He shakes his head at me and reaches in for the eggs again. “You should. Maybe you’d be less angry all the time.” I grind my teeth into dust as Ryan sets the eggs on the counter and starts looking in all my cabinets. He pauses with his hands on the handles of the open upper cabinets and looks at me over his large shoulder. “Do you not own a mixing bowl?”
I roll my eyes. “Of course I do.” I push him out of the way with my hip. I won’t let my hands touch him. They have a mind of their own, and I’m afraid that if they feel his hard body, I won’t be able to pull them back off. From then on, I would have to go with him everywhere, my hands plastered to the six-pack that, no doubt, lives under his shirt. “But I’m not a million feet tall like you, so I keep everything down here.” I open a lower cabinet and wave my hands in front of it, making the classic ta-da gesture.
Once the mixing bowl situation is settled, I pour my cup of coffee and hop up onto the counter to watch closely (because I’m keeping a steady eye on the enemy, not because I think he’s sexy) as Ryan goes to work making us breakfast. He takes out an egg, taps it on the counter, and cracks it open with one hand. He does this with five eggs before washing his hands and going back to my fridge to pull out a bell pepper and cheese. My eyes follow him around like the head of the CIA has assigned me to investigate his every move. Like they are suddenly concerned chefs making morning omelets might be starting a nuclear war.
Ryan makes himself at home. He’s forgotten I exist and that this is my kitchen he’s taking over. I sip my coffee while Ryan pulls out a knife I’ve only ever used to wield as a weapon and starts chopping the bell pepper at a frightening speed. He’s humming, and his tan forearms are flexing as the knife continues to slice and dice. Finally, he lays down the knife and scoops the veggies up to pour into the egg mixture and dumps it all into the hot skillet on the stove.
Now he’s got a hand towel draped over his shoulder and is flipping an omelet, and the veins down his arms are popping, and my mouth is watering, but it has absolutely nothing to do with breakfast.
After Ryan tosses our omelets onto plates, it occurs to me that I have a three-star Michelin chef making me breakfast in my kitchen. “What are you really doing here, Ryan?”
He hasn’t spoken to me or even glanced in my direction since he started cooking, so I sort of just thought he forgot I was here. But when his eyes find me right away, I realize he never lost track of me once. He’s been just as aware of me as I am of him.
“Making you breakfast before we plan the menu for Friday night.”
I shake my head and set down my coffee beside me. “You don’t need me for that. You’re a chef.”
He folds his arms and leans back against the counter, keeping his eyes fixed on me. “You’re right.”
“So, why then? I want the truth. Is this some kind of trap or way for you to mess with me like you used to?”
He gives me a sad tilted smile and shakes his head. “After all this time, you still don’t see the real reason I messed with you back then?” The string connecting us pulls tight.
I force myself to swallow. “Because you hated me.”
He pushes off the counter and walks toward me, one slow agonizing step at a time, until he’s close enough to pin me in. His hands land on the counter beside my hips, and I forget how to breathe. “Has it never occurred to you that the only reason I picked on you in high school is because I was into you? Or that messing with you was the only way I could get you to look at me?”
My heart is beating so hard right now I’m afraid if I open my mouth, it will leap right out. I settle with slowly shaking my head.
He smiles, and his eyes fall and settle on my mouth. “June, I’m not your enemy.” Those dark eyes hold my mouth for five heartbeats before they pop back up to meet my gaze. “I never was.”
For a minute, I think we’re going to kiss. But then he pulls away, picks up our plates, and carries them to the table.
I, however, can’t move. I’m numb—inside and out.
His words seep into me like a dry, brittle sponge slowly being dipped in water.
I’m not your enemy. I never was.
But that can’t be. What he just said can’t be true. Because if it is…that means, all this time, I thought he hated me, and he thought I hated him, but really we were both into each other. It means we could have been kissing in high school instead of biting at each other like wild dogs. We could have gone to prom together. He could have brought me milkshakes after my tonsillectomy. I could have held him when his mom died.
I would never have met Ben.
But no…no, no, no. Ryan had his chance to kiss me at graduation, and he didn’t take it. If he really liked me, he would have. What he just told me changes nothing. So what if he crushed on me back then? So what if we are attracted to each other now?
We both have different lives, and his happens to be all the way in Chicago. Plus, I still have my one-date rule. I’m not ready to let go of it yet, and when I do, it definitely won’t be for someone like Ryan Henderson. No, I just need to make it through this wedding week and then wave to him as he drives away, retreating back to his important life. Everything will go back to normal.
I slide off the counter and make sure my legs still work before I straighten my shoulders and march into the breakfast room. I don’t sit down when I make it to the table. Instead, I lean over and level Ryan with a glare that would scare the head of the Mafia. I throw my hand behind me, not breaking eye contact with Ryan, and point to the kitchen. “What you just said back there changes nothing. And for the rest of the day, we will discuss nothing but food and menu items. Understand?”
He’s not threatened. He’s not shaking in his boots like I want him to. He wants to take my picture and post it with the hashtag cute. “Fine. Whatever you say, boss.”
And then his smile tilts, and I’m worried I’ll never be in control when it comes to Ryan.
Chapter 10 Ryan
True to her word, June makes sure we never discuss anything personal all morning. She barely looks me in the eye. After scarfing her breakfast down and draining two cups of coffee, she fetches a pencil and notepad and taps the lead against the paper in a Morse code that says Let’s get this over with and then get out.
I’m not quite ready to comply yet, though. Instead, I feel like seeing how much I can learn about June without her realizing I’ve squeezed personal information from her. “Tell me about Darlin’ Donuts,” I say, and she narrows her eyes at me. I raise my hands in surrender. “It’s just a business question.”
June is skeptical as she searches my face for the hole in my lie. She can’t find it, though, so she gives in and spends the next twenty minutes talking nonstop. It’s ridiculously hard not to smile and give myself away as I watch her talk about her bakery.
Her eyes light up, and she smiles when she recounts to me the day they bought the shop and how it was filled with dead mice and rotting holes in the walls. Her brother, Jake, is an architect and helped her redesign the building, fitting it for a new industrial kitchen and shop front with seating. She goes on and on about how they designed the bakery to look both vintage and modern, mixing bright pastel pinks, yellows, and turquoise with thick, intricate crown molding.
I listen and nod approvingly through the entire monologue, acting surprised when she tells me they have a peg wall behind the counter that spells out D.D. where they hang each of their signature donuts every day to showcase their flavors. I smile as if I didn’t already know about it. As if I don’t also know that her booths are tufted in a blue-green velvet and the floor is speckled marble. I have to act surprised so she doesn’t find out I’ve been secretly following the bakery’s Instagram account ever since Logan accidentally informed me about Darlin’ Donuts a few years ago.
I don’t actually follow her account or like or comment on any photos, so she has no way of knowing that I’ve been keeping up with her. But every night when I fall into bed, the first thing I do is type @DarlinDonuts into the Instagram search bar and stare at whatever photo she’s posted that day, hoping to see a glimpse of her face in every reflection.
I don’t tell her any of this for two reasons: (1) I don’t want her to hit me with a restraining order because she suddenly thinks I’m her stalker; and (2) it sounds an awful lot like I’ve been pining away for her since high school—but honestly…I have been a little bit. But I’ve also been busy and content in my life, working so hard that I barely have time to think about anyone or anything but the career ladder I’ve been climbing. You don’t become the world’s youngest three-star Michelin chef by sitting on your ass and dreaming of a woman far away. You think of her while you’re working instead.
But it’s really been in the last few years that I’ve thought about June more than normal. Logan and Stacy visited me in Chicago, and Logan let the news of the bakery slip. Stacy kicked him under the table, and that was when I was first tipped off about the “no talking about June” policy. I didn’t press it in the moment. But I did manage to get the name of her bakery before Logan left, and I then proceeded to think about June every day for the next three years.
Actually, yeah, I do sound like a stalker. Great.
But the thing is, June has become a comfort to me from far away. An enigma. A figment of my imagination and someone that I’ve let myself dream of reuniting with for so long that I’ve been afraid to actually see her again. The more time that passed without me coming to visit, the more I talked myself out of ever seeing her again. I couldn’t imagine there being a scenario where the real June measured up to the one I had created in my mind.
Except, here she is. And she’s worlds better than the June of my fantasies. She’s beautiful and spunky, and yet soft as butter behind all those sharp thorns.
In the middle of her business talk, she accidentally tells me about the time Justin Timberlake came into the bakery and how she was so nervous she spilled an entire tray of donuts onto the floor. This leads to her telling me about how sometimes she drinks too much coffee and it makes her hands jittery. Which leads to the story about the time she tried to cut her own bangs after drinking three cups of coffee, creating a new system in her family for identifying a date in time known as BBB and ABB (Before Bad Bangs and After Bad Bangs). And how the only thing that could calm her down after seeing her jagged bangs in the mirror was a trip to Taco Bell because fast-food tacos always make her feel better.
