Tilly: That works great. Are they local?
Kayden: They are. But they’ll be good to you.
For some reason, those simple words calmed her, making it that much easier for her to breathe.
“Is that Kayden?”
She glanced up to see Harper looking at her with a knowing smile on her face. She didn’t have a chance to respond though, because the doors to the shop opened and three guys walked in—Theo, Hendrix, and Jake. Jake smiled the second he saw her, while the other two didn’t even look her way.
“You know him?” Harper asked, voice hushed.
“I know all three of them. They work on Kayden’s SAR team and do tours in the mountains.”
Jake crossed to their table. “Hey.”
Tilly rose to greet him. “Hey, Jake. How are you?”
“Oh, you know, enjoying a rare day off. Couldn’t not give Sugar and Spice a visit. You?”
“Well, I’m always here when I have a spare moment, so if you come often on our days off, you’ll likely find me. By the way, this is my friend, Harper.”
He dipped his head at Harper. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
He looked back at Tilly, one side of his mouth lifting. “So if you’re here often, that’s more incentive for me to be here.”
Okay,thatwas definitely flirting, right? “You should come for the cupcakes and iced coffees. They’re amazing. Oh, and try the chocolate chip cookies, you won’t regret it. It was nice to see you, Jake.” She was about to sit again when he touched her arm.
“Hey, as someone who grew up in this town, I was wondering if you could show me the ropes of the Sunday market?”
Was that a date? No…just a friend showing another friend around, surely. “You want to go to the market together?”
“Yeah, if that’s okay?”
She opened and closed her mouth. “I’m not sure, Jake…”
He chuckled. “Come on, one friend helping another friend out. Please, take pity on this poor newcomer.”
Friend… “Um…okay, that sounds good.”
“Great, you’ve just made my day. If you give me your phone, I’ll put my number in and we can arrange a meet-up time.”
She lifted her phone from the table and had just handed it to him as the door to the shop opened and a young girl walked in, closely followed by Kayden.
“Uncle Kay,do you think Daddy will get me a snake when I turn nine?”
Kayden smirked at his eight-year-old niece’s question. He was taking her to Sugar and Spice to get her favorite cookie before Eastern finished at the sheriff’s station. He wasn’t a big “kid” person himself; in fact, he didn’t see himself wanting kids in the future. But he could never get sick of Avery. She was both cute and smart, two things he liked to joke that his younger sheriff brother was not.
“I don’t know. Your father has a bit of a fear of snakes.”
She frowned. “I thought he wasn’t scared of anything.”
Kayden scoffed. “He tell you that?”
“No. But he was a SEAL and everyone at school says SEALs aren’t scared of anything.”
“Everyone’s scared of something, Ave, even the biggest, toughest-looking people. But fear’s not always a bad thing.”
