Page 107 of The Gingerbread Bakery
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said with a shrug, taking a bite of chicken and then licking her fingers clean.
‘Don’t you think we deserve to be together after all this time?’
‘Well, you still haven’t formally asked me, so I’m not sure if wearetogether.’ There was that teasing smile again. He wanted to kiss it from her lips. He liked that he was allowed to now.
‘Annabelle Andrews, will you be my girlfriend?’
She tipped her head like she was thinking about it. Mac growled her name again and she threw her head back and laughed.
‘Okay, yes, I will be your girlfriend.’
He liked the sound of that a little too much for a grown man, but he’d waited for a really long time to hear it.
The kittens had apparently smelled the chicken and were mewing from beside the bed. He leaned over and scooped them up by the scruff and deposited them in the blankets. Annie picked off little bits of chicken to feed to them and they tripped over each other to get to them.
‘I think maybe it’s better it worked out this way,’ Mac said, stealing a piece of chicken for himself.
Annie raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? You think it’s better that we wasted all this time hating each other?’
‘I never hated you, Annie.’
She rolled her eyes again, but a blush worked its way up her cheeks.
‘Whatever,’ she said.
‘I think it’s better,’ Mac went on, ‘because what was going to happen between us when we were nineteen? Imean, what are the odds we would have lived happily ever after when we were so young?’
‘It does happen sometimes.’
‘Yeah, but now we have our own shit sorted out.’
Annie gave him a bemused smile. ‘You have all your shit sorted out?’
‘I like to think so,’ he said. ‘Took me a while, but I finally figured out that living here is actually really lucky, that plenty of people would jump at the chance to have my life, that my dad built a great business with loyal customers and I’m happy to have taken it over. It’s agoodlife. And you have your baking empire. You don’t need to worry about me getting in your way while you build it.’
‘I was never worried about that.’
Maybe she hadn’t been, but he had. He’d never wanted to hold her back.
She shrugged again. ‘But maybe you’re right. Maybe it is better this way, although it does still feel like we wasted a lot of time. I know a lot of that was my fault. I know you tried to apologize.’
‘The way I remember it, Ididapologize, and you told me to get the fuck out of your store.’
‘Oh, right. That’s what happened. Sorry about that.’
Mac crawled across the bed toward her. And kissed her lips. Because he could. ‘You're forgiven.’
She smiled. ‘So are you.’
He lay back in the pillows and Annie put the plate aside and joined him. The kittens promptly crawled on top of his chest, curling up together in a fuzzy heap.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Current biggest fear?’
Annie rolled to face him. ‘Probably the way the town is going to react to this little development.’
‘Yikes.’ Mac cringed at the thought. He had no desire to be the topic of town gossip, but it was a small price to pay.
‘What about you?’
