The Copper Valley Bro Code Series: Volume 1, page 52
The man I left behind because while I love my mama and would do anything for her, I didn’t want to be her?
“I’m Grady,” he says, shifting an unreadable glance away from me and holding a capable, strong, long-fingered hand out to Bailey. He’s in a black Shipwreck—We Do It Pirate-Style T-shirt, because of course he is, and those biceps are definitely a new development. “I run the Crow’s Nest Bakery over in Shipwreck.”
Soda bubbles fill my veins.
I didn’t keep up with the Grady Rock gossip after I left home. I didn’t join Facebook or Twitter, I didn’t sign up to get the Sarcasm News delivered to my inbox, and I didn’t come home on leave and stalk him to find out what Shipwreck local he married and how many kids he had.
I needed space and distance to get over him and to start my life fresh and be someone, someone who could take care of herself, away from where I was the daughter of that wild child who got herself pregnant at sixteen.
I needed to get to know who I was when I wasn’t in love with Grady Rock, because despite four years of solid friendship, after that night, he didn’t call. Or text. Or email.
He completely dropped out of my life just when I needed a friend most.
But I still knew he was running Crow’s Nest.
That we’re basically competitors in this little slice of the Blue Ridge Mountains, though I’m competing on Mama’s behalf right now, and if we can’t find a real baker in the next month, he’ll put us out of business with one hand tied behind his back.
And Mama’s dreams will go up in smoke faster than she suddenly lost her eyesight three weeks ago.
I’m trying to be the bigger person here, to be happy for him and to be professional, one baker to the next—or one stumbling, klutzy mess of a kitchen disaster to one baking god—but my nerves have been raw since Bailey called in a panic in the middle of the night because Mama was in the ER unable to see anything, and nothing about this morning and the broken toilet and the ruined cinnamon rolls and the general panic over figuring out how much of Mama’s and Bailey’s lives I can fix before I run out of emergency leave and have to report back to Fort Bliss in Texas if my discharge paperwork doesn’t go through, is making seeing him again easier.
“You’re from Shipwreck?” Bailey asks, her entire posture going suspicious. “Then what are you doing here? Don’t you have another village to plunder?”
He slides another unreadable blue-green glance at me.
There’s a smear of chocolate frosting in front of his left earlobe, but otherwise, he’s calm and cool and put together with his jeans melding to his thighs, two days’ worth of scruff on his chin and neck, and his dark hair just long enough to curl at the edges.
“Heard an old friend was back in town,” he tells Bailey.
It’s clear she gets the implication when she frowns at me. “You have friends in Shipwreck?”
“You will too, once you start high school,” I point out.
“Nope. I will only hang out with people from Sarcasm. It’s better here. Sarcastic people score twenty points higher on IQ tests than normal people, and we all know pirates are dumber than normal people.”
“What if one of them is good at volleyball?”
Her eyes narrow, because she knows I have her there. “This conversation is over.” She turns to Grady with a flip of her hair. “And you need to leave.”
“I liked you better when you were two,” he tells her, which almost throws her off—I can tell by the slight flare in her eyes—but she’s a Williams, through and through.
“Well, bless your heart,” she says sweetly. “Annika, I think our crowd’s starting. We should go finish those tres leches donuts and get to work on our bubble waffles.”
We barely managed to put together the coffee pot this morning, but she gets points for her addiction to Food Network and the bravado that goes with the bluff.
“Be right there,” I tell her.
She tilts her head at me in the you are not seriously going to stand here and talk nice to THE COMPETITION FROM SHIPWRECK, are you? glare, and I barely refrain from smiling.
Family, food, volleyball, and loyalty to Sarcasm are Bailey’s life.
She’s pretty damn awesome.
“I have to wait for Roger to finish the toilet,” I remind her.
“Roger knows where the toilet is.”
“Bailey.”
“If you think I’m going to leave you alone to let some random baker guy from Shipwreck besmirch your honor or throw you off your game, you’re crazy.”
Seriously.
I love her to pieces, and not in the least because she’s willing to pretend I have any game when it comes to running a bakery.
Grady, though, I’m not so sure about.
Everything between us is more or less ancient history. We’re practically strangers. I’m not the same woman I was when I left home ten years ago, and I’m sure he’s changed too.
He still has his dimples, but his body is honed and his eyes are full of a depth that they didn’t have ten years ago.
We’ve both grown.
But I can’t stop the feelings about who we used to be.
And the feelings are too overwhelming on top of all the other chaos that I can’t fully color-code in my life planner right now.
“Thanks for stopping by, but the grand opening isn’t until this weekend. We’ll be sure to send an invitation.”
I am not sending an invitation.
Which I think he knows, because I get the full intensity of his searching blue-green gaze, the gaze that used to smile at me over cupcakes in the cafeteria at school, that he’d dial up to coax me to come over to Shipwreck and go roller skating tonight after you get off work, and I’ll bring these toasted macadamia-pistachio cookies I’ve been working on, that would calm me the fuck down when I was freaking over a test or a late assignment or getting my shoe stuck in mud at the lake and not knowing how I was going to tell Mama we had to buy me a new pair, when I knew Bailey was growing faster and needed more things than I did.
It’s the same gaze that would silently ask if I was okay after some asshole in the hallway between classes would make a crack about my mama. I was that freshman, the daughter of a teen mom who was now single and pregnant in her early thirties with number two, because doesn’t she know yet where those come from and can’t she keep her legs shut?
Like it didn’t take two. Like it wasn’t more offensive that a man who claimed to love her and me had shoved us out of his life as soon as he found out she was pregnant.
Like she hadn’t done a kick-ass job of raising me all on her own.
You ask me, she deserved a fucking medal.
But every time someone said something snide, Grady was there, asking if I was okay.
He knew I didn’t need to be protected, but he offered it anyway.
Because we were friends.
“You bake now,” he says.
“Never underestimate a motivated woman.” I try to add a smile, because I don’t want to be cranky and affected, but god.
I am affected by having him standing two feet in front of me. Who wouldn’t be?
I’m also trying really hard to keep up the bluff that I can bake now, and even though it’s been ten years since we’ve been friends, I still feel like he can see right through me.
“You bake for Sarcasm,” he adds.
The disdain in his voice makes my attempt at a smile die a quick death. “I grew up here,” I remind him.
“You opened your own bakery in Sarcasm.”
“And it’s so nice of you to be happy for me.”
Those bubbles streaming through my blood are popping and sparking something far uglier. I don’t bother correcting him, to tell him that it’s Mama’s bakery.
We stare at each other, because he’s clearly not happy for me, and I’m not happy that he’s not happy for me.
Aren’t friends supposed to be happy for each other when good things happen?
And how about friends asking, hey, how’ve you been? What brings you home? How long are you here? Oh my god, your mom went blind? What can I do to help?
“You’re putting fliers all over my town for your bakery.”
“That was me,” Bailey says. “Because you can’t grow a business without advertising, and it’s been a one-bakery county for way too long. I hit all the towns, by the way. Just in case you think I made a special trip to Shipwreck. I actually put them there under protest, because having a pirate town in the mountains is stupid, but now I’m really glad I did it.”
“You’re not old enough to drive,” he barks.
“So?”
Her total disregard—and lack of any desire to explain herself—should be funny.
But I’m not amused.
I’m pissed as hell that he’s treating me like an intruder instead of a friend who came home.
“Excuse me,” I say shortly. “As you can see, I have a bakery to run.”
I grip Bailey’s hand too hard when I grab her and pull her back toward the kitchen, but she still squeezes back.
I got your back, Annika, that squeeze says.
She’s thirteen.
She shouldn’t have to have my back. I’m supposed to be the adult. I’m supposed to be the one putting everyone’s lives back in order. Figuring out how Mama’s bakery can get off the ground when it’s starting in the midst of a crisis.
Except we’re both Maria Williams’s daughters.
And I couldn’t be more grateful for that than I am right now.
We’re going to be okay.
We’re all going to be okay.
And Grady Rock can bite me.
3
Grady
I shouldn’t have gone to Sarcasm to see Annika.
I should never go to Sarcasm, period—that town has been a thorn in my town’s side since before I was born—but going back to see the woman who told me to take a flying leap when I kissed her and asked her to give me a chance, a real chance, ten years ago before she left for the Army was an even worse idea.
Annika Williams does not now, and never has wanted me.
Re-opening Sarcasm’s bakery is just more proof of how she always really felt about me.
Seeing her again, though—god, I wanted to touch her.
Hold her hand.
Wipe away that worry line between her brows.
For three seconds, I was back in high school. Admiring her grit. Wanting to see her smile. Wishing I’d brought a fucking cookie.
And then every moment of graduation night came crashing down, her eyes landed on me with panic and disbelief and dread, and I knew.
I knew.
I still wasn’t who she wanted to see standing there, and the knowledge opened every last scar I’d forgotten I had.
Turns out, my heart’s still bruised too.
“Quit moping,” Tillie Jean says to me. I’m sidled up to the bar in Crusty Nut, Shipwreck’s most popular restaurant, rolling silverware into napkins after delivering cookies here for their ice cream sandwich dessert tonight, and helping install a new fridge. She’s working behind the counter, restocking the liquor before the night crowd hits since she runs the place. “So you have a little competition now. So what?”
“We were friends,” I tell my sister. “Friends don’t open competing bakeries.”
And having Annika here running a bakery—let’s just say she’s never failed at anything she set out to do.
Which means my bakery might be in actual danger from the competition.
“Did you ask her why she opened a bakery?” my mom asks as she slides onto the seat next to me and plops a nine-by-thirteen dish of dirt cake in front of me.
“Ma. You can’t bring that in here,” Tillie Jean objects.
“Can and did. Your brother’s had a rough day. He needs a dirt cake.”
“It’s not even two in the afternoon.”
“But he’s been up since three, haven’t you, sweetie?” Ma kisses my cheek, and I let her ruffle my hair and fuss while I finish the last of Tillie Jean’s silverware, because it makes Ma happy, and I’m feeling shitty and it’s nice to know my mom still loves me.
I’m officially that pathetic idiot.
Shouldn’t have come here to Crusty Nut either, but I knew TJ would take the help until I’m calm enough to go back to my own bakery.
If I walk in there now, Georgia will chase me out, because pastries and baked goods need love, not heartbreak, if they’re going to taste good.
“What he needs is a girlfriend,” my grandfather declares.
He, too, strides into the dark-paneled bar attached to the restaurant, but unlike my mother, he has a parrot sitting on his shoulder.
Tillie Jean points to the door. “Pop, Long Beak Silver can’t be in here either.”
“Fuck you and the unicorn you rode in on,” the parrot says.
“Long Beak Silver, go swab the deck.”
“All work and no play makes a parrot frisky.”
My sister glares at Pop.
His weathered face wrinkles more as he smiles broadly.
“Can’t argue with that,” he declares. “Besides, it’s too hot outside. His beak’ll melt right off.”
Tillie Jean throws her hands up. “If the health department shuts us down, I’m moving in with both of you,” she informs our elders. She doesn’t own the place, but Dad does, and she’s his manager.
She’ll inherit it one day, if she wants to.
“Pipe down, wench!” Long Beak Silver says.
I unroll the last silverware I fixed up, take the spoon, and dig straight into the dirt cake. It’s a testament to how much my mother loves me that she doesn’t chide me for my manners.
Or possibly I just look that shitty.
Annika Williams.
Fuck.
She’s back.
With those expressive brown eyes. Those cheeks that could cut glass, but covered in deep olive skin so soft it rivals the silk of a good meringue. And her hair.
Her thick dark hair.
She didn’t cut it in the Army. She left it long. It was pulled up in a ponytail under a hair net, and it was fucking adorable.
“Here, boy,” Pop says, straddling the seat on my other side and putting the parrot between us. “I picked out a few more women for you to try out.”
“Pop. He’s not looking for a fucking car,” Tillie Jean snaps. “Leave the man alone. He just came face-to-face with the one who got away. He deserves five minutes to mope. Okay?”
Huh.
I owe my sister a nice birthday present this year.
“She warned me,” I tell them all. Despite the fact that my mom always shows up with dirt cakes whenever my life hits a bump in the road, I’ve never told her the whole story of why I needed a dirt cake after high school graduation.
And I mean the good kind of dirt cake with cream cheese and vanilla pudding and whipped cream, and gummy treasures mixed in, and topped with crumbled Oreos, not the kind my brother Cooper used to bring in from the yard after digging for treasure.
“She told me a million times if she told me once that she wasn’t interested in dating boys because she was going to college to get a degree so she could afford to buy a big-screen TV and a Toyota,” I tell my family. “New. A new Toyota. Because that was making it to her.”
“A Toyota?” Pop’s frowning big-time now. “What’s she want with a Toyota when Chevy’s the good stuff? Here. Look at this one. Penelope Summer. Her grandpa cheats at pool, but I don’t hold that against her. And if she hyphenates, she’d be Penelope Summer-Rock, and that’s charming, isn’t it?”
“Pop, Grady’s not getting married just because a woman’s hyphenated name would be charming,” Ma says. “But show him Meredith. The one with the degree in plasma physics. I didn’t even know that was a thing, but imagine how smart their kids will be.”
Tillie Jean and I share a look.
My dad bustles out of the kitchen with a basket full of gold nuggets, which the rest of the world calls fried pickle chips, and one of potato swords, which are—you guessed it—french fries.
Shipwreck might be nestled into the Blue Ridge Mountains, but we have a long and storied history of being founded by a pirate on the run from the law, and so we pirate-ify everything.
The tourists love it.
Most days, so do I.
My whole family is in the business of running Shipwreck, so loving it is a good thing.
Dad bought Crusty Nut before I was born because he loves to cook, and he and Ma decided to have Tillie Jean so that they’d have at least one kid who could run his restaurant one day.
I fell down on my role of running Ma’s coffee shop, but she’s holding out hope Cooper will come home and take it over when he retires from baseball in another ten or fifteen years.
“Heart attack in a basket,” Dad says proudly, sliding the food onto the bar beside Ma’s dirt cake. “Rather have you dead than moping over a Sarcasm girl.”
“Dad,” Tillie Jean says.
He grins. “What? Perspective.” He taps Pop’s notebook. “Did you show him Neveah yet? Fascinating name. And she took dance classes all through high school, so you know she’s good and nimble. What? That’s important for childbirth.”
I pick up the dirt cake and the heart attack baskets and head for the door.
“Where are you going?” Pop calls. “We’re just getting started.”
I should head back to my own bakery and make sure everything’s running fine, but Georgia chased me off the minute I got back from Sarcasm and said—rightfully so—that if I tried to bake a thing in the mood I was in, the cakes would fall and the cookies would come out tasting like chalk and don’t get her started on what would happen to the donuts.
Makes more sense to pay her to not screw up than for me to ruin two days’ worth of baking. I’ll deal with what that means for the bottom line later.
Which means I’m going home.
To my goat.
Who loves me even though I never asked him to, and even though I tried my damnedest to get rid of him when he invaded my yard a year ago.
