Page 39 of Perfect Pairing
When I moved to Apple Blossom Bay the previous spring, the Brubaker Cafe had been thriving. But after the unexpected death of Char, the matriarch of the Brubaker clan, her sons had taken over the business…and quickly ran it into the ground. After violating numerous health and building codes, they were eventually forced to close their doors last fall.
“Yeah,” Brie said slowly. “Dad definitely wasn’t happy, but…it won’t be empty for long.”
“What do you mean?”
“Dad and I sort of bought the building…”
“What?” I asked, incredulous. “Why are you telling me thisnow? What are you going to do with the space?”
A thousand more questions whirled through my brain, but one thought stuck out more than the rest, flashing neon—did this mean she was coming back?
“I’m opening a bakery,” she said simply.
Fucking hell. Shewascoming back. My skin hummed in anticipation of getting to see her again, and more regularly at that. Maybe…
No.
I firmly shut that thought down, boxed it, locked it up, wrapped it in chains, and tossed it into the proverbial Mariana Trench in my mind. We’d agreed to be nothing more than friends for a reason, and I wasn’t going to let my imagination wander with delusions of grandeur where she was concerned.
“When?”
“I’m moving home as soon as my apprenticeship is up. Dad has actually been hard at work on it while I’m in Chicago, so it’ll be ready for me to decorate and open once I move home.”
“Which will be when?”
“My apprenticeship finishes up at the end of June, so I’m hoping to be open by the middle of July.”
I whistled low, impressed and surprised. “I had no idea you wanted to open a bakery.”
She grinned. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me.” Then, she resumed flipping through the recipe book but said, “Now, enough about me. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
“You know, normal stuff. Trying to keep my energetic son alive. Oh, and my dad and I have been renovating the house. We ripped out the kitchen yesterday, so tomorrow, we’ll get started on rebuilding now that supplies have started to arrive.”
“Wait,” she continued, seeming to snap out of whatever task she’d been lost in. “You ripped out your kitchen?”
“Yeah, I just said that…”
“Then where exactly are you planning on baking this treat?”
“The winery,” I said with a shrug. “Your dad has been cool about letting me use it when I need to.”
“So that’s how you’ve been spending your time off,” she said, almost to herself, but I perked up.
“You’ve been thinking about me?”
“Every day,” she admitted, though she seemed reluctant to do so.
“Well, that makes two of us.”
The line was silent for several heartbeats, any words quashed under the weight of all the things wecouldn’tsay. Then, Brie clapped her hands.
“Okay,” she said. “Back to the real reason you called. You’re going to make spiced apple cupcakes. Now, get a pen and paper. You need to go shopping, and here’s what you need to buy…”
I grinned as she parroted my instructions from our last phone call back to me and did as she asked.
Two days later, my phone rang as I was in the middle of tearing out the old sheet linoleum lining the floor of my kitchen. Grateful for the break, I pulled it from my pocket, my mood picking up further when I saw it was Brie.
“Hey, honey.”
