The Gingerbread Bakery (Dream Harbor, #5)(71)

‘I don't know what you’re talking about.’

‘Annie, come on…’

‘Don't Annie come on me! I haven't seen you in eight years, Macaulay Sullivan.’

‘I tried to see you.’ He had tried. Several times over the past few years he’d stopped by her parents’ house. Conveniently, she’d never been around, and no one had known where to find her. It was like she disappeared anytime he came back to Dream Harbor. Or her friends and family were instructed to make him think she had.

Annie scoffed. ‘Look, we don’t need a big reunion moment. You’re moving back to town. That’s lovely for you, but I don’t need to interact with you, so please leave.’

‘I’m sorry. For everything.’

Annie put her hands on the counter and leaned toward him. ‘I don’t need or want your apology. We were children and it was just a silly fling between us.’

Mac swallowed hard. He understood her anger, but she couldn’t erase what happened between them. It had been extraordinary. He hadn’t found anything like it since. ‘There was nothing silly about it,’ he ground out.

Annie shrugged like none of it really mattered to her. She should have punched him in the face. It would have hurt less.

‘I guess it meant more to you than it did to me,’ she said, her words cutting him to the bone. A small part of him was glad. If she had welcomed him with open arms, he wouldn’t have trusted it.

‘You don’t mean that, Annabelle.’

‘Don’t fucking call me that.’

‘Sorry.’

She stared at him from across the counter. Those same blue eyes that had once looked at him so lovingly were staring daggers.

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’ve already forgotten about what happened between us and I don't need you coming here to my town and dredging it all back up again. So, as far as anyone’s concerned, I don’t like you, Macaulay Sullivan. I never have and I never will.’

He nodded, swallowing everything else he wanted to say to her; everything he’d never confessed. Clearly, she didn’t want to hear it. And she didn’t owe him anything. She didn’t owe him forgiveness. Not after the way he’d treated her.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I came in.’ He turned to go but looked back one more time. ‘The bakery looks really great. You did an amazing job.’ And for a brief second Annie’s expression softened, a tiny glimmer of the way she used to look at him, before she shuttered it again with a scowl.

The Annie he’d known all those years ago was gone. This Annie wasn’t his anymore. This was the Annie he’d hurt.

Now he had to figure out how to live in the same town as her and not lose his mind pining after her.

Because while Annie wasn’t his anymore, he would always be hers.











Chapter Thirty-Four





Now


About a half an hour later, they pulled up in front of an unassuming ranch-style house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a town Annie had never heard of. The mailbox was in the shape of a largemouth bass.

‘Where the hell are we?’ Mac muttered from the driver’s seat.

‘We are at the address Estelle gave me this morning—the home of her cousin Sylvia—and those two runaways better still be here,’ Annie said, hopping down from the truck.

Mac did the same and they made their way down the uncleared path to the door. Icy snow crunched beneath their boots.

There was a festive wreath on the door and a welcome mat that read, Happy Holidays! Annie found that encouraging. Someone was in there and they’d at least been around recently enough to decorate for Christmas.

She rang the bell, and they waited, crammed together on the small landing at the top of the cement stairs. Mac smelled like spiced sex appeal and mixed emotions. It was wildly distracting.

‘Nobody’s coming,’ he hissed.

‘They’ll come,’ she insisted. ‘This is where they said they would be.’ They better come. She did not have time to go searching any more small towns today. She rang the bell again.

Mac glared at the door like maybe that would make it open sooner.

Finally, it opened and revealed a very small, very old woman on the other side.

‘Hello,’ Annie said. ‘Are you Sylvia? We’re here to pick up Estelle and Dot.’

The woman blinked.

Dear God, she'd better know where they are.

‘What was that, dear?’ she said, cocking her head.

‘Estelle and Dot! Are they here?!’ Mac yelled loud enough that Annie was sure half the neighborhood knew who they were looking for. She jabbed him in the arm with her elbow. He jabbed her back while continuing to smile at the old lady.

The woman's face lit up. ‘Oh yes, they’re here. Come on in.’ She opened the door, and Annie breathed a sigh of relief before following her into the house. If Estelle hadn’t been here, she seriously didn’t know what she would have done, besides put out a missing-persons report and possibly find another woman to dress up as Nana for the wedding. Maybe Logan would never have noticed.

‘I was worried you were those terrible people that are always trying to get me to join their cult,’ Sylvia said with a cheerful smile as she led them through her house.