Page 51 of Knot Baked Out For This
Tomorrow, I'll rebuild my walls. Tomorrow, I'll remember why this is dangerous. Tomorrow, I'll go back to being careful and distant and safe.
But tonight, I stand in my bakery with its fixed door and rescued flowers and phantom touches from three different Alphas, and let myself imagine what it might be like to not be alone.
To be cared for without conditions.
To be worth fixing doors in the dark.
Dangerous thoughts for a Tuesday night.
But then again, everything about these three Alphas is dangerous.
The question is whether I'm brave enough—or stupid enough—to find out which kind of dangerous they really are.
CHAPTER 9
Sandwiches And Social Media Disasters
~HAZEL~
Wednesday afternoons at the bakery should come with hazard pay and a therapist on standby.
The lunch rush died twenty minutes ago, leaving me with flour in my hair, frosting under my nails, and the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from smiling at customers while your life falls apart in slow motion. I'm attacking a ball of sourdough like it personally offended my ancestors when chaos incarnate explodes through my door.
"HAZEL HOLLOWAY, YOU ABSOLUTE MENACE!"
Reverie Bell bursts into my bakery like a honey-blonde hurricane, curls bouncing with the kind of energy that suggests she's either had too much coffee or discovered nuclear fusion. She's brandishing her phone like a weapon, the screen bright with what I can only assume is my latest humiliation.
Please let it be literally anything other than?—
"You're trending!" she announces, loud enough for the entire block to hear. "Hashtag Oakridge Alphas! Hashtag Bakery Babe! Hashtag—oh my god, this one's my favorite—Hashtag GetItGirlGetThoseKnots!"
I'm going to fake my own death and move to Alaska.
"I'm not trending," I protest, punching the sourdough with perhaps excessive force. "No one trends in Oakridge. We have like three thousand people and half of them don't know what hashtags are."
"Oh honey, you're so wrong." Reverie hops onto a stool, making herself at home like she owns the place. Which, given how often she's here, she basically does. "The Oakridge Community Facebook page has exploded. Dottie James has written a three-part saga about your 'romantic entanglements.' With GIFs."
"Dottie doesn't know how to use GIFs."
"Her granddaughter helped. There's one of a swooning Victorian lady that's supposed to be you, apparently."
Kill me. Kill me now.
"And look!" Reverie shoves her phone in my face. "Someone got video of Rowan catching you at the Pumpkin Patch. You're a meme! 'Local Alpha Catches Falling Omega'—it has twelve thousand views!"
"TWELVE THOUSAND?—"
"Oh, and there's fanfiction."
"There's WHAT?"
"Just a little one-shot about you and the firefighter. Very tasteful. Mostly. Okay, chapter three gets explicit but in an artistic way?—"
"I need you to stop talking immediately."
The bell chimes, saving me from further social media mortification, and Levi Maddox strolls in carrying a crate of milk bottles like he hasn't just been written into pornographic fanfiction about my life.
"Afternoon, ladies," he says, that easy grin already in place. "Milk delivery for the prettiest baker in town."
