Page 11 of A Mustang River Christmas

She liked an alpha. She always had. The trouble was finding somebody that was more alpha than she was. And that was an ever-revolving door of mistakes.

“Chloe said you left it all behind. That sounds kind of ominous.”

He grinned at her. That wicked grin that had snared her the first time she’d seen him. The one that she now knew was more or less a lie. A bright and shiny lure to deflect attention from the real man. “Oh, it is,” he said.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

“Not at all.”

He started mixing together frosting, and laying out all of the candy and gingerbread tiles and panels they were going to need. Then they started discussing the isomalt sugar, and the construction methods they would use to make the window panes.

She watched in awe as he melted the sugar precisely with his thermometer, and spread thin sheets out onto a tray, and then squared them up by hand.

“We can make molds for the larger one. I won’t mess around with eyeballing.”

“But this looks perfect,” she said.

“Perfect enough for this.”

He was quiet for a moment as he began to assemble the first panel on the house. “What about you, Laney, how did you end up in Mustang River?”

“The same way many people do.”

“And what is that?”

“A bad breakup. Very bad. As in, stole my deposit money for the brick-and-mortar restaurant that I was going to open.”

“Shit. Really?”

“Yes. And I’m an idiot. I knew the guy I was buying the building from, so I sunk a bunch of money into it before the loan was finalized. So most of my savings got eaten up already. Then the loan got secured, and I needed my down payment and it was gone. We had a joint account, and so I was basically told there was nothing I could do about it, and pursuing getting it back wasn’t worth it.”

“That sounds like bullshit.”

“Yeah, it is. But we weren’t married, and there’s just... I didn’t have anything written down, I just trusted him, because we’d been together for five years.”

“Well, you should have been able to trust him.” He shook his head. “You should be able to trust your partner. I’m divorced, so there’s no claiming that I was a perfect husband or anything like that. But I didn’t leave her with nothing.”

“That’s really nice.”

“When I say I didn’t leave her with nothing, I mean she got our ranch. The house that Chloe grew up in. I just think that was right.”

“Well, he didn’t care about what was right, and... caring about it would have really hindered his ability to take me for everything I was worth. He didn’t think about me. After five years together, he didn’t think of me at all, he just thought about his own cold feet and I guess in the end he decided that was all that mattered. Finding his own comfort. I mean, he had a lot of childhood trauma and —”

“It doesn’t excuse what he did.”

“You don’t know what his trauma is.”

Pike shrugged. “I don’t have to know. Having trauma isn’t an umbrella that shields other people from your consequences. When your bullshit hurts other people you don’t just get to excuse it.”

Her heart squeezed tight. She had been hurt by it. So badly. “I worked for years for that,” she said softly. “Food trucks and pop-ups. And I finally had all these people who were interested in investing and... It just disappeared overnight. And that was when I saw an ad online for this place. That they were looking for a chef. I just figured I would take it. It’s different than what I wanted to do, but not that different. I’m able to be me. And actually a lot of the local food here is similar to what you find in the Bay Area. Probably fresher here, honestly.”

“Yeah, sometimes life just kicks your ass.”

“It does.”

Pike looked at her, and she felt herself lean toward him. She wanted a kiss. Just one.

“I’m an addict, Laney. Just so you know.”