Lance let out a low moan and blinked his eyes open, choosing that moment to come to.
Jon stood, his instinct telling him something was amiss.
The woman offered him a teasing smile and sashayed forward until she stood parallel with the foot of Lance’s bed.
“Jon…?” Lance cleared his throat. “You changed blondes.”
Jon cut his idiot friend a hard look.
The lithe blonde let out an airy laugh. “I think your friend is beginning to regret informing the surgeon what dosage of anesthetic to give you, Mr. Blackburn.”
Jon snapped his glare forward. The thoughthadcrossed his mind, just for a second. “Who the hell are you?” Was she some kind of psychic? And if she was, did that mean she was working with the same group that had attacked Jenna’s bakery?
Lance pushed himself up to sit a little straighter. “The only stranger I feel like seeing in my room right now is a pretty nurse.”
The blonde made a dismissive gesture. “Your pretty nurse is on her way. Be patient. First, we need to talk.”
Jon folded his arms across his chest. “You have thirty seconds.”
She smiled. “My name is Ella, and if I’m being honest, Jon, I’m mostly here for him. I just thought it’d be best if we all met this once. For Jenna’s sake.”
“The fuck?” Lance muttered.
Jon surged forward, but after a single step, his body froze. His every muscle locked up until he couldn’t take a single breath. His mind was aware—painfullyaware—but nothing responded.
Ella stepped closer and clicked her tongue, tapping a finger on his half-extended arm. “Now, Jon, that was rude. Trying to attack me when I’m only here to help.” She gave a little push and his arm lowered back to his side. “I never said I was going tohurtJenna. I’m in the business of making people deliriously happy, in fact. But Jenna is stubborn. She and I will probably chat later, and we both know she leans on you for the ‘weird things.’ So, I let you meet me. That’s all.” She smiled as if consoling a child. “Now be a gentleman and go get me one of those coffees from that machine in the other hall? Lance and I need to talk privately. I promise I’ll leave him exactly how I found him.”
The worry, fear, and general sense of aggression fled him as his body repositioned to neutral and properly unfroze. Jon blinked. Coffee was a great idea. “Sure.”
“Wait, what?” Lance said.
Jon ignored his buddy’s confusion, angled around Ella, and slipped from the room. Lance would be fine. He didn’t have a clue who Ella was, and with every increasingly robotic step down the hall, he questioned why he wasn’t turning around. But he continued to believe that Lance would be fine when he returned. Lance was generally better at quick-bonding with people, anyway, so maybe it was best if he left them to it.
Or maybe he’d lost his mind.
He’d find out after he grabbed a couple of vending machine coffees.
The small, delusional voice of hope Jenna had clung to as she’d gotten ready that morning finally died when she turned onto the utility road that ran behind her shop and saw the ugly yellow tape crisscrossed over the door. She pulled into her usual spot on autopilot, killed the engine, and blew out a hard breath.
“Then all of that … really happened.”
A part of Jenna had expected to show up at Sweet Stop in the morning and find it fully intact and quietly waiting for her. That same part of her brain had stubbornly insisted there would be not a single sign of the devastation she’d come to wonder if her tired mind had hallucinated. A hallucination would certainly have made more sense.
Instead, as she slowly walked around her precious bakery, Jenna was faced with the hard reality. The front of her shopwas boarded up almost completely across the forward-facing wall, and even half the parking lot was taped off. No vehicles remained, but crunched and shattered fragments of glass still dotted the sidewalk like foreboding sprinkles, and dark stains of something she did not want to think too hard about marred the old asphalt.
Sweet Stop was closed, like it or not, until the sheriff’s office released the scene. It would in fact have to remain closed even after, at least until she could get the damn windows replaced and the inside cleaned up. Preferably she’d get all the visible scars removed, but if that ended up requiring repaving the parking lot … she didn’t know what she’d do.
Her throat swelled.This could kill me.
What was she supposed to do for money in the meantime?
What did she tell her employees? She wasn’t their primary source of income, thank God, but she still had an obligation to them.
Swarmed with a nauseating combination of guilt and uselessness, Jenna dug out her phone. It was obscenely early, as it always was when she arrived at the bakery, but she’d give them the most notice she could offer. If she woke someone up, she’d apologize for that, too.
Since there were only four, and she didn’t know if her heart could handle repeating the same words so many times, she threw together a group text—everyone had each other’s numbers, anyway—and sent out her message. Probably she needed to prioritize digging through her insurance paperwork as soon as she got another cup of coffee in her system, because they would have questions she had no answers to. More than likely, she’d have to make calls to get those answers. But at least the text she could do easily enough.
Sweet Stop is closed for now. I intend to re-open once I get it back, and fixed up, but there’s no way we’ll be open before week’s end. I’m sorry. I’ll keep you updated and get back to you on what moving forward looks like as soon as I know.
