“Sweet! Think she’ll give me free snickerdoodles if I tell her I work for you here?”
Grabbing another rag, I chuck it at him and then roll my eyes when he laughs. “I guess that’s up to her,” I grumble. “Are you good to close up? I want to go see my wife.”
“Yeah, I can—wait! You said you got married this morning? Why aren’t you on a honeymoon or something?”
This topic is going to get old as well. “Because we have too much work to do. We’ll do something later.”
“Okay, but why didn’t you take today off so you could…you know.” He waggles his eyebrows. “I could have taught that surf lesson, and no one came into the shop while you were out on the water. You could have been enjoying your first day as a married couple.”
I force my mind not to go where Brody’s comment implies. It takes some effort, especially after that kiss I shared with Georgie in the courthouse, which I still feel even hours later. For my own sanity, I really hope I don’t have to get that close to her again, or I’m going to fall right back to where I was the last time she was here. Only, it’ll be so much worse this time.
This time, we’re not teenagers holding hands and stealing quick kisses. We’re grown adults who are legally bound to each other. Georgie is a full-blown woman with curves and full lips and a stubbornness that shouldn’t be as attractive as it is. That courthouse kiss, however short it was, reawakened a part of me that probably should have stayed dead.
“I’m going to the bakery,” I mutter, ignoring Brody’s suggestive whistle as I cross the sand to the stairs back up to the boardwalk.
Though I shouldn’t be surprised, Kingston’s is crowded when I step inside. Most of them look like locals, which means they’re as much here for the gossip as they are for baked goods. Bracing myself, I keep to the back of the lobby and take it all in. Nothing is physically different, but the bakery already feels like it has changed. Something about the smell, the stocked displays, and the satisfied looks on the faces of those who have already been served.
It feels like Georgie.
Before I can stop them, memories of the first time I met Georgie start to surface.
I was twelve and already obsessed with surfing, so I was heading to the beach with a goal to spend the whole day on the water. But I had to make a stop at the bakery because my mom asked me to bring something to Uncle Bill, and I was reluctantly a good kid (and a little hopeful that I could steal some cookies in the process). The plan was to get in and out as quickly as possible, which resulted in me barreling into the lobby and colliding with a girl who had been about to dig into a strawberry cupcake as she walked out.
When I close my eyes, I can still see the way pink frosting spread across her nose and mouth as the cupcake smashed between us, and I swear I still have a bruise from our heads colliding. But once the proverbial dust settled after the crash, while we were still lying in a heap on the floor, my eyes fixed on hers, marveling at how green they were.
She smiled and said, “That’s one way to eat a cupcake, I guess.”
Then she licked the frosting from her lips, and it was the first time I thought about kissing someone even though I was nowhere near brave enough to do it. Thank goodness her parents stepped in, breaking us apart, and Uncle Bill offered them half a dozen cupcakes on the house to make up for my bumbling clumsiness.
By some miracle, Georgie said hi to me the next day when she and her parents visited the beach, and again when I was wandering the boardwalk with some friends. And by the end of the summer, she was spending as much time with me as she did with her family, and I begged for her email so we could keep in touch when she went back to New Hampshire.
Those emails were my lifeblood during the months of the year when Willow Cove’s population dropped to nothing. From the beginning of September to the end of May, I hung on Georgie’s every word and in turn told her everything, talking to her in a way I didn’t talk to anyone else.
She was there for me when my mom died right before I turned fifteen, even if she was hundreds of miles away.
Every June for five years straight, I hung out around the bakery for days until she finally arrived and brought everything back into balance again. I knew I wanted to marry her when I was sixteen because there was no way anyone else could come close to matching her. She was it for me.
I even waited the summer after she left me, a part of me hoping she would come back again and finally give me an answer to my question. Her parents came, but she didn’t, and I told myself to move on.
When Georgie comes gliding from the kitchen with a tray of vibrantly colored cupcakes, including some with pink frosting, my chest grows tight at the sight of her. My wife. The woman I clearly didn’t move on from, which means I’m in a lot of danger right now.
“King!”
I don’t know who shouts my name, but that one word pulls the entire lobby’s attention to me where I’m standing by the door. Even Georgie and Meg, who is at the cash register, look over at me. Meg’s expression is still furious, but there’s confusion and something else in there too. It almost looks like worry. Georgie turns a bright red, which she tries to hide by darting back into the kitchen without acknowledging me.
That’s going to make selling this marriage a little more difficult.
There’s a part of me that has wanted this whole thing to fail from the beginning, but now that I’m standing in the last place that holds pieces of my family, I know deep in my bones that I’ll never be able to give this a half-hearted effort. I need Georgie to keep this bakery alive, and Georgie needs her independence. I know better than to hold her back and stifle her free-spirited nature. Her stubbornness, for all its annoyance, is what has made her so good at what she does, and she can save this place.
She might be the only one who can.
Before I can take a step in any direction, half a dozen people crowd around me.
“Is it true that you and Georgie got married?” a man asks. “Marlin said she’s staying at your house.”
“Have you been secretly dating all this time?” a woman asks, pressing a hand to her heart. She’s one of the teachers at the elementary school and clearly a romantic, with the way she looks like she’s on the verge of a delighted swoon.
“What about her fancy boyfriend in New York?”
I frown at the woman who asks that question. I’m not sure I like the idea of everyone knowing about Georgie’s fame thanks to that baking show and her stupid ex-boyfriend. She never did say why they broke up, but I know the guy was an idiot. According to Coop, he broke up with her on live TV only a couple of weeks ago.
Clenching my jaw, I debate the merits of answering any of their questions and then decide it would be easier to let them wonder. Until we can get the process of transferring the bakery underway, I don’t want to confirm anything that could get us into trouble.
“Excuse me,” I say and push forward, ducking around people until I get behind the counter and through the swinging kitchen door.
Georgie is waiting for me, a wild look in her eyes. She grabs my hands and shifts me a step to the left, and then she bites her lip as she glances behind me. “I’m going to kiss you, King,” she says, and that’s the only warning I get before her mouth is on mine.
Chapter Nine
Georgie
If I’m going to be forced into kissing King every time someone questions our marriage, this is going to be the worst—or maybe the best—few weeks of my life.
He’s stiff at first, likely caught off guard by my sudden attack, but when I don’t let him pull away—this one is going to need to be extra convincing—he relaxes enough to wrap his hands around my waist and gently tug me closer so we’re not standing at an awkward distance. There’s something intense about this kiss, in the way his lips move against mine with more pressure than the last time, but I am particularly grateful that he doesn’t let it slip past PG.
I think I would enjoy that a little too much.
