All I Ever Wanted Read online

  The man in the parka just nodded. “Yep. She’s grown into a real beauty.”

  “So, you’ve known her a long time? She grew up here? Always lived in the area?”

  “Yep. Since the day her mama ‘n’ daddy brought her home from the hospital.”

  I swallowed and uttered something probably incoherent. Couldn’t speak clearly. Couldn’t keep my eyes off her. Couldn’t make an approach.

  I hesitated for too long. Amanda—no, Samantha, or whatever the hell her name really was—had finished distributing her drinks and was now scurrying away from the town square. All I seemed to be able to do was stare after her, disoriented for the first time in a decade at least. I wanted to follow her, but my sense of direction was shot.

  The old dude must have sensed something wasn’t quite right. He patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t’cha worry, son. She’ll be back,” he promised. “She’s an Abbott, after all. She’ll be working at the café all weekend and helping run the bakery booth this afternoon during the Bake Sale. Them cupcakes are good eats. You oughta get yourself a couple. Take my word, they’re worth sampling.”

  Not exactly what I was interested in sampling.

  But I just grinned at the guy and mumbled a thanks for the suggestion. Then, finally, I headed toward my car, knowing my way back but feeling as though I’d completely lost my bearings.

  Yeah. Something about small towns.

  Secrets and drama I’d expected. Maybe even a rogue vampire.

  But Amanda? I had not expected her.

  Maybe there’d be more to interest me in this odd, middle-of-nowhere place than I’d thought.

  I read through the Winterfest program one more time before I shoved it in my pocket. Today’s events featured one that caught my eye: 3pm Bake Sale.

  Cupcakes, huh?

  Sami

  The stupid potholders were not doing their job.

  I could feel the heat of the pan on my fingers, despite their flame-resistant padding. And it was my fault. In hurrying to the oven, I’d grabbed the old potholders—the ones I’d singed on the stove the last time I was home for vacation and had been forced to cook and bake. The protective material was beginning to wear off, and it was all the more noticeable because I kept burning new things.

  Ouch!

  I dropped the smoking pan on the towel laid out on the countertop and glared at it. Seriously, I hated cupcakes.

  My mother chose this inopportune moment to walk into our industrial-sized bakery kitchen, sniffing.

  “Sami, honey? Did you burn the bottoms of the vanilla cupcakes again?”

  I sighed. As if it weren’t perfectly obvious, and she knew it.

  “Sorry, Mom. I’ll mix up another batch. I just—I thought the recipe said sixteen minutes. But I checked on them after that long and they didn’t look ready. I was going to give them another two or three minutes more, but I got distracted by the icing…” and the Austen novel I was reading, “…and, well, it turned into more like five minutes before I pulled them out.” Or six or seven. Ugh.

  My mother kissed my forehead, doing her best to hide her exasperation from me but not quite succeeding. You’d think for someone who was twenty years old, who’d grown up in a bakery, for goodness’ sake, that I’d know this stuff by now.

  But that was the suckiest part. I seemed to be the only member of my entire culinary family who couldn’t cook. It was like being born with a pair of black thumbs into a family of gardeners.

  “It’s okay, honey. We’ll just cut off the bottoms and decorate the tops really beautifully. We can sell them as ‘cupcake heads’—kind of like those ‘muffin tops’ that are all the rage now. I’ll bet if we frost them like they’re flowers, we can display them in bunches on the trays. Like edible bouquets.”

  I sighed again. This was a good idea. A very good idea. It would make my mistake look intentional and creative rather than a sign of my total idiocy. My mother excelled at coming up with solutions like these. Not that she had much of a choice. She’d spent two decades with me as her daughter.

  Fortunately, she was blessed with the family prodigy—my older brother Oliver—who had gifted baker’s hands and was like the Maharaja of Bread Making. It was endlessly taxing to be related to Mr. Perfect. And I knew his patience had to be frayed because I was his kid sister. How many times had he joked that there must’ve been a mix-up at the hospital? That some other family had gotten the real Abbott daughter, the one who could follow recipe directions without screwing it up?

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said, wishing for maybe the eight millionth time since first semester ended that school could’ve continued through the holidays and right into the start of second semester. Then I’d have some kind of logical, reasonable excuse not to have to come home and deal with this torture for a month and a half.

  Of course, summer vacations were even worse. If I didn’t love my parents (and even my genius-chef of a brother) and if I didn’t know how much they truly needed my help, I’d spend the three months sweeping floors at a pharmacy or setting up displays in a hat store or walking baby velociraptors. Anything other than this.

  I helped my mother do triage on the twenty-four vanilla cupcakes I’d nearly massacred so they’d look presentable at our booth this afternoon. They would, after all, have to hold their own at the Bake Sale alongside Mom’s perfectly crusted and crimped fruit pies, Oliver’s buttery croissants and Dad’s special-recipe brownie squares.

  By the time we were done, they did actually look kind of pretty, and I knew they’d taste good too—it was Mom’s recipe, after all. So, my secret was safe—as long as no one sifted through our kitchen’s garbage bin and found those burned bottoms we’d lopped off.

  The good news was that the worst thing that could happen today had already happened. Things could only be looking up, right?

  When one of the delivery guys brought some fresh eggs and milk to the back door, I slipped away from the kitchen to check my email in a quieter part of the bakery. Only one more week and I’d be reunited with my college friends in Cincinnati again. The friends who knew another side of me. The side that liked to write poetry, read classic English novels, and was leaning toward majoring in literature. The side that never cooked—only microwaved soup or brought home carryout. The side that danced recklessly to music of all kinds and sometimes made out backstage with a hot musician.

  Well, that last thing had only happened once. But it was memorable. And it didn’t stop with us just making out.

  Strange. I could’ve sworn I’d seen a guy today who looked like him. Like Alex. The sexy guitarist/sax player for the White Knights. He was tall, dark-haired, solidly muscular but trim, more than a little edgy, and inexplicably in the middle of our town square, which was how I knew my eyes had to be playing tricks on me.

  Alexander Hamilton wasn’t the kind of guy to just accidentally show up in Abbott Springs.

  He was a city mouse if I’d ever met one, and I’d met a few. Heck, I tried to be one when I was away at school. It was safer that way. Easier. And I’d never regretted not being completely myself around some random guy I’d just met, until after that night at the concert with Alex.

  I shoved the memories of it out of my mind. It hadn’t been him. I was practically certain. I’d have been more likely to run into him on the streets of New York City, among the millions of Manhattanites, than on the Village Hall steps in my tiny hometown.

  Which was a good thing, I reminded myself. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew enough to be reasonably sure things would never work out between us. It was better if we didn’t come face to face again.

  Even so, I clicked open the gallery on my cell phone with the pictures of Alex and his band. I’d taken most of them with my phone, but my friend Janna snapped a couple of Alex and me together from that night at the concert and emailed them to me.

  Funny, not only did I feel different when I was away at college, I looked like a slightly different person in the pictures. Someone I doubted my lovi
ng but overprotective family would approve of or even recognize.

  And Alex?

  God. I’d told him so many lies about myself that night—although unintentionally at first. He’d misheard my name in the noisy backstage area. My mistake was in not bothering to correct him later and then embellishing with other fictitious details because I’d thought it was too late to start on the right foot.

  It was too late, and I regretted it, but there was more to it than that.

  Truth was, the guy scared me. Just being around him made me want him.

  As for kissing him, touching him, and getting half-naked with him? That felt far too real for someone like me. Someone who lived in such a well-constructed web of benign deception.

  I liked having a different persona at the university than the one I had at home. Was it so wrong to want to be someone other than the Sami everyone had gotten used to and taken for granted in Abbott Springs? I’d just never expected anybody I might really fall for would only know the girl I’d made up.

  I clicked off my phone and pocketed it.

  In the bakery kitchen, I could overhear Oliver and our mutual friend Maya talking. They must have just arrived. I listened for Mom’s voice but didn’t hear it. So they were alone. Excellent! Sounded like they were packing up the trays of treats for the Bake Sale.

  At first there had been a regular burst of conversation between them, but then it got quiet. Too quiet. I tiptoed closer to investigate.

  “What are you thinking about?” I heard Maya ask my brother.

  There was a long, weird pause. “Um, what?”

  Yeah. That was Oliver at his most eloquent.

  I rolled my eyes and heard Maya, whose longstanding crush on my clueless brother was epic, more or less ask him the same question again. If the dweeb weren’t blind as a bat when it came to appreciating the sweet, smart, and wonderful person standing right in front of him, he would be kissing her senseless right now, not creating awkward silences.

  Eventually Oliver said, “Um.”

  Another beautiful sentence construction. What wit and verbosity.

  “I…was thinking about how many of my chocolate croissants you’d try to eat this year. I think it was six last time,” he remarked.

  Oh, Oliver, you idiot!

  “Ah. Okay,” Maya replied, which was way more polite than what I’d have said to him if I were in her shoes.

  But I could hear the faint strain of hurt in her voice, and I wanted to smack him for being so oblivious to Maya’s feelings of affection toward him. For being almost as oblivious to my feelings too, especially when it came to not understanding how he and I had lived two very different childhoods. One of us was exactly where he belonged. And one of us—that would be me—wasn’t quite.

  Not that I’d try to tell him this again though. He hadn’t listened to me the first hundred-thousand times. Besides, he and Maya were already gone. Off to the center of town, no doubt, to get the Bake Sale table set up.

  Soon, I was there too. With the revamped cupcakes.

  At our family’s Bake Sale booth in the Village Hall, I noticed that Oliver seemed a little out of sorts, but the table was ready. He was drinking some of the Mexican Hot Chocolate I’d left for him in a thermos and staring blankly at the people milling around inside. As I arranged the cupcake heads in all their floral glory to one side of the table, I saw he’d already set Dad’s famous brownies out front.

  I laughed. “Trying to get rid of them?”

  Oliver just grinned at me and shrugged. “What are those?” he asked, nodding at the tray I’d brought in.

  I lifted my chin. “Cupcake heads,” I said brightly. “Mom and I decorated them. Like muffin tops, but more decadent.”

  “Good idea. I like it.” He took another sip of his hot chocolate and sighed. “This stuff is like crack, by the way. I always look forward to it.”

  “At least I’m good at something,” I muttered, pushing a few strands of hair away from my face. I probably should have tied it back into a ponytail.

  My brother frowned, stood up, and crossed his arms. “Come on. Can we have one weekend where you aren’t griping about the bakery? No one expects you to be perfect. Just to help out when you’re here.”

  I pressed my lips together to keep from telling him off. Easy for him to dispense advice. No one ever hurled it in his direction, only mine. But just because he was in a pissy mood didn’t mean I had to put up with a lecture from the Croissant Wunderkind.

  “I do,” I said finally. “I help with everything. But I suck at it. And yet, Mom and Dad keep making me—”

  “No one’s making you—” he interrupted, leaning toward me and getting ready to go into full bickering mode. It was like we were preschoolers all over again, fighting about who told a story the right way. Suddenly, he pulled away from me, straightened up, and pasted a quick smile on his face. When I saw who was coming, I did too.

  I waved at our good friend. “Hey, Maya!”

  “Hey.” She stopped in front of our table, looking oddly uncomfortable. No doubt, something was upsetting her like, oh, Exhibit A: my boneheaded brother.

  But he was a given. He’d been a problem for her since junior high. She seemed more than usually worried. Nervous. Not quite her normal cheery self. If I hadn’t personally made the hot chocolate and the coffee, I’d wonder if someone had spiked the drinks with something that threw everyone into an irritated state.

  “Um, your table looks good, you guys,” she said finally.

  I was about to say thanks and maybe drag her away for a couple of minutes so I could ask her what was actually going on, but she turned toward me and shot me an anxious look.

  “Oh, Sami,” Maya said. “There was a guy asking about you near the judging station. Has he stopped by yet?”

  “A guy? Really?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Someone I didn’t know,” she replied, looking distractedly at my dense brother. “He was about Oliver’s age or a little older. Maybe just here for the festival?”

  “Huh.” I couldn’t think of anyone in our town who’d know me that a friend like Maya wouldn’t also know. Abbott Springs was too small for such ambiguities. Anybody within a few years of our ages would be someone we’d all either gone to school with, to church with, or to work with at some point during our growing-up years.

  Then again, I hadn’t been in the building long enough to thaw out. My mind was still frozen from the cold January air outside, and the synapses in my brain weren’t firing as quickly as they should have been. Something tugged at the edges of my memory. I reached for my coffee to warm up my hands and my head, took a healthy gulp, and then almost spit it out when I heard a familiar voice behind me say, “Amanda.”

  I turned around fast.

  There stood Alexander Hamilton in all of his denim and black-leather glory. Not a hallucination like I’d thought earlier in the afternoon. Real flesh and blood. And a most seriously displeased expression on his chiseled face.

  The only thing I knew for sure in that moment was that I’d been totally and completely wrong back at the bakery: There were worse things that could happen today besides just burning the bottoms of a few cupcakes.

  And from the angry glint in Alex’s gray-green eyes…much, much worse things.

  Alex

  By three o’clock, I was starting to get used to being in Mayberry.

  This worried me at first, but I figured it was just another sign of human adaptability. Like the way people the world over got used to other unnatural things—enslavement, poverty, SUVs on the road.

  Justin’s cousin’s B&B was actually kinda nice though. Like everything around here, the place was quieter than I’d expected, but the room Ginny had reserved for me was over the detached garage, so separate from the house. Meant I could play my sax or my guitar a little later into the night and hopefully not bother anyone.

  I tugged the zipper of my jacket up a few inches higher. Damn, it was cold. But I was on a mission. Nothing as mundane as chilly weat
her was going to stop me.

  Downtown Abbott Springs had begun its transition into a wonderland of outdoor commerce. I watched the action on the street in progress.

  “Yo, Kennedy,” some vendor guy selling grilled bratwurst called to the mayor’s kid. “Great football season you had! Wish we could’ve seen more of your games.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Wesley,” Kennedy said back, shoving his fists deep into his pockets and looking away. Not sure why the comment made him look so distressed, but he bought a half dozen brats from the man and then scurried away.

  “Oooh, that scarf looks marvelous on you, Darlene!” one white-haired old lady said to another, directing her to a mirror at a table packed with handmade knits so she could better admire herself.

  “I may have to take this,” Darlene agreed. “Are there matching mittens?”

  I wandered around a little more, eavesdropping on conversations. Then I saw the “Bake Sale” sign pointing to the Village Hall, so I meandered inside.

  There was a flurry of activity. Lots of people talking, buying, laughing, eating. Nothing said “community” like shared food.

  I spotted a petite brunette with longish, slightly curly hair—sort of like Amanda’s, sans the golden highlights. She was sitting with a selection of bakery items in front of her and had a “Judge” badge on. Decided she seemed competent. Organized. The type who’d know where to find the booth I was searching for amid the chaos.

  “Hey,” I said to her.

  She glanced up at me surprised. There was that scrutiny again. The cataloging. The assessment. Like almost everyone I’d seen on the streets or Abbott Springs, she knew I wasn’t from around here. “Hey,” she said back, her voice wary.

  “Looking for Aman—I mean, Samantha Abbott. Heard she had a booth somewhere nearby?”