“It’s not a hard choice.”
He had a point. She took one. “Not bad.”
His eyebrows creased. “Didn’t you make them?”
“No idea,” she admitted. “They’re leftovers from the bakery. Employees take home goodie bags when stuff doesn’t sell.”
“Quite the perk.” He finished the second cookie. “Do you get two bags as the owner?”
“One like everyone else. My dad owns the bakery. I’m just an employee.”
Garrett studied her with an intense gaze. “Not just. You run the place.”
“For now.” She bit into her cookie.
Lines formed on his forehead. He leaned forward. “You never mentioned this before. What do you mean for now?”
Oops.Taryn hadn’t meant to say that. Nor did she want to discuss it. She wiped her mouth with a napkin.
“Taryn?” His voice sharpened.
The bakery’s ownership wasn’t a secret in town. But Taryn hadn’t told anyone, including Jayden, everything because she didn’t want to jinx herself and the bakery. Superstitious, maybe? She would rather be safe than sorry with so much at stake, but a part of her wanted to tell someone to keep it from bottling up inside her. Garrett wasn’t from around here. Plus, he was an attorney. Weren’t they good at keeping secrets?
Better find out.
“Between us?” she asked.
He nodded, coming even closer to her.
Her pulse sped up. But that was likely the situation, not him. At least she hoped so.
Taryn took a breath.
“My dad was thirty when his father signed over the bakery to him. He’d only managed it for a year. I’m thirty-two, and I’ve run ours without him for three years.”
“Why is he waiting?”
A bead of moisture dripped down her glass. She wiped it away with her fingertip. “He doesn’t believe I’m capable of running the bakery on my own. Even though he’s not there every day, he reviews the books and what I’m doing.”
Garrett’s lips pressed together. “You were doing fine in December. Has he told you why he feels this way?”
“Not really. Once I took over, profits increased each month until the Summit Ridge Bakery opened in March. At first, he said I wasn’t ready to be fully in charge, which I accepted. Now, he’s implied I’m not capable.”
“Making a profit says you are.”
The fact Garrett agreed with her made her sit taller. “I thought so, too, but there must be more to it than that. If I knew what, I could address or fix it.”
“His reason might have nothing to do with you.”
“I wish I believed that was the case.” Snippets from her conversations with her dad swirled in her brain with the force of a hurricane. She shuddered, wanting to shake those words off. “He hates the changes I’ve made, which is strange because he did the same thing after he took over from his dad. He put his own touch on Lawson’s, which is all I want to do, too. At its core, the bakery is the same as it’s been for the past fifty years, but I have remodeling plans and more menu ideas to implement. But now…”
“What?”
“He’s threatened to sell the bakery.”
Garrett’s eyes darkened before he sipped his iced tea. “Do you think your dad will?”
She shrugged. “I’ve been hoping he was joking or trying to stop me making changes, but before he left on his cruise, he said the Summit Ridge people might be better suited to run Lawson’s than me.”
