thing she needed was to be spending any mental energy whatsoever thinking about him .

“Please leave,” she begged the cat—anything to avoid giving That Man even one inch of her brain space today. But the cat ignored her. Because of course he did. It was his . Why would the cat ever do anything that wasn’t designed to aggravate her?

Magda had never thought of herself as the kind of person who would have an archnemesis—she was nice . To a fault. Everyone said so. Too nice. Too sweet. Too yielding.

But Mackenzie Newton brought out the worst in her.

Mac to his friends. Bane of her existence. And owner of Satan’s tabby.

Magda picked up her cellphone. She had his personal number, thanks to a group chat they were both on since her best friends had an unfortunate habit of marrying his best friends—but everyone in Pine Hollow knew where Mac would be at the crack of dawn on a Sunday morning. She called his diner.

“We don’t open till eight,” his voice came down the line, brusque and impatient.

“That’s how you talk to your customers?”

There was a slight pause as he recognized her voice. “Since when are you a customer?”

“Fair point,” Magda acknowledged. “I try to only support local businesses that aren’t run by thieves.”

“I didn’t—” A growl in his voice. “Are you just calling to insult me? Because I’m a little busy. Some of us have breakfast rushes to prepare for. Though I’m sure your cute little bakery never has to worry about things like that. A rush is when there’s more than one person who wants to buy your product.”

Cupcake whined again, and Magda resisted the urge to snark back at Mac. “Your cat is in my apartment again.”

“And?”

“And someone should come get the feral thing before I call animal control.”

“We don’t have animal control. And you would never call Levi this early on a Sunday.”

Magda gritted her teeth—equal parts annoyed that he’d called her bluff and mad at herself for giving him the opening. Mac was in a poker group with the sheriff, who handled all the pest complaints. “You could just come get your cat,” she snapped.

“And you could learn to shut your windows. Who keeps their windows open when it’s forty degrees out anyway?”

Magda ground her molars. April in Vermont wasn’t exactly known for its sweltering heat waves, but Magda’s apartment was cozy (microscopic) and historic (the radiator was several hundred years old and stuck in the “on” position), and it had a tendency to absorb all the heat from the ovens in her bakery downstairs. Keeping a window open was the only way to get any semblance of airflow. “I shouldn’t have to bolt my windows just so that creature doesn’t break in and terrorize my dog.”

“It weighs fourteen pounds. The terror.”

“Just get your cat, Mackenzie.”

“You know, cupcake, if you want to see me, you don’t have to invent—”

Magda ended the call in the middle of his sentence. She flung her phone on the couch with a barely human-sounding growl of aggravation—and it rang before it even had time to bounce.

She snatched up the phone, accepting the call and snarling, “Just get the damn cat!”

“I’m sorry?” a very confused—and very familiar—female voice asked.

Magda groaned internally, sinking down on the couch. “Mom. Hi. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

“Are you getting a cat?” her mother asked, still audibly puzzled.

“No, it’s just, uh… inside joke. What’s up? Did you need something?”

Her mother never called unless she needed something. Magda tried not to take it personally. As the matriarch of the Miller family, with seven children, sixteen grandchildren, and the family dairy to run, essentially by herself since Magda’s dad’s heart problems had made it necessary for him to retire, she had a lot on her plate. Family updates were done by group text or at the semiweekly family dinners—which Magda had a tendency to skip. Evelyn Miller would always pick up the phone when one of her kids or grandkids called, but Magda could count on one hand the number of times her mother had actually been the one to call her in the last two years.

“I was just calling to wish you safe travels,” her mother said.

The words were normal enough, but there was a note in her voice like there was more to it, and Magda felt a sudden flash of guilt.

She knows.

Why had she thought she could hide it?

“Thanks,” Magda replied, keeping her tone as innocent as possible.

She hadn’t told her mother about the show, but she should have known she would find out. There were no secrets in Pine Hollow, Vermont. Even if the only people Magda had told were her two best friends. Charlotte and Kendall had undoubtedly told their husbands. Charlotte might have told her sisters… who would have told their spouses, and by then the entire town might as well have known. She was lucky it hadn’t been published in the Pine Hollow Newsletter .

“I also wanted to say carpe diem.”

“Oh?” Crap. Her mother definitely knew.

Magda was allowed to tell people about Cake-Off . She’d been a little surprised that the show people hadn’t demanded secrecy—though they’d told her so little about what to expect that it wasn’t like she could have spoiled anything. She was barred from putting the show’s name in marketing materials to promote her business—she didn’t even try to understand all the legalese about infringement—but other than that it was pretty much fair game.

She hadn’t had to lie to her family and tell them she was going on a three-week European cruise instead. She’d just been so scared to tell them the truth.

They would make a big deal of it—with a family as large as hers, nothing that happened was ever a small thing. Even nonevents got blown out of proportion, and something like this? Her family would lose their minds. It would be huge. There would be fanfare. Celebrations. A send-off party with at least sixty guests—all of them looking at her and feeding the smothering sense of pressure she already felt.

They would all say they were sure she was going to win—as everyone she’d actually told had said. And she would drown under the weight of their good wishes. The need to live up to their expectations. The pressure to make the town proud.

It had sounded like a nightmare.

So Magda had invented a story about an old pastry school friend and a cruise in countries where she didn’t have cell reception to explain why no one would be able to reach her for a month.

If she was gone that long. She might not even make it a week.

Nerves twisted like acid snakes in her stomach, and she latched on to the distraction of her mother’s voice.

“I just think this could be a really great opportunity for you,” her mother said, her tone so gentle and encouraging that Magda felt like the worst daughter in the world for keeping things from her.

“Look, Mom, I meant to tell you—”

“No, let me just say this,” her mother insisted, her voice somehow both firm and gentle. “I know you haven’t had much luck, here in town, romantically speaking.”

“What?” Now Magda was the confused one.

“You’re always so focused on your bakery, and your father and I are very proud of what you’ve managed to build there, all by yourself, but I think sometimes you use it as an excuse not to put yourself out there, and I just think this could be an incredible opportunity to meet someone, if you let yourself.”

“Mom.” Magda frowned. “That’s not why I’m going.” She wanted to win . To make a name for herself. She certainly wasn’t going to be trawling for a husband in between baking challenges.

“Oh, I know, I know. Just don’t close yourself off to it. You could meet the man of your dreams at sea. Maybe even get engaged in Paris!” her mother gushed—and Magda realized with a jolt that her mom did not, in fact, have a clue where she was really going. That none of this had anything to do with the competition—and everything to do with her mother’s desperate attempt to marry off her last unmarried child.

Now that Magda knew this was actually about her love life, the guilt receded on a tide of irritation and she felt a familiar defensiveness knotting her shoulders. “Mom, I like being single.”

“I know. You’re happy as you are. I hear you,” her mother insisted, then ruined it by adding, “I just don’t want you to die alone.”

“You do realize being unmarried isn’t actually fatal.”

“You say that, but I was reading an article the other day that said ninety percent of breast cancer cases are first detected by romantic partners.”

Magda pinched the bridge of her nose. “You literally just made that statistic up.”

“Okay, maybe it wasn’t ninety percent—I couldn’t remember the actual number, but it was a lot. And the article was real. This could save your life, baby.”

“I’ll get a mammogram, okay?” she snapped, louder than she’d planned, but lately this topic had become a sore spot.

Magda had six siblings and eighteen cousins, all of whom were now married. Her best friends had both tied the knot in the last few years, and it was starting to feel like she was drowning in a sea of happy couples. And yet she had never seemed to be able to find her person.

A few years ago, after a bad breakup, her friend Charlotte had drunkenly declared that they must all swear off men and get dogs. And the Puppy Pact was born. And something had finally clicked for Magda.

It wasn’t just adopting Cupcake. She adored the pittie. The dog was her angel. Her whole heart.

No, it was being single. Voluntarily single. Charlotte and Kendall had both since gotten married, but Magda hadn’t even dated since that day.

It wasn’t that she hated marriage. She liked the idea. In theory. She sometimes daydreamed about the whole thing—spouse, kids, domestic bliss. She’d always done what was expected of her, a born rule follower, and it had felt like there was so much pressure to do the normal thing and settle down with a nice guy—but she had a nasty tendency of falling for guys who either didn’t want the same things she wanted out of life or didn’t want her back, and there had been something incredibly freeing about swearing off men.

Suddenly her singleness hadn’t felt like a failure, but a choice. And she had loved that feeling.

She’d taken a hard look at her goals then, refocusing on the ones that didn’t rely on magically meeting the man of her dreams in a small town where she was related to over half of the single population. And on that man of her dreams actually wanting her too.

She’d admitted to herself for the first time that she’d always dreamed of going on Cake-Off , and she’d started training and auditioning for the show immediately. It had taken three seasons of auditioning, but she’d finally made it.

She loved not looking for love. And the last thing she wanted was to miss this moment because she was crushing on some guy.

A heavy knock sounded at her door before she could say another word, let alone explain any of that to her mother.

“Mom, I’ve gotta go. Love you. I’ll call when I can.”

She hung up the phone to her mom yelling, “Just be open to it!”

Magda opened the door, already tense from the conversation with her mother, and there was another source of frustration, standing on the landing.

The ginger Lucifer himself. Mackenzie Newton.

He was tall—but then, Magda had to stretch to reach five foot one, so she thought everyone was tall. He wore his usual uniform—a T-shirt from some Broadway show she’d vaguely heard of that was too tight on his stupidly muscular arms and a baseball cap mashing down his dark auburn curls. His deep brown eyes usually watched her with an arrogantly knowing expression that always made her want to thwack him with a wooden spoon—but at the moment he was looking at her strangely.

So strangely that her oh-so-polite greeting was to snap “What?”

His eyebrows arched, disappearing beneath the brim of his hat. “Everything okay? I heard yelling about mammograms as I was coming up the stairs.”

Embarrassment flashed, quick and hot—and because this was Mac, it was quickly followed by an aggravation chaser.

Magda was the nice one. Everyone said so. Too nice, Kendall was fond of pointing out. The pushover. Too quick to rearrange her life to help others. Too willing to let things slide. Too eager to forgive.

With everyone except Mac.

Magda didn’t know what it was, but there was something about him that brought out the worst in her. Ever since she was eighteen years old, he would speak and she would see red. Her usual filters would fall, and things she would normally never say out loud came out of her mouth.

Which was the only possible explanation for why she snapped, “My mother thinks I’m going to drop dead because I don’t have a husband regularly mashing my boobs for me. Because God knows modern medical technology is no match for a man .”

Mac’s mouth fell open, and she almost thought she saw a tinge of red on his cheeks before his gaze dropped to her chest.

“Don’t,” she snarled.

His gaze pinged back up to hers. “Sorry?”

“If you offer to check for lumps, I will chop you up and serve you in a pie.”

“Thought never even crossed my mind,” he promised. And of course it hadn’t. The man had made it vividly clear how repulsive he found her. “Though I appreciate the Sweeney Todd–ness of the threat. Very nice.”

Magda set her teeth. Today was going to be a good day, damn it. And she wasn’t going to let her mother, or Mac, or anyone else get in the way of that.

“Can you please just get your cat?”