Page 90 of Not Your Average Vixen
He trudged through the snow, his head spinning.
He could barely tell up from down at this point as the far-off squeals and shrieks peppered the air in the distance. His thoughts were all over the place. The Angels, Bridget, Tom’s damned wedding, and this godforsaken town were starting to take a toll on him. He kept walking, grateful for the quiet, when something small and white whizzed past his head. He looked around, but he couldn’t see anyone. The light was fading fast, and in the shade of a grove of towering blue spruce, he looked for the person who’d thrown the snowball that had passed only inches from his head but didn’t see a soul.
“Hello?” he called, shielding his eyes from the falling snow.
No reply…until…smack!
Smack, smack, smack, crack!
Five snowballs hit him in rapid succession—two to the head and three to the shoulder.
He raised his hand defensively.
“Who is that?” he called, bending down and scrambling to make a snowball with the damn ice scoop salad tongs.
He stilled as movement flashed in his peripheral vision.
Then a crack.
A crunch.
And…pow, pow, pow, pow!
Another round of blistering snowballs hit him square in the head.
Again!
This must be what it’s like to live inside a Slurpee machine!
Cold snow slid down his face, and he dropped the snowball maker. Stumbling back a few feet, he lost his footing and toppled over.
Fucking fantastic! With his luck, Carly was his assailant, and he could add having an eight-year-old little girl knock him flat on his ass. If this day wasn’t already a giant shit show, this would be the icing on the cake.
He ran his hand down his shivering, wet face, but before he could reach for his snowball maker to retaliate, Bridget, not Carly, appeared. She jumped out from behind a tree and pinned him back onto the ground.
“What the hell are you doing? I’m already down! You got me with four hundred snowballs! Are you crazy?”
That storm he’d seen in her eyes now raged. “Am I crazy? No, Scooter, I’m furious.”
“With me?”
“Of course, with you!”
“What did I do now?”
She’d been stewing since the Angels came by the shop, and that exercise and fresh air he’d hoped would have helped her move on, clearly hadn’t. Unfortunately for him, she looked more pissed off.
She held a snowball in her hand, poised to nail him in the chest like a baker phenomenon turned snowball ninja. “How can you do it? How can you go out of your way to hurt so many people? I let a lot go, Scooter. I didn’t even yell at my boyfriend when I caught him in bed with a woman who was wearing my lingerie. I let Gaston take advantage of me. He paid me nothing to do the job of three bakers and a store manager. But you, you take the cake. Literally. You don’t want to help Cupid Bakery or for Tom and Lori to get married. You are a matrimonial meddler and the killer of cake all wrapped into one!”
Matrimonial meddler? Killer of cake?
He’d been called a lot of things in his day, and perhaps she had him on the meddling, but killer of cake wasn’t something he’d ever imagined anyone would call him in a million years.
He needed to get her talking like a normal human.
He glanced at the perfectly formed snowball clutched in her gloved hand. “I’m not saying this to piss you off, but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about with the whole lingerie and Gaston rant?”
She shook her head and released a frustrated sigh. “I should apologize for that part. That stuff doesn’t have anything to do with you. There’s just a lot making me mad right about now—and I’m not the kind of person who gets mad. Somehow, you’ve turned me into a lunatic!”
