Temptation Trails (The Haven Brothers #3)

“A blip? What’s a blip? Is that like a senior moment?”

“A senior moment? I’m not even forty.”

“I know, you’re like super old.”

I rolled my eyes. Nothing like a teenager to keep you humble. “Yeah, I’m old and it was a senior moment.”

“Thought so.”

Maybe it was better that Owen assumed age was getting the best of his dad. Because the truth? That a woman I’d never met had just about dropped me to the floor with her smile? I did not need him to know that.

Because I certainly had no idea what I was going to do about it.

CHAPTER 6

Harper

My feet were killing me.

There wasn’t anything unusual about that—just the life of a baker. My day started at four in the morning and most evenings I stayed until after we closed. But it had been extra busy and Beth had gone home sick. I was so done.

I was almost finished cleaning up the kitchen, getting it ready for Horatio, who’d be in for his daily bread baking well before dawn. I’d be back early as well—tomorrow’s desserts weren’t going to bake themselves—but Horatio seemed to like doing his thing in the middle of the night.

Kind of wondered if he was a vampire or something. He was awfully pasty. But maybe that was because he worked at night and probably slept during the daylight hours.

Still. Vampire?

I wiped down the island and checked the time. Two minutes. I never closed even a minute early. Maybe I had a touch of OCD, but even on a day when I was so ready to go home, I had to leave the cupcake sign turned toward open until exactly five o’clock.

The front door opened and my heart sank a little. A customer right at closing.

I sighed. It was my fault. I could have locked the door a hundred and twenty seconds early, but did I? No, I did not.

“Hi.” I did my best to be cheerful as I came out from the kitchen. “Can I help you?”

The man was probably in his late thirties, maybe forty, with a slightly receding hairline and a scraggly beard in need of a trim. Big, block letters on his T-shirt proclaimed, True Crime All the Time.

“Yeah.” He eyed the pastry case, and when his gaze lifted to meet mine, the corners of his mouth turned up in a grin. “Oh. Hi.”

The intensity in his expression was disconcerting, like he was mentally undressing me. I stepped away from the counter to put more distance between us.

“Is there something I can get for you?”

He didn’t look at the pastry case. Instead, his eyes flicked down to my chest.

Lovely.

“Uh…” He ran a hand through his unkempt hair. “Did you bake all these?”

“Yes, I did.”

“They all look so good, I don’t know what to pick.”

“Take your time.”

“Did you know that in the nineteen seventies, a guy killed his parents and then led police on a chase that lasted four days before they finally caught him?”

His question was so out of the blue, it tripped me up. “Um, what?”