“You realize how insulting that sounds to someone who’s incredibly proud of how hard she’s worked to make it what it is today?”
“Didn’t mean it that way.”
I know what this is. This is him trying to find common ground. It is a peace offering.
And I’m grateful.
But it still hurts. Bean & Nugget might not be perfect, but it’s where I belong. With coffee and Grandma’s scone recipe and the history and the community and everything we can keep doing in the future.
“I’m sorry Chandler took your puzzle piece. And your scone.”
“Not your fault. And I got another scone. You might’ve been there.”
This sucks. It just does.
“What are you even doing here?” I ask.
“Café got a call from a concerned citizen who said you were headed this way and shouldn’t be alone.”
I slide a look at him.
“Zen took the call. Couldn’t even begin to tell you what they sounded like.”
The coffee aroma is teasing me.
I’m usually a straight black coffee person. Dessert coffee—anything all doctored up—is reserved for special occasions and bad days.
Today is definitely a bad day.
So I give in to temptation and pick up the mug, sniff it—definitely cinnamon and vanilla—and I sip, and I get everything.
This is good.
Better than good.
It’s sweet and creamy and just the right spicy. A little piece of joy in a dark, dreary, ugly day when the sun still had the nerve to shine.
Dammit. “Can we pretend we’re in Hawaii and you’re Duke again for just five minutes?”
His blue eyes make a slow perusal of the landscape around us, then settle back on me with more warmth than I’m expecting.
My thighs clench. And not because it’s cold.
More because all he had to do was look away, and then look back, and I swear he’s everything he was in Hawaii.
He inclines his head while Jitter keeps wagging his tail and pushing his head into Grey’s hand. “As the lady wishes.”
I sip my latte again, then I point to the far end of Main Street. “See the big log cabin?”
“City Hall?”
“It was a general store that sold mining supplies and food back in the eighteen hundreds. When the gold rush dried up here, they built around it. If you get a tour, Vicki will point out the original walls. They’re around the county clerk’s office now. So anyone who wants to get married has to get their license in our original general store.”
He slides me a look like he wants to ask if I’m talking about marriage for any particular reason, but all that comes out of his mouth is, “Fascinating.”
“The statue of Ol’ Snaggletooth in front of City Hall was put up in the 1980’s. Legend has it that he was the first man to find gold here in the Tooth, but if you go on the tour at the mine, there—” I point in the opposite direction, to the old wooden building rising out of the mountainside above the lake “—they’ll tell you that we have the largest mine to never actually find any gold, and that Snaggletooth was likely a scam artist. But he gets credit for the railroad coming through here.”
“What was his real name?”
“You’ll have to take a tour of both the mine and the railroad depot by the lake to find out all of the different people who are suspected to have been Snaggletooth himself. And some people will tell you that the real Snaggletooth was a shop owner in town who had a tooth with the same snaggle shape as the creek if you look at it from the top of Bobcat Peak behind us.”
“So you come by having nicknames for everyone here naturally.”
“Exactly.”
“Ms. Donut came in yesterday, didn’t she?”
I pause. What did I—oh. And who—oh again.
I try to hide my heating face behind a casual sip of coffee, but I don’t think he’s buying my attempt at a non-committal hmm.
He grins, and dammit, he’s still adorable when he grins.
“Stop talking about that,” I order. “You’re Duke. You’ve never been here. I’m giving you the grand tour.”
He leans back, draping his arm across the tabletop behind us in one of those moves. “Apologies. Please continue.”
As if I can just continue when I’m wondering if he likes me as much as I don’t want to like him. “That building? The A-frame on Main Street just two blocks down from City Hall? That’s the salon where my mom has worked my entire life. The building next to it, the one with the blue roof, is an ice cream shop where I had my first kiss. The building on the other side, the brown one, is a gift shop that once caused the biggest drama the Tooth has seen in years by selling taxidermy chipmunks that weren’t ethically and humanely sourced.”