Prologue #3
the oyster shells carpeting the garden paths. She didn’t fall, but the keys she’d just located went flying. They both squatted
down and bent forward to pick her keys up at the same moment, and their foreheads thunked painfully.
Fucking hell. This was a disaster.
Muttering to himself, he grabbed the stupid keys and chucked them in her basket, then tossed her basket aside entirely. It
landed with a thump on the oyster-shell path, and Dearborn side-eyed him hard.
“What?” he demanded, frowning.
“I brought an eighteenth-century tea caddy to show the junior interpreters today. A family heirloom. It’s in my basket, which
you just flung on the ground like an old bag of clothes on its way to the dump.”
Motherfucker.
“Uh . . .” Swallowing hurt. “Really?”
“Nope,” she said cheerfully, and grinned at him. “But it could’ve been true. Stop tossing around vessels full of unknown items,
Dean. This is a public service announcement on behalf of your future companions.” Her widespread hand swept an arc high in
the air. “The more you know.”
He stared at her incredulously as she stood again.
Unlike Becky, she was not nice. Not nice at all. In fact, Molly Dearborn was kind of a bitch. So why was he fighting a grin?
“You’re a piece of work, Dearborn.” He shook his head. “Next time I take you home, I’m stuffing you in the trunk.”
Her eyes rolled heavenward. “Please be realistic, Dean. Basic geometry will inform you that someone of my size won’t fit in
your tiny car’s even tinier trunk.”
A bitch and a pedant. She was a goddamn wonder.
“I’ll make you fucking fit,” he told her. “Watch me.”
Her lips twitched, but she clicked her tongue in disapproval. “Threats of violence are beneath you, Dean.”
After getting to his feet too, he leaned in and ran his fingertips lightly over the pink spot near the part of her hair, where
their foreheads had collided. No bump yet. He’d have to check again later.
Her breath hitched at his touch, and as soon as he confirmed the lack of swelling, he met her stare directly. From only two
inches away.
That pale blue wasn’t icy. It was the center of a flame. The hottest part.
Without conscious thought, he leaned in. A quarter-inch. More.
She didn’t move away. Her soft lips parted, and he let his fingers slide down over her temple, along her silky hairline, until
he could cup her warm cheek. He waited a beat more, making sure this was okay with her, and—
The entire pack of junior interpreters skipped into the arbor, giggling and shrieking, before coming to an abrupt halt.
He was going to fucking drop-kick those kids, and no court in this fucking land would convict him.
The moment was gone. He turned to Molly, about to suggest they find a private spot near the canal, but she was already greeting the girls. Next thing he knew, they were walking as a group to the parking lot.
Didn’t matter. He’d call and ask her to prom that night.
But before he could, Becky called him. Convinced him things would be different. And yeah, he still wanted to date Molly, but she’d probably say no anyway. Girl
like that—strong, confident, take-no-shit—might not want to date anyone. If she did, she’d choose someone who didn’t fucking
headbutt her while trying to ask her out. Definitely someone who could express himself better than he did.
He couldn’t even figure out how to make his first-ever girlfriend love him, and she was already way the hell out of his natural
reach, so . . .
He and Becky were back on.
And once the senior project was turned in, Molly disappeared on him again. They didn’t talk, hardly saw each other. Until
the week after prom, when she tugged him aside in homeroom to tell him it was her last day at Harlot’s Bay High. She was leaving.
For good. Moving to California with her mom months before she’d planned for reasons she didn’t explain.
“There’s not much schoolwork left. I’ll do it in California and mail it here.” Those pale blue eyes were red-rimmed but dry.
Oddly blank too. “And I can graduate without walking across the stage. They’ll send the diploma to me.”
He couldn’t say a word. Not without shouting or—no. He wouldn’t cry. Refused to fucking cry. So he just glared at her as she tore off a piece of lined paper and wrote her family email address on it.
“Write if you want,” she said, and didn’t bother waiting for a response.
She didn’t say goodbye. Didn’t hug him. Didn’t do anything but press the slip of paper into his palm and walk away.
The right words didn’t filter into his stupid damn brain until much, much too late.
What the hell happened? Are you okay? Will you miss Harlot’s Bay? Will you miss me?
I’ll miss you. Doesn’t matter if we haven’t talked in fucking weeks.
He didn’t have the fucking nerve to call and say that before she left, though. Didn’t even have the guts to write it in one
of the brief emails he started sending her. Instead, whenever he saw the for-sale sign in front of her home, he got out of
the car and kicked it. Then put it back upright again, because he wasn’t a total asshole.
Becky left for Johns Hopkins in late August. Broke up with him the first time she came back home for a visit. Told him she
was going somewhere, literally and figuratively, and he wasn’t. She needed a different kind of boyfriend. Someone more than him.
He got it. Fucking gutted him, but he definitely got it.
In his occasional emails to Molly, he didn’t tell her. Too humiliated. Too unsure whether the breakup would stick that go-round.
It did, though. He didn’t hear from Becky after that. Meant he had a clean shot at things with Dearborn again.
So he began to email more often. Began to hint at his interest in a closer relationship and subtly feel out whether she might
be interested too. Because maybe she lived across the country now, but who knew what’d happen after she graduated from UCLA?
He still didn’t say he’d been dumped. No need to sound pathetic. Once he knew she wanted him too, he’d tell her what happened.
Without warning, she stopped writing him back. Sent one last, terse message—“This doesn’t feel right. I’m sorry”—and that
was it. His messages started bouncing back to him.
He was a dumbass, but not oblivious. He knew what he’d done wrong.
He should’ve told her he was single. Might’ve made a difference. Or maybe she just wasn’t interested in him that way. He’d
never fucking know now, would he?
She’d probably gotten a new email address at the university. He didn’t have it. No one else in Harlot’s Bay did either. He
had no way to contact her. Even if he did, he couldn’t override what she’d told and shown him she wanted—and what she wanted
wasn’t his sorry ass.
It was distance from his sorry ass.
Somehow, he’d managed to lose her without ever really having her.
His regret—his longing for the one person who’d seemed to understand him from the very beginning, without his even needing
to try—never fully disappeared over the years. He thought of Molly every time one of the junior interpreters came by the bakery
for brownies. He thought of her whenever a flame burned hot enough to turn that same gorgeous shade of pale blue. To his shame,
he sometimes thought of her while he was in bed with other women, although he tried like hell not to.
Just like with Becky, none of those women ever said they loved him.
Including the girlfriends he’d dated for months.
His best guesses as to why? His long hours at the bakery didn’t give him enough time to deepen casual relationships.
He wasn’t especially lovable as a boyfriend.
And maybe, on some level, his partners sensed that a small corner of his heart wasn’t theirs, even during sex.
Couldn’t be, because he’d given it away long ago to a girl who’d left him far, far behind.
He told himself that was why he’d stopped declaring his own love. Because he didn’t have a whole heart to offer any girlfriend.
Not because he was scared of the silence that might follow his declaration.
After all, he should be used to silence—and not just from Becky. After Molly’s last email, he hadn’t heard from her. Hadn’t
seen her. Didn’t expect to do either, ever again.
But one random afternoon, eighteen years after graduation, he left the bakery as a customer was eating a sandwich and listening
to an audiobook in her car with her windows open. Some story about a guy who could turn into a guppy, which was beyond bizarre.
Especially since the fishy asshole was apparently ripped and had weird fin things on his dick.
He shook his head. Kept walking.
Then the narrator’s voice registered, and he stopped dead in his tracks.
Velvety. Calm yet expressive. Subtly wry.
He knew that fucking voice. Had loved that fucking voice.
His knock on the hood startled the hell out of his customer, who was clearly caught up in the story, and he felt bad about
that. Not bad enough to mind his own business, though.
“What are you listening to?” He’d meant for that to sound like a casual question, not a demand, but . . . whatever.
The woman flushed. “I’m sorry. I can roll up my—”
“It’s fine. Keep ’em down. I don’t give a shit.” He thrust his finger toward the dashboard, where he assumed her audio controls
were located. “I just want to know who that is.”
“The author?” The customer’s thin brows drew together. “Sadie Brazen.”
He gathered every crumb of his patience. After eighteen goddamn years, there was barely enough left for a starving ant. “Not
the author. The narrator.”
“Oh. I don’t know. Let me . . .” She fumbled for her phone and tapped at the screen a few times. “Her name is Molly Cressley.”
Molly. It was her. Had to be.
The Cressley meant she was probably married, but that didn’t matter much, did it? She was long gone from his life. He would never see
her again.
But now he could hear her again. Finally.
“Thanks,” he rumbled, slapped the hood in farewell, and went back into his bakery. Back into his office. Back onto his computer.
Where he promptly bought and downloaded Desire, Unfiltered by Sadie Brazen, as narrated by Molly Cressley.
He listened to the entire bizarro story in one sitting. Told himself that was enough.
The next day, he listened to it again. Called himself a fucking idiot the entire time.
The day after that, he proceeded to obliterate his monthly budget by buying every goddamn audiobook Molly Cressley had ever
narrated.
From what he could tell, they were mostly books about women fucking weird-ass creatures. Like guppy-men. Or shadow-guys. Or . . .
the Loch Ness Monster?
Didn’t matter. He’d take what he could get.
Before the bakery opened in the mornings, he began listening to the stories she narrated as he egg-washed, baked off, and iced the pastries he’d shaped and refrigerated before leaving work the previous day.
As he baked off breads, rolls, scones, and muffins too.
As he fed his sourdough starter. As he fried umpteen million doughnuts.
He used earbuds at first, but then he burned all his English muffin bread one morning when he didn’t hear the damn timer.
Which was when he got permission from Bez, Charlotte, and everyone else who worked the early shift to play the audiobooks
out loud.
And for the next two years, her voice was all he had of her.
Then, twenty years after graduation, Molly returned to Harlot’s Bay.
Unfortunately, she came for his fucking funeral.