Chapter Eleven
Fourteen years ago…
Mac snuck an impatient look at his watch as he hurried through his closing routine at the Cup. The CLOSED UNTIL MONDAY sign had already been taped to the door. The people of Pine Hollow would just have to get their coffee somewhere else this weekend. He had a hot date with some Broadway shows and some no-strings sex. Which, after this summer, he needed more than ever.
He needed to get away—and get a certain someone out of his head.
Mac liked to think of himself as a good guy—and if he wanted to be able to keep thinking of himself that way, he needed to stop having age-inappropriate thoughts about a certain jailbait brunette with big blue eyes. She was a teenager, for Christ’s sake. Barely out of high school. And he knew when to keep his damn hands off.
But that hadn’t stopped his thoughts from going a little haywire these last few weeks. She was fun to talk to. Fun to flirt with. Fun to watch blush over the most unexpected things—like when he complimented her soufflé.
But she was also the same age as Elinor’s baby sister, which put her firmly in the hell no zone.
Which was why he needed this weekend.
A few days of total distraction and evicting Magda Miller from his thoughts.
The shows wouldn’t start until tomorrow—Mac had all the rushes and lotteries and standing-room-only procedures copied down so he could hopefully see four shows for less than forty dollars each. But the sex could start tonight, if he made it down to the city before Cleo fell asleep.
They’d met in college—the two years he’d gone before his grandfather had gotten sick and he’d dropped out. They’d hit it off back then, but never dated. Cleo had been adamant that she had not come to college to get an MRS. degree. She was going to be a big-city lawyer, thank you very much, and did not want her identity to be defined by who she was dating. So she didn’t date.
She’d been a good friend, but they actually got closer after he left school—exchanging long but sporadic emails over the years. When she moved to New York for law school, Mac had come down to visit her for the first time. He hadn’t expected anything to happen—Cleo was still as anti-relationship as ever—but one night after winning lottery tickets to Wicked , they’d hooked up. It was fun, it was no-strings—which suited them both—and so their routine had been born.
Two or three times a year, he’d go down to the city for some great shows, good food, and casual sex. It was his vacation from the responsibilities of his regular life. He loved Pine Hollow, and he wouldn’t have chosen to be anywhere else, but when he went to New York, he was completely taken out of himself and put back again refreshed.
And he needed that. This summer had been especially busy. The Cup was doing better than ever. His grandmother seemed to be doing a little better, too—for a while there he’d worried he was going to lose her, too, after his grandfather passed away, but she seemed to have finally rallied and started to get interested in life again.
The classes at King Arthur had eaten up his weekends for the last couple of months, making a New York trip impossible, but the class series had ended last night. Cleo wanted to see In the Heights again. Mac just wanted to feel the energy of the city pulsing around him, smell that trash-on-the-sidewalk-in-the-hot-sun smell of summer, and just forget about everything else. Every one else.
He was sweeping up—a necessity if he didn’t want to get bugs or vermin, and his last task before he could get out of here—when a thumping knock came on the front door.
“We’re closed!” Mac shouted before he even looked.
A thud came—as if someone had stumbled into the door—and he looked then.
Magda was standing on the sidewalk, both of her arms wrapped around a large bakery box and what looked like a school binder. She’d knocked with her foot, he realized, his brain identifying the odd sound even as something in his chest shifted at the sight of her.
Mac set aside the broom at the earnest, pleading expression on her face and went to unlock the door.
“Hey.” He leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb, torn between inviting her in and getting on the road. His conversations with Magda had a tendency to stretch into hours. “What’s up?”
She glanced past him, her expression a mixture of anxiety and hope. “Can I, um, can I talk to you for sec? Inside? I promise it’s good.”
“Ah…” Something in her expression made the hairs on the back of his neck rise, but he pushed open the door all the way. “Yeah, of course. Come on in.”
He stood back and Magda stepped across the threshold, looking around as if seeing the place for the first time, as if she hadn’t gotten in the habit of meeting him here when they drove out to King Arthur together. She was almost always early, and he was almost always running late, so she’d been here a fair amount, waiting on him, but now she looked around as if everything was new. And perhaps it did look different with the lights off.
The kitchen light was still on, and it shone golden through the pass-through, keeping it from being pitch-black.
“So, what’s up?” Mac asked as Magda set her armful on one of the café tables. He didn’t usually rush her, but he was suddenly entirely too aware of the fact that they were alone in the dark.
“I, um, well, you, uh… Would you like some cake?” The last words came out in a rush after the stammering, and Magda turned suddenly to the bakery box. Opening it to reveal a gorgeous brown cake drizzled in some kind of white drip icing. “It’s my grandmother’s famous maple cake,” she was saying, not looking at him as she immediately started cutting a slice.
She’d brought him a cake? “Mags, you know I’d never turn down your cake, but I really don’t have time tonight—”
“Just try it,” she urged, shoving a slice at him on a paper plate—she’d even brought plastic forks. “Please?”
There was an urgency in her eyes, and Mac had the distinct feeling he was missing something—or a lot of somethings—but he accepted the cake and took a big bite.
Damn. His eyes closed involuntarily as he chewed. Light and moist—she’d called it a maple cake, but there was a spice to the glaze that accented the sweetness, balancing it. “That might be the best cake I’ve ever had in my life.”
“I’m in love with you.”
“Whoa.” That opened his eyes—and he found her staring at him. “Uh… Mags…” His brain was stuttering, ohshitohshitohshit repeating on a loop.
“Sorry,” she flushed. “I meant to say that part later. I just… after this summer, and getting to know you, and sharing all our plans for the Cup…”
“ Our plans?” He had the distinct feeling of this conversation spiraling out of control.
“I wrote up a business plan.” She snatched up the binder—which looked like a little kids’ Trapper Keeper. “A schedule for rolling out the new menu items and eventually moving to a better location. I would work for a share of the profits—you wouldn’t even have to pay me until we were successful, but I know we’re going to be—”
Panic crawled up his spine. Shitshitshit. “Magda…”
He’d done this. He’d let it go too far. He should’ve put distance between them weeks ago, when he started feeling…
She stepped closer, putting a hand on his arm where he’d frozen, still holding that slice of cake. “Mac, this has been the best summer of my life. Getting to know you and this thing that’s been happening between us—”
Alarm bells jangling in his head finally jolted him into motion. “Magda, there’s nothing happening between us.” There couldn’t be. She was a baby .
A flicker of uncertainty flashed over her face. “What?”
“I’m not… we’re not…” He set the cake on the table, looking down, all the way down, at her hopeful young —God, she was so young—face. She was beautiful and sparkling and fun, and maybe if she were five years older this would be a different conversation, but she’d just turned eighteen. And the look in her eyes… “Look. You’re a really sweet kid—” He tried to ignore her flinch. “But I think you’ve got the wrong idea.”
She shook her head, confusion and hurt flickering in her cornflower-blue eyes. “But we’ve been planning this. For months.”
“I mean I’ve been making plans,” he agreed. “For the Cup. And you’ve been great, I mean, a really good listener. Our drives have been really helpful, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know you. A lot. Just not… like that.” He raked a hand through his hair, scrambling for words to make her understand. “I shouldn’t’ve… I mean, seriously. You’re practically jailbait.”
Her throat worked as horror moved across her face, and he felt like absolute shit. “I’m eighteen,” she whispered.
“Which is when you should be screwing up and trying new things.” He tried a smile, hoping it didn’t look as strained as it felt. “In a few years you’ll come back from college, and we’ll laugh about this.”
And maybe something could happen then. When she was more than three months away from prom dresses and senior skip days. When her eyes didn’t gleam with a wholesome sort of hero worship when she looked at him that made him feel like he could never live up to who she thought he was. When there wasn’t so much pressure and he didn’t have to be quite so terrified of breaking her perfect, innocent heart.
Hurt worked across her face—and Mac tried to think of something to stem it. “Trust me. When you’re older this will be funny.”
“He practically laughed at me. He said it was funny .”
“Can I kill him?”
Magda paused, mid-pace, startled out of her agitation by Kendall’s casual offer of violence. “Would you?” Then she shook her head almost immediately. “Except I don’t want him dead. I just want—”
“For him to realize he’s madly in love with you and come stand in front of your window with a boom box?” Charlotte suggested.
Magda’s best friends had come over as soon as she’d called them both in a panic. They hadn’t known about her plan to profess her feelings to Mac and propose both a personal and business partnership. She hadn’t told anyone. Perhaps someone else would have been able to tell her what a train wreck this was going to be, but she’d been so blinded by her own feelings, so blinded by certainty, that she hadn’t even thought to consult with anyone else.
“He isn’t going to show up with a boom box.” He had made his feelings—or lack thereof—brutally clear. “Who even has a boom box? I just want him to be sorry.” She pivoted and started pacing again. “I just want him to look at me and realize I’m not a child and he’s made a huge mistake and—” Okay, yes, she also wanted him to realize he was madly in love with her. But she’d take the huge mistake part to start.
She was just so angry at him.
Sure, she’d been hurt to start—when he’d called her a kid and dismissed all of her contributions as her being a ‘good listener,’ all with that expression that was somewhere between patronizing indulgence and horror—but after running out of the Cup so fast she’d left her grandmother’s supposedly man-catching cake behind, anger had kicked in.
Magda had always been petite, but she wasn’t a child . And she may not have dated much, but she knew what flirting was.
She wasn’t wrong, damn it. There had been something there. But he was so busy judging her for her age that he refused to see it. And even if she was wrong, even if this thing between them wasn’t a thing, she had good ideas.
She was the one who’d come up with half of the promotional ideas—more than half! She was the one who’d mapped out a plan for expansion. When he’d just had vague ideas and big dreams, she’d broken them into realistic steps. Action plans. She’d contributed, damn it!
It felt like he’d just invalidated everything she thought she knew about the last two months. All that confidence that had been building. All that certainty.
“You could always pull a Sabrina,” Charlotte suggested, plucking a thin envelope from L’Ecole Len?tre off her desk and waving it. “Run away to Paris, hone your awesomeness, and then rub his nose in your goddessness when you return.”
Magda dismissed the suggestion with a wave of her hand. “I haven’t even opened it. It’s probably a rejection.”
The slim letter had arrived two days ago. When she’d first seen it, a sharp, excited sort of terror had jabbed into her gut. Only Charlotte, Kendall, and her aunt Lena even knew that she had applied to the notoriously cutthroat French pastry academy.
Two days ago, she hadn’t wanted to know whether she’d gotten in or not—because she hadn’t wanted to leave Mac. She’d been so certain that all the pieces of her life had already fallen into place. She’d known exactly what she wanted.
And she’d somehow completely missed that he didn’t want it too.
How could she have been so wrong ? How had she so completely misread the signals?
She’d seen her entire life stretched out in front of her—happily-ever-after in Pine Hollow, with cakes and coffee and a guy who had a propensity to sing show tunes as he drove. Now she couldn’t imagine staying here. She’d gotten into college, but that didn’t seem far enough away. She wanted to show him that she wasn’t a child—not do exactly what he thought a girl her age should be doing.
“Open it,” she suddenly declared, whirling toward Charlotte.
“What?”
She didn’t speak French. She’d never been out of the country. She’d taken only one proper baking class, and this was a freaking world-famous pastry academy. She hadn’t really planned to go when she applied. She’d mostly done it to please her teacher at King Arthur, who had written her a glowing recommendation, gushing about her talent. It had been so nice to have someone gushing about her talent. To have someone see something in her. But the idea of enrolling in a notoriously grueling program where bakers regularly had nervous breakdowns didn’t sound like the kind of environment where Magda would excel. She’d never really considered it.
Mac would think she couldn’t do it. He thought she was a child.
Magda strode over to Charlotte. “If I got in, I’m going.” She wouldn’t let anything stop her.
Charlotte’s eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“Open it.”
Kendall was smiling—but then Kendall loved risk and adventure. Magda was the one who always played it safe. Maybe a little too safe. The invisible Miller girl. Maybe it was time for her to be more.
Charlotte opened the letter. “Oh, thank God, it’s in English,” she muttered—and then her eyes widened, a huge grin slowly spreading across her face. “Holy shit. Magda.”
Magda didn’t need to ask what it said.
She was going to France.