“Jesus, that ass would drop a ticking time-bomb in me,” Avery groaned as she came back into the room.

It lacked the usual vigor her digs at Daz held, but it wasn’t surprising since she’d just been in the bathroom for half an hour getting sick. Apparently, it was not going to be an easy road at least in the early days of this pregnancy. Morning sickness had been a real bitch to her thus far, cropping up daily, and at all hours.

“Feeling any better?”

She didn’t answer, just dropped onto one of the stools she had for when she was decorating cakes and lowering her head to the workbench.

“Have you tried the lemon thing?”

When I was carrying Owen, I miraculously stumbled onto the suggestion that the smell of lemons could help the nausea pass. It didn’t hold back the horror show every time, but the times it did was enough to be thankful for.

“It helped a bit.” Her voice was muffled into the table, but she didn’t move. “We’re going to have lemon on the menu from now until I’m done with this shit.”

Truthfully, we had lemon on the menu nearly every day as it was. It was popular. I just hoped she didn’t get too attached to using lemon to the point of filling the whole display case with it. One of the best things about working here was that people rarely got testy when they were surrounded by sweets—except dieters, but they usually just avoided the shop like the plague. I didn’t want to test if that would still be true if we had no chocolate to offer.

I’d worked a lot of different jobs over the years. My first was in high school, bagging groceries. Then, I moved on to cashier, waitressing, housecleaning, sales clerk, call center rep, administrative assistant. Some were worse than others; none were particularly great.

Working at Sugar’s Dream was the best by far.

I had watched from the sidelines as Avery had stopped stripping, then quit being Daz’s manager at the strip club the Disciples owned and he ran. I’d rooted for her in my quiet way while she got this place up and running. What had surprised me was when she’d offered me a job. It had been about a year after Joel passed, and I hadn’t worked in that time. After losing him, Daz had moved me and Owen to Hoffman and into the club’s farmhouse. He’d insisted on taking care of us, and I’d been too much of a mess to do anything but let him.

Then, Avery asked if I would come help her. She’d made it sound like she needed me, something no one but my son had made me feel in a while. Maybe she actually had, or maybe it was a ploy they came up with to try to get me moving forward.

Whatever it was, it worked.

Well, it got me out of the house and working, and in a place I actually ended up enjoying. Moving on was another issue entirely.

Avery, still face down, groaned again. I wouldn’t say it to her—not out of fear of losing my job, just because she was my friend and sometimes that meant holding certain truths in—but the hormones seemed to be making her a bit dramatic. This manifested in a lot of ways from the current display to the fact that she’d threatened Daz with castration the other night. Now, I wouldn’t have thought that last was all that out there from the way she and Daz had always goaded each other, but the fact that she’d been pointing a chef’s knife at him was extreme even for the two of them.

“Why don’t you head home?” I suggested. “I can finish off the last few things here and handle everything until close.”

That got her head up. She always had pale skin, but the green tone to it made me even more certain my offer was for the best. “You sure?”

I nodded. “I’ve got things here.”

“You’re a lifesaver.”

I watched as she lowered her head back to the bench. After a minute of loading a piping bag with frosting, I saw she’d still not so much as moved an inch.

“Do you need me to call him to come get you?”

“Mmmmmm.”

I was going to take that as a yes.

After a quick peek to make sure no customers had come in that I’d missed, I pulled out my phone to get Daz on the line.

“Hey, sis,” he greeted. Sometimes, I wanted to scream into the line that I didn’t want him to call me that. I never did, though. I never would.

“Hi. Your beloved baby-momma needs you to pick her up.”

“But she drove there.”

“Yes, and she’s been driving the porcelain express all day. You’ll be lucky if you can get her to walk out to your truck on her own.”

“The truck?” he said it like the idea of taking the truck when the weather was good enough for the biker was horrifying.

“I can guarantee you she’s not in any state to get on the back of your bike.”

“Shit. All right, I’ll be there in a few.”

He clicked off. I don’t know who taught the Disciples to talk on the phone, but none of them seemed to like to say goodbye. It was vaguely irritating at first. At this point, it just felt normal.

“He’s coming,” I told Avery.

“Nu-uh. Not once this baby’s out. Not without wrapping that fucking thing.”

I walked away. Avery and I were close, but Daz was family. I didn’t want to hear anything about “that fucking thing.”

An hour later, Avery had been picked up—literally—and carried out by Daz and I was busy piping mounds of her mocha frosting onto chocolate cupcakes. There was a station for frosting and decorating right behind the counter, a bit of a show for customers while keeping the real mess of the baking in the back. That was an area I did precious little in. I could frost with the best of them now, and I’d taken on a good bit of the bookkeeping and inventory, but I wasn’t about to go back there and bake things. Ovens and I weren’t all that good together.

No, I was better in the front, which surprised even me. From the start, I’d had no problem putting on the fake customer service smile. It was easy, predictable. The fact that the bakery actually turned out amazing stuff, so there were almost never people coming in to bitch at me over something, only made it easier.

Plastering on a smile for work had been an important step.

It hadn’t begun as a deception, necessarily. It was a habit to keep a smile on at work, even when Daz, the Disciples, or any of the club families came in. And then, I’d realized how powerful it was.

“Working here agrees with you,” Daz commented.

He was here to get me and Avery once we closed down. The three of us and Owen were going out to dinner.

“You look more like your old self,” he went on.

Did I?

I didn’t feel like my old self. I felt the same as I had for more than a year.

Empty.

My eyes flicked over to Owen, who was munching on a giant cookie even though we were about to go eat. All right, maybe I wasn’t entirely empty. I had my son, and he was my world. My little, smiling, crumb and melted-chocolate-smeared world. There just wasn’t anything else, and frankly, I wasn’t looking for there to be.

I kept the smile that he seemed happy about on my face because I wasn’t sure what to do or say.

“It’s real fuckin’ good to see, Katie.”

That was it. Just a few offhand comments and I realized something pivotal.

Everyone had been pressing me to start the process of “moving on.” I even had a shrink trying to talk me through the steps to somehow letting go of the fact that I’d lost half my world in the blink of an eye. They wanted to see me doing better.

So, I’d let them see it.

It’s funny how good you can get at faking a smile with enough practice. At this point, I doubt they could even spot the real from the deception, and that was fine with me.

I had Owen, and he was all I had in me to feel joy about anymore. And that was enough. In the hours I couldn’t just fill with him, I could work at a job I didn’t mind at all, stylishly decorating the best cupcakes in town.

While I was caught up in my task, the bell for the door chimed and startled me. Though, not nearly as much as the sight that met me when I looked up to greet whoever was coming in.

Because it was him.

Tall, lean muscled, heavily tattooed. He had black hair that nearly touched his shoulders. He seemed to always have some kind of smile on his face, even if it was just a benign grin. He also had eyes the color of melted chocolate that he kept fixated on me whenever he was close.

Liam was a tattoo artist at Sketch’s shop, and he was at Sugar’s Dream far too often.

That was in no way a judgment. He didn’t look like he was regularly in buying boxes of baked goods. Even if he did, it wouldn’t be my place to judge. No, the real reason was because of what happened when he came in.

And it started right when I made eye contact. He smiled, with a single dimple.

Too bad it was on the wrong side.

Too bad he was the wrong man.

“Kate,” he greeted. I didn’t know for sure how he’d learned my name, but it was easy enough to guess. All of the staff at Sailor’s Grave were fixtures around the Disciples’ clubhouse, same as me. It was the same reason I knew who he was.

“How can I help you today?” I returned, hiding behind the pleasant work veneer.

His smirk made it more than clear he knew what I was doing, but I didn’t care. It only mattered that he knew I was retreating if I ever had any intention of letting him catch me.

And that was not going to happen.