Page 9 of For Butter or for Worse
“King, are you okay?” Georgie’s question precedes her hand on my shoulder. Her touch is simultaneously burning hot and freezing cold. “Oh wow, you’rehot.”
“Under any other circumstances I would thank you for the compliment.” I moan, willing my legs to keep working instead of giving out beneath me, like they’re threatening to do. Whatever this is, it sucks. Probably food poisoning, but it feels worse than that. I feel like my body is trying to turn itself inside out.
“King, you need to go home.”
“Yeah,” I agree, but it’s not like the world is going to pause while I crawl my way back to my truck. And I can barely stomach the idea of driving all the way home when I can barely hold myself upright. “Can you…” I heave again, wondering how there’s anything left after the first time.
Georgie puts her arm around me. “I can help you get home, yes.”
“No.”
“What?”
“The…” I swallow and sink to the floor, tempted to lie down but knowing I’ll never get back up if I do. “The bakery. If you want the bakery, you need to go help. Right now.”
I’m vaguely aware of her face next to mine as she crouches, but I can’t keep my eyes open as my stomach continues to churn. “But what about you?” she says. “I can’t just leave you like this.”
“You’ve left me with worse.”
She breathes in sharply, and then she wraps my arm around her shoulders. “Okay, big guy. You’re coming with me.”
I’m too tired and nauseous to argue, as much as I want to. “Where?”
Grunting as she struggles to her feet without much help from me, she doesn’t say anything until we’re walking. Guess I’ll have to trust that Brody will get to the shop soon and things will be fine until he does.
“You can lie down in the back of the bakery,” Georgie says when we hit the sand. “You probably shouldn’t be alone like this. Do you need an ambulance?”
Like I can afford that? I’m running two businesses, one of which is barely staying afloat and the other which only sees significant profits during a few months of the year. I groan.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
The journey down the boardwalk is agony, and I have to stop at two different garbage cans before we finally make it to Kingston’s. Georgie smartly brings me around back, given the sheer number of elderly customers in the lobby that I can smell more than I can see. I’ve never hated floral perfume more than I do right now, and it nearly triggers another heave, though at this point there’s nothing left.
Georgie deposits me underneath the desk in the corner, giving me an apron as a pillow and a mixing bowl in case my stomach magically finds more to empty, and then she heads up front like she owns the place.
And as I curl up in a ball and hope whatever this is passes quickly, I can’t help but think about how Georgiewillown this place because I just agreed to give it to her. Worse than that, I just agreed tomarry her. And while I can’t claim to be the best of men, I have always been a man of my word.
This marriage will only last long enough for me to transfer the bakery to Georgie’s name, but no matter how short it is, it’s going to be…
I grab the mixing bowl and heave again.That. It’s going to be that.
Chapter Four
Georgie
I like Meg. Shehas a no-nonsense attitude about her, and though she was skeptical at first when I appeared out of nowhere and offered to help, she warmed up to me as soon as I showed her the photo of me and Bill from when I was a kid. She liked me even more when I moved to the kitchen and started making cookies as quickly as I could to help appease the never-ending line of senior citizens who had apparently heard about the bakery on a travel blog and each were determined to have a taste.
Being in a kitchen again, without a dozen cameras in my face, feels nice. More than nice. I feel like myself again instead of an extension of Lane, and there’s something warm and familiar about Bill’s kitchen. It’s badly out of date and needs a million upgrades, but this is where I spent my summers until I graduated high school, and I’ve missed this place.
I can already feel all my anxieties from being aimless melting away.
It’s that feeling that I cling to as thoughts about my proposal run through my head nonstop.I asked King to marry me. Which is insane on somany levels. But no matter how many times I run through my options, I can’t think of another way to make it work because the ovens need to be replaced and the floors are perpetually sticky and the point-of-sale system is so old that it takes way too long to do any transactions. If I’m going to save this bakery, I need money to fix it. Money I don’t have but the bakery does.
I don’t stop baking cookies until two teenage girls show up to relieve Meg, and she tells me I can take King home, glancing at him while she does. He’s been snoring softly for a couple of hours now and looks a whole lot better than he did when we left the surf shop. I’m assuming he got hit with food poisoning, but it came on so violently that I’m genuinely worried he has a stomach bug or something. I do need to get him home, though I have no idea where that is. Last time I was here, he lived with Bill, but I wouldn’t be surprised if his housing situation has changed along with everything else.
After taking the last batch of cookies out of the oven, I clean up my workstation and then crouch beside King, who is still a bit pale and sweaty. I nudge his shoulder. “You alive down there?”
He jolts awake, taking a few seconds to focus on me. “Georgie,” he rasps. “Where…” He looks around the bakery and then winces. “What time is it?”
