I’d really tried to forget that information, but it’d stuck in my mind. Brady, Dante had told me repeatedly, was an Aries, which was why he didn’t seem to give a single damn about my feelings, ever, unless he wanted something.
“Uh,” the stranger scratched the back of his neck. “Thank you?”
I discounted the cinnamon rolls another two dollars in the hopes that it’d make up for Dante and offered him the reader.
“You’re so welcome,” Dante said, as though he wasn’t about to become this man’s small town horror story, the one he told to all his big city friends when he explained why he could never live somewhere like this.
The stranger smiled a shy little smile at me on his way out, and I smiled and waved back because I was nothing if not a sucker for a pretty face.
“He was cute,” Dante said the moment the door swung closed behind him, turning to look at me.
“He was terrified,” I pointed out.
Dante sighed and rolled his eyes like he was auditioning for a part on a Netflix teen drama set in the 90s. “You’re never getting laid again.”
4
MILO
“What doesit mean if I’m a Virgo?”
Dawn blinked at me as I set the box of cinnamon rolls down on the counter in front of her.
“That you were born sometime between the twenty-third of August and the twenty-second of September? Which is true, you are a Virgo. I’m good, by the way, and it’s really nice to see you for the first time in three years.”
“Obviously it’s great to see you, you’re glowing, and you really are the size of a house,” I said, looking my baby sister over for, as she’d reminded me, the first time in three years.
For the first time in my life, she looked all grown up to me.
Something caught in my throat, and I forgot all about the weirdo in the bakery—and the cute baker he was clearly friends with—and rushed around the counter to wrap my arms around her.
“Are you okay?” Dawn asked as I squeezed her a little tighter than was probably necessary.
“I haven’t slept in my own bed for a week and my best friend moved to New York, which might as well be Mongolia, and also my little sister is pregnant and I haven’t seen her in three years,” I said. “And I feel a little sick, probably because caffeine is the only thing keeping me upright and I might have overdone it on the way here.”
Dawn sighed, ducked out from under my arms—which left me swaying for a second—and shoved the box of cinnamon rolls over to me.
“Soak it up with one of these,” she said. “And then take a nap.”
“Thought you needed me to help you out?” I asked, but I wasn’t about to refuse food right now. Especially not food that smelled like cinnamon and sugar and butter and the kind of love you could only get from food stalls and little hole-in-the-wall places no one knew about.
I picked one out of the box, sticky and dripping glaze on my fingers, and immediately took my phone out. This was Instagram-worthy.
“Why’s it so dark in here?” I asked while I looked around for a patch of halfway decent lighting.
“So the flowers don’t wilt,” Dawn said, already chewing on her own cinnamon roll. “Also because I get headaches if it’s too bright for too long.”
I finally found a spot by the window where the light was hitting just right, and the backdrop of colorful flowers against the pale glaze and golden cinnamon roll worked for me. I tried a couple of angles, and finally settled on holding it up with excess glaze running down my thumb.
It was a sexy pastry, it deserved a sexy photo.
I licked the glaze off my thumb and then had to bite down on my hand to stifle an embarrassing moan that Dawn would never have let me live down. No mouthgasms in front of my little sister.
But it wasgood. Not too sweet, made with real butter, smooth and rich and like a mouthful of vanilla-flavored heaven.
The first bite into the soft, fluffy, still-warm body of the roll almost made me drop my phone.
“Holy shit,” I said aloud.
