Chapter Twenty-Four
P ine Hollow hadn’t changed, but then it rarely did, and he’d been gone less than two weeks. The historic town hall, the picturesque square with its gazebo and bandstand, the rec center where the roof had caved in and been rebuilt a few years back—everything was exactly as he’d left it.
Mac was impatient to get to the Cup and make sure it was exactly as he’d left it, too, but he had the driver take him up the hill to his place instead. The converted carriage house was also exactly as he’d left it—complete with the cat on the front step, who gave him a look of searing disdain and stalked off to punish him for his absence.
He made a mental note to pick up a rotisserie chicken to make it up to the cat, and stepped inside long enough to drop his bags before heading to his grandmother’s house.
He hadn’t been able to sleep last night with all the uncertainty, so he’d been packed up and in the common room at six a.m. when a van heading to the Burlington airport had been leaving. The driver had agreed to swing by Pine Hollow on his way back to King Arthur, so Mac had caught a ride.
Magda had said she wanted space to think, so it was a win-win. He got home earlier, and they didn’t have to sit in awkward silence in the van together, wondering what was coming next.
He had his own thoughts to sort through.
But after ninety minutes of speculating with Tim and Abby about why the show had been shut down and another forty-five minutes chatting with the driver on the way back to Pine Hollow, he was still no closer to any answers.
Would the show go on? Were he and Magda on hold until it did? Was there anything with Magda to be on hold? They’d been feuding for so long, and now he didn’t know what they were.
But he knew he needed to tell his grandmother about the show before she heard it somewhere else.
The historic Newton house sat on top of a hill a short walk from downtown Pine Hollow. His ancestors had been among the founding families of Pine Hollow, but they hadn’t built the house until the mid-nineteenth century, when one of his great-great-grandfathers had fallen madly in love with a Newport Beach heiress and brought her back to Vermont with him.
The house—or more accurately, mansion—was three stories of architectural intimidation. The rooms were drafty and somber, with dark wood paneling and heavy velvet drapes at every window. Portraits of long-dead ancestors hung above all the fireplaces. There was a weight to the place—the weight of history and family legacy.
Mac preferred the airy and fully renovated carriage house, which gave him a sense of privacy but kept him close enough to help his grandmother whenever she needed him. It had been strange, being away these last couple of weeks, even though he’d known Connor would look in on his gran.
He crossed the gravel drive and climbed the little hill to the main house.
Eight thirty on a Friday morning. He found his grandmother on the veranda, looking out over the view of the hollow while she ate her grapefruit.
Her thinly tweezed eyebrows arched when she spotted him, but otherwise she gave no reaction. “You’re back.”
“I am.” He dropped a kiss on the top of her head, which she tolerated with a little huffing noise. “Though maybe not for long,” he added, pulling out the black metal patio chair with a scrape across the pavers. “I couldn’t tell you before, but I’ve actually been filming a TV show— The Great American Cake-Off .”
“I know,” his grandmother said, without an ounce of surprise. “You were in the town newsletter.”
Mac blinked. “What? When?”
“Yesterday. Linda Hilson put out a special edition. Hot off the presses—two of our hometown heroes in a televised baking competition.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. Nondisclosure agreements.”
“I figured as much,” she said, utterly unperturbed as she daintily removed a section of grapefruit. “What does ‘not for long’ mean?”
“There’s been a production delay,” he explained. “That’s why I’m back. But as soon as they’re ready to resume filming, I’ll be heading back there.”
“Well. That makes more sense than four weeks in New York with a newly married woman.”
Mac blinked, startled that his grandmother knew about Cleo, but then all his life she had always seemed terrifyingly omniscient.
“Can you tell me how it’s going?” she asked. “Or is that against the rules?”
“It’s frowned on. But I will say I like it.” He hadn’t always been sure about that. It was stressful, but it was a good stress. “And I think I’m good at it.” And he really wanted to go back. Not just for the competition. The entire experience. Magda…
His gran huffed out a soft breath that was her version of a snort. “Of course you are. You can do anything.” She said it as if it was fact, her confidence in him absolute, and Mac smiled.
His grandmother could be a taskmaster—she had strong opinions, and they’d butted heads constantly when he was a teenager. If not for his grandfather’s intervention, they might not have both come through those difficult years alive, let alone speaking to each other. His grandfather used to say they were too similar, though Mac couldn’t see it. But in the years since his grandfather’s death, they’d come to know each other in a different way—and he’d never doubted her confidence in him for a second.
She’d wanted him to go back to college at one point, and they’d argued for months, but now she seemed to genuinely just want him to be happy and follow his dreams. Though he was realizing he hadn’t been as honest with himself as he might have thought he was about what those dreams were.
“Do you think I avoid commitment?” he asked her abruptly.
If she was startled by the out-of-the-blue question, she didn’t react with so much as an eyelash twitch. She simply reached for her tea and considered him. “Yes,” she said calmly, absolutely, after a moment.
“That’s it? Yes?” Julia’s words had been bugging him for over a week, and his grandmother acted like they were a given.
“Did you want more of an answer?” She eyed him over her tea. “The second someone becomes an obligation, you start to pull away.”
Mac grimaced—he’d known only to ask if he wanted a real answer. His gran didn’t pull her punches. “That makes me sound pretty crappy.”
“Not at all,” his grandmother argued. “You take your obligations very seriously. Probably too seriously. I was your first stop, wasn’t I? Checking up on your doddering old gran?”
“You aren’t doddering, and you aren’t an obligation.”
She waved his argument away with one elegant hand. “Yes, of course. Love isn’t an obligation and all that. I only mean that you have a horror of letting anyone down, and therefore you’re excessively careful not to commit.” She picked up her fork and pointed at him with it. “I think your grandfather and I overcorrected with you. Far too much emphasis on responsibility and legacy. Scared you away from the whole thing.”
“You didn’t scare me away from anything,” he argued. If anything, his grandparents had been a shining example. It was his parents who were the cautionary tale.
“Hm,” she grumbled, noncommittally. “What brought this up?”
“Just something one of the producers said. About why I’m single.”
His gran’s eyebrows arched speculatively. “A female producer?”
“It’s not like that.” Not that Julia wasn’t attractive, but his brain hadn’t even registered her in that way. There was such a clear line between the contestants and the producers at the show—and the only person he’d been interested in kissing was the one he’d kissed. Though he still hadn’t been able to talk to Magda about exactly what that was.
A moment of insanity brought on by the near hostage situation environment of the show bubble? Something else?
Did she still hate him? He certainly didn’t hate her. But he was starting to think he never had.
“Hm,” his grandmother mumbled, her sharp blue eyes missing nothing. “So. You did run away with Magda Miller after all.”
His eyebrows flew up. “That’s a very loose interpretation of reality.”
“Hm.” She studied him enigmatically for another moment, then seemed to decide to let something go, taking a breath and turning her attention toward the carriage house. “That cat of yours has been all over town in your absence. Looking for you, I imagine.”
“I saw him at the carriage house. George has been feeding him, but I think I’ll need to grovel for forgiveness for leaving.”
She nodded once. “Good to have you back.”
His grandmother wasn’t effusive, and he smiled as he stood and dropped a kiss on the top of her head for the second time—which he knew would make her try to smack him with her fork. “Love you too, Gran.”
He dodged the fork and started down the hill toward the Cup, to see how his other “obligations” had fared in his absence.
Mac had caught an earlier shuttle.
Magda wasn’t quite sure what the significance of that fact was—could he be avoiding her? Or was he just ready early? She told herself not to overthink it as Julia escorted her to the car that was waiting to drive her to Pine Hollow—but overthinking it was pretty much her natural state. She’d been overthinking all night.
She turned to Julia when they reached the car, desperate for some scrap of information that might ease her mind. “I know you aren’t allowed to tell us anything about the ongoing legal stuff, but can you maybe say what it isn’t?” she asked.
Julia winced, starting to shake her head. “I’m sorry—”
Magda cut her off before she could give her an answer she didn’t want to hear. “Can you just tell me if it’s about Mac and me?”
Julia blinked, visibly startled by the question—and Magda’s hopes lifted. “You and Mac?”
She wasn’t going to mention the kiss unless she absolutely had to. “That thing at the photo shoot, I know that can be grounds for disqualification, and I wasn’t sure if that… or maybe some other accusation of, um, misconduct? If that might have been leveled against… us?”
Julia’s expression cleared. “I probably shouldn’t say anything, but I don’t see how it can hurt—no accusations have been leveled at any contestants.”
Which did nothing to clear up why they were shutting down production, but it was a huge relief to know it wasn’t because she’d stupidly kissed Mac.
Now she just had to figure out how she felt about stupidly kissing Mac.
She chatted with the driver some on the drive, but spent most of it texting with Kendall and Charlotte. She’d FaceTimed with both of them last night, so they’d already been through all the news about the Archrivals Edition, production shutting down, and Mac being there, too.
But she hadn’t mentioned the kiss. Not to either of them.
She hadn’t told them about almost slapping him or working with him, or about him helping her when her oven malfunctioned. There had been so many other things to say that it had been easy to avoid the things she still couldn’t quite wrap her head around.
Charlotte and George had been trying to conceive for months, and while Magda had been away she’d had a false-alarm positive pregnancy test, and Kendall had new sonogram photos to share, so it had been easy to dance around the subject of Mac.
She was going to tell them. She just wanted to do it in person. And when she let herself into her apartment and saw them waiting for her there, along with Cupcake, her heart swelled.
The comfort of being home was acute, but it wasn’t just that. It was the realization that no one was watching her. She could just be herself. She didn’t have to worry about being judged—and as soon as she threw her arms around her dog, who went into paroxysms of delight, wriggling and licking and making little noises of joy, she nearly burst into tears at the magnitude of the relief.
She hugged her friends next, barely keeping it together as they helped her drag her bags across the threshold and into her apartment, talking over one another and so happy to see her.
She’d been spotted in the square. The whole town would know she was back before long. She’d already seen the latest town newsletter with the special announcement about the show. But somehow even knowing all of Pine Hollow was watching her was still a relief after the constant surveillance of the last two weeks.
“We’ve been dying,” Charlotte said, with her usual drama, as Magda curled up on the floor with her arms around Cupcake. “I wanted to text you every single day to ask how it was going, but we knew they’d taken your phone.”
“I wished I could text you. It was so stressful.”
“Was it the timers?” Kendall asked.
“The timers, the cameras, the lights, the questions—knowing they’re always watching you and building a story about you and you have no control over what they’re going to say, but I know a bunch of it is going to be about my feud with Mac—which is the absolute last thing I want to be defined by in front of the entire country, but that’s who I am now, the girl who hates Mac—who, of course, is doing amazing. Though I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you that.”
“Cone of silence,” Kendall promised. “Nothing leaves this room.”
“I’m so confused,” Magda admitted. “I wanted this so badly, but it’s not at all how I thought it would be—”
“Because of Mac being there?”
“Maybe? Sort of? It’s the whole rivals thing—pitting us against each other—and yes, I know it was always going to be a competition, but it’s all different this year. It’s like they care more about how much we hate each other than what we’re baking. I was so thrown when he walked in—and then I told myself I wasn’t going to let him ruin the experience for me—but then I nearly hit him, and he could have thrown me to the wolves, but he didn’t, and he let me use his oven—which nearly cost him the cupcake round—and I just wanted to know why, but then he kissed me and the production shut down and I don’t even know if we’re going back—”
“Whoa whoa whoa!” Charlotte held up both hands. “Back up. He kissed you? Mac?”
“I don’t know what happened. One moment I was yelling at him, and then—it was this insane moment in the hallway—”
“I love a hallway kiss,” Kendall murmured fondly.
“And then a PA interrupted us—we weren’t supposed to be fraternizing off camera, and I thought we were going to be kicked off the show, but the producer said the shutdown wasn’t about that—or at least she sort of implied it, but I don’t know what it is about and now I’m wondering if I just thought that was what she was telling me when really they’re assembling their legal team to boot us both off.”
Kendall and Charlotte stared at her, and then Kendall smiled wickedly. “You guys did always have a ridiculous amount in common—”
“Bite your tongue!” Charlotte glared at her.
“What?” Kendall asked innocently. “I just wondered if it was a good kiss.”
“We are not encouraging this! He was a dick. We’re Team Magda,” Charlotte reminded Kendall.
“I’m always Team Magda. But you have to admit they have insane chemistry—”
“Yeah, like nitroglycerin,” Magda muttered. “But it doesn’t matter. It can’t happen again. I need to focus on the show.” He’d already gotten in her head. She’d been so off during that cookie challenge. Her thoughts all muddled. “I like being single, not worrying about men and dating—and I don’t need the distraction right now. Besides, how could I trust that he was kissing me for the right reasons and not because of some convoluted strategy to throw me off my game so he can beat me and steal my grandmother’s recipe?”
“Exactly,” Charlotte encouraged. “We don’t trust him.”
“What I need to be focusing on is how to find the soul in my baking when we go back to the competition. If we go back.”
“Optimism!” Charlotte insisted. “You’re going back. This is a blip. And your bakes have tons of soul!”
“The judges don’t think so. Alexander Clay thinks you can’t see me in my bakes.”
Charlotte bounced. “I still can’t get over you knowing Alexander Clay.”
“I wouldn’t say I know him. He just periodically tells me I’m basic and uninventive.”
“Sounds fun,” Kendall said dryly.
“It wasn’t, actually. But it should have been,” Magda said. “I was so busy panicking about winning and being perfect and Mac that I forgot to actually enjoy the experience. I spent two weeks baking in front of the Cake-Off judges—living my freaking dream—and I feel like I missed it.”
“You’ll get another chance,” Charlotte soothed. “It’s not over.”
Except it might be. She didn’t know what was happening with this mysterious legal challenge. And she had no idea if they were going back. Which meant everything was on hold. Her confused feelings about the show. Her confused feelings about Mac. All of it.
“I think I was… I don’t know. I didn’t mean to hold myself back, but I had this feeling like I needed to be something else. Some one else. Like they’d only picked me because of Mac, and I only won when I was with him—except I was good at the skills stuff, but I don’t want to be the baker who is technically amazing but boring .”
“You are not boring,” Charlotte insisted staunchly.
“And you don’t have to be anyone but yourself,” Kendall reminded her. “Just go wild, Mags. Stop trying to please everyone and let yourself go. You’ve got this.”
“Maybe.” Except she might not get the chance to try again.
She would just have to wait and hope.
Until they heard more.