CHAPTER SEVEN
The best substitute for sex, Maggie decided, was pie.
And since she couldn’t eat enough pie to make those bad feelings go away—whipping up pastries all morning, every morning, kind of ruined a person’s enjoyment of baked goods—she kept her ovens working overtime.
Now her display case was packed with pies. There was caramel delight pie filled with soft-piped caramel and drizzled with chocolate. There was butter pie bursting with butter, sugar, eggs, raisins and walnuts covered in a crisp pastry shell. And there were crumbly apple tarts bubbling over with oats, cinnamon and brown sugar.
She assembled the ingredients for lemon meringue. Between customers, she returned to the kitchen to add her grandmother’s special lemon curd filling to the bottom of a short crust and then she layered in the fluffy meringue. After she slid the pie in the oven, Maggie washed the pastry board and set it to dry.
It was ten a.m. two weeks after her sister’s wedding. Cuervo had returned to being the drowsy little hamlet it had been and she was bored out of her skull. And restless. And so not thinking about Jake Sutton.
Okay, so she might have looked him up online a few nights ago. Big deal. Well, he actually was a big deal if all those photos of him glad-handing the president meant anything. There were lots of pictures of blond women standing beside him, all white teeth and artfully tossed hair, and a photo essay of Jake hang gliding with some celebrity athlete she’d never heard of. Jake was shirtless in a few photos. Seeing what she’d walked away from, all ripped and lean and tan, not only made her grumpy, it filled her with an ache that closely resembled regret.
But that wasn’t true, she told herself, picking up a bottle and spritzing blue glass cleaner on the display case. How could you regret not doing something really damn stupid? And sleeping with Jake would have been the worst kind of stupid. He would have been one of those lovers who left their brand on you, who ruined you for regular mortal men you should actually want to settle down with and start a family.
The bell above the door chimed, startling her. She looked up and saw April and her mother walk in.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Her sister was usually at work at this hour.
“Living the jet-set life of a social worker.” April sighed. “My boss is making everyone take a ‘mental health’ day and now I don’t know what to do with myself.”
Priscilla’s gaze roamed over the pie rack. “Hand to God, Maggie, I get fatter every time I come in here. Just from breathing. Why couldn’t you open a frozen yogurt place instead? I hate frozen yogurt.”
“Ah, but I made a lemon meringue today,” Maggie said. “Dad’s favorite. You should take one home with you.”
Priscilla heaved one hip up on the lipstick-red, soda-shop stool behind her. “No, because I already know how it will end. I bring home a pie, your father gets one slice, and I eat the rest. Last time, I actually hid it from him.” Priscilla gave her a tragic smile. “I’d better just get a coffee.”
While Maggie made her a cup, April wandered behind the counter. She grabbed a white chocolate chip cookie without the wax paper, earning herself a swat on the hand.
“So,” April said, studying the cookie as she chewed. “Did you find any more boys to kiss that you said you didn’t want to kiss but then went ahead and kissed anyway?”
Not this again. Maggie set a cup of coffee in front of her mother and then went into the kitchen to do the dishes. April followed.
“Everyone is still talking about how smokin’ hot he was,” April said. “And that was before they found out he was worth four billion.”
“Billion? With a b?” Maggie had to stop scrubbing a pie plate just to absorb this. “Nobody with four billion dollars comes by it honestly.”
April shrugged. She broke off another piece of cookie and popped it into her mouth. “Apparently, you can see his helipad from the breakfast room window of his penthouse.”
“How do you even know these things?” Maggie tried not to remember him mentioning the plane or how sexy and disheveled he looked in the gazebo. Her insides gave a little hiccough, which she ignored by scrubbing harder.
“Mom’s gossip magazines,” April said.
Maggie glanced at Priscilla, who had a gossip magazine open on the counter. A former hairdresser, Priscilla inhaled just as much gossip as she had peroxide fumes. Sometimes when Mason and Cassidy appeared together inside those magazines, Priscilla gloated for days.
“Well, don’t get any ideas,” Maggie told April. “Jake isn’t coming back to Cuervo any time soon. And even if he did, why would I care? It was just a kiss. I’m not fifteen, you know.”
“Just a kiss, eh?” April went to the refrigerator. She opened a milk carton, sniffed it, and then poured herself a glass. “I guess that’s why you two couldn’t keep your eyes off each other all night.”
“You’ve got a wild imagination.” Maggie heard the doorbell ding. She set the pie on a pie rack to cool, untied her apron, and headed toward the front. “If you’re waiting for me to do something naughty, you’ll die of boredom.”
“That’s not quite how I remember it,” came a familiar voice.
And it wasn’t the one she’d secretly been waiting for.
It was Todd, her ex-husband. He was standing right in front of her. In her bakery. Wearing the same black suede cowboy hat he’d had on the night she met him.
Maggie felt the blood drain from her face. Everything went fuzzy except for weird, random details. Black T-shirt. Scuffed cowboy boots. Jeans. Him.
She hadn’t heard from Todd in three years. Seeing him now brought it all back, the whole painful carousel of knives.
There was a crater-sized hole inside her that had rumbled open again. That hole had swallowed her dreams, her youth, her heart. She was stronger now, a thousand times stronger, but it still seemed as though she might have lost something along the way. She’d become another divorce statistic, another “failed marriage.” The world was full of them. Try as she might to fight it, she still felt like damaged goods.
She’d loved. Trusted. And she’d been punished for being such a fool.
Now the man who’d fooled her swept his hat off as though suddenly remembering his manners. The eyes that had once made her feel beautiful, desirable, special were gazing at her with the same keen interest. Was that why her heart kept booming? Or was it because every cell in her body was screaming at her to run like hell?
“Hey, Maggie,” he said in his rumbling drawl.
Priscilla’s mouth was open, but no sound came out. Maggie couldn’t think straight, and April wouldn’t dare say a word, so all they did was stare at him in the thundering silence.
“It’s real good to see you,” he said with his signature country-boy politeness. “You look…well, you look beautiful as always.”
Priscilla seemed as though so many unsaid things were bottled up inside her, she might fly apart like a piñata at a children’s party. With visible effort to modulate her voice, she said, “What’s it been, Todd, about three years since you came to Cuervo?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’d say about three.” Strange to hear him ma’am the woman he once affectionately called “Miss Priss.” But then this whole thing was strange, including the fact that some part of her was happy to see him, even though any sensible woman would want to stab him through the heart. Just like he’d stabbed hers.
He’d slept with her best friend, Avery. Slept with her, knocked her up and then married Maggie anyway.
Avery was already pregnant when Todd was saying his vows in church and Miss Priss was dabbing her eyes in the front row. Maggie’s heart was still whole back then—not this scarred, war-torn, patched-together thing that wanted much but didn’t buy it anymore. Not that she let anyone in far enough to see.
“What are you doing here?” she heard herself say. It was another Maggie who asked it. Maybe the same Maggie who used to take people at their word.
“I’m taking a break from the rodeo circuit,” Todd said, his fingers inching around the brim of his hat. “Blew my shoulder out in Abilene.”
She remembered the risks he took when she’d sat watching him from the stands. She remembered the churned-up dirt and the horse smells and the rodeo announcer’s patter echoing across the arena. She’d been so proud of him then, her sexy cowboy husband, that she’d forgotten to watch for other women who thought he was sexy, too.
“Where’s Avery?” Priscilla asked in the crisp tone that betrayed how much more she wanted to say on that subject.
Todd looked a little stricken. His hands kept traveling around the circumference of his hat, restless like he himself was restless, always searching for the next woman or bronc to bust. “She took up with another fella, to tell you the truth. Left me and the kids high and dry about two weeks ago.”
Kids, Maggie thought with a pang. Plural. When she and Todd hadn’t managed to have even one kid.
A ribbon of envy snaked through her belly. The past was clawing at her again—the night of her wedding, how she’d found Avery, her Maid-of-Honor and best friend since kindergarten, throwing up in a bathroom stall. How she’d gathered big armfuls of her wedding gown and knelt down to help because that’s what friends did. Because friends stuck together no matter what, through breakups, weddings, or even what your best friend swore was a stomach virus but turned out to be the early stages of morning sickness.
Of course, what friends didn’t do was sleep with your fiancé since pretty much the beginning of your relationship with him.
And now Avery was on to the next guy.
Maggie had difficulty swallowing because of the pain in the back of her throat, which was where all her tears lived. They simmered there like lumps of burning coal.
But right now, what was important was acting like she didn’t care. She was good at that. Always a sharp answer, a scornful side-eye, a subtle drifting away. It seemed to her that when you couldn’t have love, you settled for power.
“You got a fine bakery here, Mags,” Todd said. “Annetta Woburn at the grocery told me where to find you. She and I agreed you’re the best cook in Raymond County.”
“A lot has changed since you left,” Maggie murmured.
Behind Todd, a small face appeared in the window. She recognized it at once—Todd and Avery’s six-year-old son, Sawyer. He struggled manfully to carry a baby wearing a pink bonnet.
Sawyer had Todd’s eyes. They were busy taking in the pies and the cookies and the café tables with the spring daisies on them. Maggie’s heart gave a sharp jab to her ribs. She felt as though she were being dragged toward the children by invisible strings. All she saw were little beings who might need her, little beings she could protect.
“Why didn’t you bring your kids in with you?” she asked Todd sharply before lifting up the hinged door in the counter. “You can’t just leave them outside like that.”
Todd looked sheepish. “I didn’t want to show you any disrespect, Mags. Sawyer’s a good boy. I knew I could depend on him to take care of his sister.”
Maggie grabbed two cookies out of the display case. “April, will you watch the store for a minute, you and Mom?”
April nodded. Priscilla seemed less shocked now and more worried. But Maggie knew she wouldn’t say anything. Priscilla might have thought about giving Todd a piece of her mind, but she’d figured out long ago that it was best to let your grown daughters handle their own business.
Maggie went outside and Todd followed. Spring sunshine gleamed on the leaves of the live oak that grew in front of her store and the oxblood lilies nodding gently in their half-barrel planter. Next to the planter was a sandwich board displaying the day’s specials.
When she set eyes on Sawyer and his baby sister, yearning moved through her. The only thing worse than wanting kids was knowing that she could never have them. She’d tried so hard with Todd. And nothing.
Sawyer wore a collared shirt the same color blue as his eyes. She could see the comb marks in his hair. He seemed very serious for a six-year-old, which only increased her yearning to protect.
“Would you like a cookie?” Maggie asked.
Sawyer looked up at his father for permission and then nodded.
Todd said, “Mind you thank Miss Maggie.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Sawyer answered in a boy’s shy voice.
Maggie put her arms out for the baby. “Here, let me.”
With touching maturity, Sawyer adjusted his sister’s lace-covered bonnet before handing her over. Maggie accepted the baby with a kind of melting. It felt as though some deep yearning inside her had been appeased, something that had lain in mute hunger for the chance to hold a child.
“Her name is Abigail,” Todd said.
Abigail sucked on her fingers and gazed thoughtfully at Maggie. She smelled of talcum powder and the irresistible freshness of new human. It didn’t matter that these children weren’t hers or that they were proof Avery’s body could do things that her body could not. Every part of her responded to their appealing smallness.
A torrent of love rushed through her, filling all the holes, the sadness, the disappointments. For a moment, these children were her children, hers and Todd’s. They were a family. As Todd gazed at them with a tender smile, she let herself pretend that life had gone so differently for them. She let herself, just for that moment, rewrite history.
“You always had a way with kids,” Todd said. “Kids and critters.”
“Your folks doing okay?” she asked on an impulse to change the subject. “I saw your cousin Rita a couple of weeks ago. She came in and ordered a birthday cake for Scooter.”
“Uncle Pete passed, but I guess you heard.”
Maggie nodded, wondering why it felt good to fall into this familiar intimacy. She settled Abigail on her hip and watched Sawyer demolish his second cookie. “I was really sorry. Remember when Uncle Pete accidentally set the barbecue on fire and had to throw it in the pool?”
Todd chuckled. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”
They started down the sidewalk, away from Priscilla and April’s prying eyes. A family of sparrows nesting in the eaves above Connie’s Consignments set up a hungry racket. Maggie saw her own Mona Lisa smile reflected in the storefront window.
“It’s great seein’ you doing so well for yourself,” Todd said with a flash of the heartbreaking dimple he usually reserved for his rodeo groupies. “I guess I said that already, huh?”
“Where are you and the kids staying?” she asked. She didn’t want to talk about her bakery. She didn’t want to talk about the last three years at all.
“My folks are putting us up. They never were too keen on Avery. Not like they were on you.”
She politely ignored that. Abigail was fussing a little because the sun had made her sleepy. Maggie laid Abigail’s head on her shoulder, feeling the beloved weight of her, heart to heart. She could see the baby’s hand curl into a tiny fist, each miniature finger so perfect it took her breath away.
Did Todd know that after their marriage blew apart, his mother had screamed at her, saying it was Maggie’s fault that Todd had left? If you’d given him what he needed, he never would’ve looked elsewhere. Only it wasn’t she who’d been too tired or too banged up from bronc busting, just cheating Todd. Maggie had actually loved the bedroom part of being married.
She shoved those memories aside. Better to think about them later when there weren’t so many people around.
They turned the corner. Todd was talking about how he and his brother Jimmy were maybe going to do some real cowboyin’ next fall. Bucky Washington was short a few hands and they were thinking about applying to drive cattle. Maggie looked down the tree-lined street. There were people standing outside the old Regal theater, well-dressed, city-looking folks, and something about the tall blond man in rolled-up shirt sleeves seemed familiar.
She drew closer, and for no reason her heart picked up speed. Suddenly, it felt as though her heart would smother her, it was beating so fast.
The man turned to look at her. The shock of seeing Jake Sutton sent a flush of adrenalin racing through her body.
What was he doing here?
Like hell she would let him think she was excited to see him. Or that everything inside her went molten when she did.
Jake looked at her and then looked at Todd. A frown crossed his face.
Only then did Maggie remember there was a baby on her chest, a little boy by her side and a bigger one walking next to her. She went from racing excitement to a sick, empty feeling in the pit of her stomach.
Nothing good ever happened when two alpha dogs met.
She knew there’d be trouble.