Avery’s shoulders sagged. “I can’t help feeling like…”
I lifted my eyebrows, waiting for her to continue.
“Like she did all this for me.” Avery looked around the bakery. “Pink is still my favorite color.”
And now I was sure: Evelyn had done all the redecorating, in the house and at the bakery, for Avery. I’d been surprised when Evelyn had the empty guest suite painted pink — Evelyn’s style was more crisp, more practical — but now it made sense.
“Hey.” I crossed the room and put my hands on Avery’s shoulders, hoping I wasn’t overstepping. “It’s okay. Bastien was right, Evelyn was happy you were out in the world, busy living. I never heard her talk about you with anything but love. Older people know the clock is ticking. She wanted to make everything nice for you because she loved you, and she wanted inheriting it all to be pleasant and easy, or as easy as it can be to inherit a big house and a small business.”
I’d only meant to comfort Avery, but now she was right there, just inches away, looking up at me with sad brown eyes that made me want to pull her close, bake her some cupcakes, fuck her senseless.
Dammit.
“Thanks.” She sniffled. “She sounds really amazing. I wish I’d known her better. Not just for her, but for me too.”
“You can know her through the Crumb,” I said, referencing the bakery. “And through the house and the town. She loved this place, crazy as it can be sometimes.”
Avery flashed me a sad, lopsided smile. “Crazy?”
I chuckled. “Well, you did find a dead body on your first day.”
“Good point. When I first drove into town I thought…”
“Boring?” I suggested. “Sickeningly cute?”
She laughed. “More like… nothing bad ever happens here.”
“You’re mostly right.” I forced myself to drop my hands from her shoulders even though it was the opposite of what I really wanted to do. “But you know what they say…”
“What do they say?” she asked.
I reached for an apron from the hook on the wall and pulled it over my head. “Never judge a book by its cover.”
Her gaze dropped to my apron. She lifted her eyebrows. “Really?”
I looked down at the words embroidered on the apron:I like big buns. “What?”
9
AVERY
I spentthe first few hours of the morning at the bakery with Beck. Showing me around the place didn’t take long — behind the customer-facing main room there was a kitchen, a storeroom for supplies, and a small office — but it was going to take me a while to get my arms around the business itself.
There were the baked goods, which Beck and Malcolm, the assistant who helped out at the bakery, made from scratch, a seasonal array of mouthwatering cookies, pastries, and cakes on rotation.
But it was more than just the baking. There were purchase orders for flour and multiple kinds of sugar, plus vanilla imported from Madagascar and chocolate imported from France and duck eggs bought exclusively from a duck farm on the lake (Beck swore the duck eggs — not the fancy imported ingredients — were the Golden Crumb’s secret weapon). There was marketing and inventory, plus accounting, which included payables and payroll for both Beck and Malcolm.
It was a lot to think about, especially when I put it all together with the house I’d inherited, and by ten a.m. I was in need of a place to clear my head.
I found Beck in the back, pulling a tray of lemon cookies from the oven. The air was fragrant with citrus and lavender, which was another of Beck’s secret ingredients.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever lusted after a guy in an apron before, but hunger roared to life in my body at the sight of him wearing oven mitts and a pink-striped apron over his jeans and T-shirt, the stalk of wheat I’d seen tattooed on his right forearm peeking out from under his sleeve.
What the fudge was wrong with me?
“Hey, Beck?”
His face lit up a little when he saw me. Or maybe that was wishful thinking. “Yeah?”