Page 6 of The Gingerbread Bakery
‘I wasn’t trying to mess with your head.’
They got to the end of the chairs and everyone else was drifting off to where the food had been set up along the wall. Archer had done the catering, and it smelled fantastic.
Annie turned to face Mac, her familiar glare burning into him.
‘Well, you did.’
The memory of that night was enough to kill him. They’d been so close.She’dbeen so close. Her face just a breath from his, her lipsrightthere. She’d been warm and willing in his arms, and then she’d looked up at him and it had been as though every reason she hated him came crashing back into her. She’d run from the pub like Cinderella from the damn ball.
He’d obviously been deluding himself. They’d drunk too much that night and Annie had been emotional because her friends were settling down. Letting him get so close to her had been motivated by some kind of panicked desperation on her part. But still it had been nice while it lasted.
‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. But you do look beautiful. That’s just an objective fact,’ he said with a shrug.
Annie softened slightly, her scowl becoming less scowl-y, which was the best he could hope for these days.
‘So, are you bringing a date to the wedding?’ she asked, steering the conversation away from their messy past.
‘Nah, not this time.’
Annie’s eyebrows rose in surprise. ‘Really?’
Mac shrugged. ‘I guess I forgot to find one.’
Annie’s gentle laugh was a reward. ‘Yeah, me too.’
It was Mac’s turn to be surprised. Annie seemed to love parading new guys in front of him, although he supposed he was guilty of bringing a random date or two to things, just so he didn’t have to be alone in front of her.
They’d played a lot of stupid games over the years.
‘Maybe you’ll save me a dance,’ he said.
Annie’s laugh was bigger this time as she patted him on the shoulder. ‘Not a chance, Sullivan.’
She was still laughing as she walked past him to the buffet. Mac shook his head at his own stupidity.
Not a chance was right. It was probably time he got that through his thick skull.
ChapterFour
Then
Hours after she’d sold out of cookies at the Christmas market, Annie was still trying to figure out how she’d ended up sitting across from the captain of the lacrosse team, sipping cocoa and eating French fries on a random Thursday night, four weeks before Christmas. It was not something she’d ever expected to add to her agenda.
But here she was.
With Mac.
A boy she hadn’t spoken more than a few words to over the past year, most of which were just the page numbers he was supposed to have completed for class.
They’d been sitting in awkward silence since they ordered, probably because this whole thing was weird, and they had no business hanging out together. But Mac was right. There was no one else around and she was bored.
That was why she’d agreed to this bizarre meet-up. Boredom. Not because of some ill-placed crush she’d had on Macaulay Sullivan ever since ninth grade when he’d shot up about two feet and stopped being a dick to her friends. It definitely wasn’t that, because Annie was smarter than that. Despite her steady diet of teen movies from the last thirty years, she knew that in real life the hot, popular guy did not in fact have a thing for the type A girl. It just didn’t make sense.
As a rule, Annie didn’t date jocks, especially ones that were mean to her friends. She had nothing to say to them. She didn’t particularly care about how hard anyone could throw a little ball into a net, or hit a ball with a bat, or catch a ball and run, or really do anything at all with a ball. So, even though she found Mac pleasing to look at, she’d never considered him as dating material. And she was sure he felt the same about her. Because, again, this was not a teen movie.
It was weird that they were here.
Even though itwasnice to look at him across the booth from her, all dark hair and bronzed skin. Annie happened to know, thanks to a sixth-grade ancestry project, that although Mac’s name screamed Irish, he was also half Italian. So even here in the midst of a cold, dark New England winter, Mac’s genes apparently still thought he was in the Mediterranean.
