"Well, there's no need to be rude," she sniffs. "Does this mean the gentleman with the beard isn't coming in today?"

"No," I say tersely. "He is not."

Opal doesn't waste any time. As soon as I turn the sign in the front window to "closed" in the afternoon, she starts in on me.

"You know," she says, "it was a lot easier on me last week when Mr. Saint was here in the mornings."

I exhale heavily. "Not you too, Opal."

I've heard it all morning from customers now. Mostly female customers. Where's the guy with the beard? We heard about the rules. We wanted to see for ourselves. Why are the rules not on the board? Was the article wrong?

The article in the West Bend Gazette drummed up more business than we've ever had. And thanks to being in the front of the store with Opal all day, I'm behind on a cake I'm supposed to make, which means I'll have to come back here with Chloe and have her do her homework here this afternoon while I work.

I already feel guilty bringing Chloe into work and I haven't even done it yet.

"I'm an old woman." Opal clucks her tongue. "It's hard for me to do things sometimes."

"I can't believe you just tried to use that to guilt me into getting Killian back here. You're in better shape than I am."

Opal smiles. "Can't blame an old woman for trying. Now, are you going to tell me what happened, or is a text saying that he isn't coming in going to be all I get?"

I sigh as I restock a napkin holder. "Nothing happened."

"Mmm-hmm," Opal grunts as she wipes a table. "That's why you come in here today all huffy and bent out of shape."

"I am not huffy and bent out of shape," I protest.

Opal arches her eyebrow and gives me a look. "If I looked up 'huffy' in the dictionary, your picture would be right underneath it."

"I'm not letting Killian Saint waltz in here and change everything about this place." I don't even try to hide the edge in my voice. "Those rules were over the line. They were beyond inappropriate. They were rude and inconsiderate and "

"And your revenue increased because of them?" Opal asks, her voice innocent. She looks at me out of the corner of her eye from the other side of the room, where she's wiping down another table.

"That could very well have been coincidental." I shove sugar packets into a plastic container.

"There were quite a few people showing up here who had never been here before," Opal points out.

"Yeah, because they heard that we were incredibly rude here," I protest, exasperated.

"Or because it was interesting and different."

"It wasn't interesting and different. It was a gimmick."

"Seems like you shouldn't be refusing a gimmick that gets people in here."

"People in this town just love to be involved when there's anything that might be fodder for gossip. They came to rubberneck at the disaster."

"It was good publicity," Opal insists. "The Gazette was all over it. The piece they did wasn't unfavorable."

"It wasn't favorable either."

"It was publicity," Opal says. "For a few days, this place was the talk of the town."

"I don't want to be the talk of the town because I'm rude to my customers and have a hot guy working behind the counter. I want people to come here because they like the food and the coffee."

Opal turns toward me, wiping her hands on the front of her apron. "Regardless of whether you agree with his methods, his heart was in the right place."

I narrow my eyes at her. "Why are you taking up for Killian Saint?"

"I'm not taking up for him," Opal protests. "I simply think that you've been here for months now and I'm your only friend."

"You're not my only friend," I huff.

"Okay. Name another friend."

"I talk to..." I rack my brain trying to think of a person I've spent more than five minutes chatting with outside of the bakery. "I talk to..."

"Go on." Opal crosses her arms over her chest, her expression smug.

What's the name of the guy who comes in at lunchtime and has an espresso and reads the paper? "I talk to . . . Bob," I say casually, avoiding eye contact with Opal as I skirt around her and back behind the counter to clean up.

"Bob." Opal snorts. "Bob who?"

"I see him every day at lunch and we talk about books."

Opal laughs. "You mean Marston? The man who's older than I am, the one who's half deaf? He doesn't talk to you about books, honey, he nods while you talk to him because he can't hear anything you're saying."

"What?" I ask. "He always talks to me."

Opal shakes his head. "He turns his hearing aid off. Used to do it to his wife, too, God rest her soul. And on Sundays in church. That's beside the point, though. The point is that the only person you could come up with as a friend was an old man whose name you don't even know."

"Fine. I have no friends. So what? I've been busy."

"Mmm-hmm."

"I have!" I protest. "This place isn't exactly the kind of thing you just put on autopilot. I've been working. Socializing isn't my priority. Besides, I have Chloe. There's no room in my life for hanging out with the girls, even if there were any girls in this town who wanted to hang out with me."

Opal arches an eyebrow. "We both know we're not talking about hanging out with the girls."

Heat rushes to my face. It's one thing to have Killian trying to get in my pants, but another thing entirely to have Opal pushing him into my lap. "And we're not talking about my romantic life either, Opal."

"What romantic life?" she asks.

I grunt under my breath. "You think I should hire Killian Saint because I need to get laid?"

Opal purses her lips and shakes her head. "You said it, not me."

"You do think that!"

"I'm just saying, it might do you a world of good. You'd be a lot more pleasant to be around. It would relax you."

"I am pleasant to be around now!"

Opal cocks her head to the side. "Let's not kid ourselves," she says, gesturing toward the lower half of my body. "That area is probably dustier and more filled with cobwebs than my attic."

"Oh my God. A sixty-five year old woman is calling my vagina cobweb-filled?"

"I beg your pardon. I'm seventy-three and not a day younger. And yes, you should take that as a sign of just how sad your love life is, that a seventy-three year old woman has a more active sex life than you."

Opal hums to herself as she unties her apron and disappears into the kitchen.

I grumble under my breath as I wipe down the counter around the espresso machine. Opal has no idea what she's talking about. Of course, she could have a point about getting laid. Killian Saint would be the perfect man for that job, with his rough hands and his muscular Nope. I shake off the thought. Out of sight, out of mind.

Then I remember the last part of what Opal said, and I push open the door to the kitchen. "Wait a second," I call. "Who are you hooking up with that your sex life is so active?"

15.

Killian Some guys drink when they're pissed off. Some guys get into fights. Me? I build shit.

So in the past few days since Lily fired me more importantly, since I kissed her in the back of the store I built a fucking porch. Or, to be more accurate, I'm almost finished building a fucking porch. I'm in the process of putting up railing on the sides. It wraps around the front of the cabin, following the entire length, which is pretty damn impressive for a weekend of work, if I do say so myself.

That says a lot about how pissed off I am.

Or about the giant case of blue balls I have, thanks to that girl.

I definitely should let this thing with Lily go. There are a million reasons to let it go: she has baggage, I don't even fucking know her, the whole kid thing. . .

Lots of reasons.

I chug a glass of water and survey my work from the side of the porch. Maybe I should build a deck behind the house too when this is finished. That will take my mind off of things. Things like the taste of her lips when I kissed her, or the moaning sound she made, low and primal, as she melted into me.

I hear a car headed up the road, the crunch of tires on gravel and dirt. Hardly anyone comes up this far, so I pause to watch the truck come into view.

Luke climbs out of the truck, a six-pack in hand. "Thought you might need some help."

"How'd you know what I was doing?"

Luke shrugs. "Just figured you were working on the cabin. Autumn has Olivia on a play date over at June's, so I was just hanging out. You need to get a phone up here."

"I like the quiet."

"You want help or not?" Luke asks. He pops the top of one of the bottles with an opener on his key ring and passes it to me.

"If you want."

We drink our beer in silence for a while, moving around the porch as we work on the railing until Luke finally speaks as he pounds a nail into the wood. "I saw that thing in the Gazette."

I groan. "You drove all the way up here to get on me about that?"

"Nope. I mean, well, yeah, obviously. They quoted some girl who said she was going to make the coffee shop her new study spot so she could study the guy working behind the counter."

I shrug. "What can I say? I've always been the good-looking one in the family."

Luke laughs because he's the one who's always been the one women fall all over themselves for. Even back when we were teenagers, Luke had a way of picking up the popular girls in school who wanted to slum it with someone from the other side of the tracks. I've always been as far from that as you could get. People in this town were always afraid of me. And women don't ogle me.

"Are you going to tell me what the fuck the deal is with you working there?"

"Nope." I take a long drag of my beer. "And I'm not working there anymore, so there's nothing to tell."

Luke hits a few more nails into one of the railing pieces. "I went in there Saturday."

"Yeah?"

"Yep. The owner was working."

"Oh yeah?" My voice sounds less than nonchalant.

"Cute girl," Luke says.

I shrug. "Didn't really notice."

Luke laughs. "Sure you didn't. It was pretty busy in there, you know. She looked like she could use some help."

"Yeah?" I take another drag on the bottle. "I'm sure she'll hire someone."

Luke grabs another piece of lumber and, for a few minutes, the only sound is the two of us hammering. "It would probably be good for her business if that someone she hired was you."

I grunt my response. It might be good for her business, but hell if it's good for her. I'm not the kind of man she needs, some guy living up in the woods by himself in a cabin. The problem is that I have to fight with every ounce of willpower within me to stay away from her. That's not something I've ever had to do with a woman before.

Which is why I'm building a fucking porch instead. And a deck. Hell, at this rate I might even build another cabin.

"Did you come all the way up the mountain to grill me about working at the bakery?" I ask. "You're worse than the old women in this town."

Luke laughs and sips his beer. "Are you fucking with me? I wouldn't come all the way up here for something as stupid as that. I came up here to talk to you."

"Talk to me? You're not dying, are you?"

"Fuck. No, I'm not dying, thanks for your concern."

"I didn't say I hoped you were dying. I just asked if you were."

"I'm going to ask Autumn to marry me."