She answered the phone, flipping open her order pad while keeping an eye on the front. Poor Coralee was dashing between the coffee machine, the cash register and the pastry trays.
Maggie found a pen and test-scribbled it to see if it worked. “You know I can’t accept cake orders two days before an event, Mrs. Connors,” she said on the phone. “We need a week, minimum.”
Alice Connors kept arguing. That woman would argue with a sack of wet hair.
“I have a carrot cake in the refrigerator,” Maggie said, knowing if she didn’t find a solution, she would never get Alice off the phone. “Why don’t we write Happy Birthday, Schnoodles on that one? By the way, you do know sugar isn’t good for dogs, right?”
Alice blasted her so hard, Maggie had to hold the phone away from her ear. It made her think she would almost rather be at the wedding. Out front, one of the reporters emptied a pocketful of change on the counter and sorted through it, one coin at a time. Behind him, the line of reporters loudly groaned.
“I’ll make sure it’s beautiful, Mrs. Connors. Yes, of course. See you then.”
Coralee sent her a look of frazzled relief when Maggie appeared beside her. She gave Coralee a wink. This was nothing they couldn’t handle. Sure, the bakery was jam-packed, but there were few things in life Maggie loved more than a challenge.
“Would you like a sandwich to go with your coffee?” she asked the disheveled reporter across from her. His press pass, dangling from a lanyard around his neck, read Harold Lipsky. “The egg salad is fresh. Family recipe.”
Harold blinked. “Wait. You’re the sister of the bride, aren’t you? Care to comment—for the record, of course—on what it’s like seeing your sister marry America’s favorite quarterback?”
Maggie maintained her brisk, professional smile. “Not even a little. But if you’d like a sandwich or a pastry to go with your coffee, I’d be happy to get that for you.”
“Not one single comment?” Harold pushed a few crumpled dollars across the counter. “Maybe something about how you’re hoping to marry a famous athlete, too?”
Right. Another stupidly good-looking cheater like her bronc-busting, rodeo-circuit ex-husband. That was exactly what she needed.
Maggie gave Mr. Lipsky his coffee. Sweetly, she said, “Not if you paid me.”
An hour later the customers were gone, and she and Coralee looked at each other with a united sense of having accomplished something. The lipstick red café tables were askew. One chair lay upended. The gilt letters spelling out the name of the bakery, Sweet Dreams, twinkled serenely on the front window, mocking her.
Maggie heaved herself up and trailed back to the kitchen. “Next time a member of my family gets married,” she told Coralee, “please remind me to just take the day off, will you?”
While Coralee sprayed down the display case and swept up discarded napkins, Maggie scooped fresh buttercream frosting into her pastry bag. She went to work finishing the row of pale pink florets. Once the cake was finished, Donny and his brother were coming over to carry it to the venue. The cake weighed about a ton. Afterward, she’d run upstairs, grab a shower and her Maid-of-Honor gown, and then meet Cassidy and the rest of the bridesmaids for makeup. Dutifully, she told herself it might actually be fun.
Coralee came into the kitchen and set the dustpan and the broom in a corner. “I just saw a news truck with one of those big satellite thingies on top. Do you think maybe they’re sending news stories about Cuervo to aliens in space?”
“If they are, that pretty much explains why aliens almost never come here.” Maggie tilted her head to one side to assess her handiwork. “Does that row of florets look bigger to you? I can’t decide.”
The bell above the door rang. Coralee rolled her eyes. “What do you want to bet it’s the same group as last time, come back for seconds?”
“I’ll take care of it. Why don’t you get started on the dishes.” Maggie wiped her gloved hands on her apron and glanced at herself in the mirror next to the walk-in freezer. Her long dark hair was pulled back in a baker’s snood. Flour streaked her left cheek. She wiped it with the back of her wrist and then went out front, where two men and a woman waited, looking wildly out of place in her cozy country bakery.
The taller of the two men wore a tux and the woman wore a full-length apricot silk Cubana dress. Maggie saw the clothes before she saw the faces. When she glanced up at the man, her heart nearly stopped.
Wow.
Maggie realized suddenly that her apron had cake batter on it and she wasn’t wearing a speck of makeup. She couldn’t breathe properly because all the air had left the room. There was a fluttering in her chest she hadn’t felt in a long time, coupled with an insane desire to turn around and run back into the kitchen. But that was stupid. What was she—fifteen?
“I’m guessing you folks are here for the wedding,” she said with her best professional sparkle. “May I help you?”
The man frowned at her, which brought his piercing blue gaze off the menu on the wall above her head and directly to her flushed, perspiring face. God, how she hated her reaction to him, hated that while he assessed her coolly, everything inside her heated up like a thermometer plunged into boiling water.
“You have coffee here, right?” the second man asked. He wore an expensive-looking suit with a red power tie and a matching pocket square. His nails were spotless, which wasn’t something you saw all too often in farm country.
“We have coffee, espresso, cappuccino and iced coffees,” she said, wishing suddenly that she had on a nice outfit. And didn’t smell like a doughnut. And knew more people who dressed like this.
“Two coffees,” Power Tie replied. “Both black.” He turned to the blond woman, who shrugged slightly. “Make that three coffees.”
Just being near the man in the tux made her nerve endings stir and tingle. Nobody that sexy had passed through Cuervo in a long time. She practically had to force herself to remember that good-looking men were bad news. If a man was handsome, you could count on him for two things: to screw you over and to break your heart.
She gave her tingly feelings a violent shove to the side.
It was hard not to feel sorry for the woman he was with. Poor thing. She’d never see it coming.
Maggie inserted a portafilter into her Italian espresso machine. She turned the portafilter to the right and locked it into place. The machine was a thing of beauty, all chrome and knobs and levers. Even with her back turned, she could study the guy in the tux in the machine’s reflective surfaces. Yet the longer she looked, the more annoyed she became with herself. Men were trouble. A lot of trouble. She knew that. So why keep torturing herself?
But there was something stern and mysteriously self-assured about him that drew her in. He struck her as a man used to giving orders and to getting his own way. His hair, sandy blond, was cut short on the sides and slightly longer on top. His face was broad across the jaw and cheekbones, which saved him from being merely pretty.
Maggie didn’t like pretty. She liked men who looked like men—who could wear work boots as well as tuxes.
Mostly, she liked men you could depend on not to cheat on you the minute some woman flashed them a smile.
She pressed the tamper down on top of the coffee grounds and squeezed hard, wishing she could do the same thing to her brain. It had taken her years to get her life back together again, and now it was exactly what a life was supposed to be: boring. The formula was simple, really. You worked. You spent time with your family. You