that he couldn’t go back to her place, or get a hotel room, but he didn’t want to have to explain his absence to a teenage girl who barely thought of him as human, much less realized he was actually just a guy with a sex drive and everything. Both of them would probably die from the humiliation of that.
“It’ll be a pretty nice place,” Finn said, and Cain was grateful his younger brother couldn’t read his mind.
“Not bad. And yes, I know that I could pay somebody to finish it. But right now I’m kind of enjoying the therapy. I spent a long time managing things. Managing a big ranch, not actually working it. Managing my marriage instead of actually working at it. I’m ready to be hands-on again. This is the life that I’m choosing to build for myself. So I guess I better build it.”
He knew that at thirty-eight his feelings of midlife angst were totally unearned, but having his wife leave had forced him into kind of a strange crisis point. One where he had started asking himself if that was it. If everything good that he was going to do was behind him.
So, he had left the ranch in Texas—the one he had spent so many years building up—walked away with a decent chunk of change, and packed his entire life up, packed his kid up, and gone to the West Coast to find... Something else to do. Something else to be. To find a way to reconnect with Violet.
So far, he’d found ranch work and little else. Violet still barely tolerated him in spite of everything he was doing to try to fix their lives, and he didn’t feel any closer to moving forward than he had back in Texas.
He was just moved.
Finn’s phone buzzed and he pulled it out of his pocket. “Hey,” he said, “can you pick up Violet tonight from work?”
“I thought Lane was doing it.”
“It’s her girls’ night thing. She forgot.”
Well, he had just been thinking that he needed to actually see where Violet worked. “Sure. Sounds good.”
“What are you going to do until then?”
“I figured I would do some work in here.”
Finn pushed his sleeves up, smiling. “Mind if I help?”
“Sure,” Cain did his best to disguise the fact that he was shocked by his brother’s offer. He wasn’t used to this. He’d been navigating life alone for so long he’d forgotten what it was like to have support. “Grab a hammer.”
* * *
ALISON STARED AT the sunken cake sitting on the kitchen countertop and frowned. Then quickly erased the frown so that Violet wouldn’t see it.
“I don’t know what happened,” Violet said, looking both perturbed and confused.
“You probably took it out too early. Though, it’s nothing a little extra icing can’t fix. And it’s my girls’ night tonight, so I think it can be of use in that environment rather than being put up for sale.”
Violet screwed up her face. “It’s ugly.”
“An ugly cake is still cake. As long as it doesn’t have raisins it’s fine.”
“Well, I didn’t put any raisins in it.”
“Excellent. Of course, I try to provide raisined items to people with taste bud defects, because we here at Pie in the Sky like to be inclusive. But not in cake. It’s just not happening in cake.”
Alison was slightly amused that her newest employee seemed to know about her raisin aversion, even if she didn’t quite have cooking times down. Violet was a good employee, but she had absolutely no experience baking. For the most part Alison had put her on at the register, which she had picked up much faster than kitchen duties. But she tried to set aside a certain amount of time every shift to give Violet a chance to get some experience with the actual baking part of the bakery.
Maybe it wasn’t as necessary to do with a teenager who had her first job as it was to do with some of the other women who came through the shop, desperately in need of work experience after years out of the workforce, but Alison was applying the same principles to Violet as she did to everyone else.
Diverse experience was important on job applications, so that was what Alison tried to provide. Experience with food service, with register work, customer service, food preparation. All of her employees left with expertise in each and every one of those things, plus a food handlers’ card for the state. It was a small thing, but it made her feel like she was doing something.
It also gave her a high turnover rate at the shop, but that was okay with her. It meant a lot of work, a lot of training, but when everything went smoothly it also meant that she could put the employees who had been there the longest on training, which gave them yet another set of skills to add to their resume.
Right now she was short on staff, and even shorter on people who had the skill level she required with the baked goods to do any training. So while she could farm out Violet’s register training, the cakes, pies and other pastries had to be done by her.
“I’ll do better next time,” Violet said, sounding determined. Which encouraged Alison, because Violet hadn’t sounded anything like determined when she had first come in looking for work. Violet was a sullen teenager of the first order. And even though she most definitely made an attempt to put on a good show for Alison, she was clearly in a full internal battle with her feelings on authority figures.
Having been a horrific teenager herself, Alison felt some level of sympathy for her. But also very little patience. But Violet seemed to react well to her brand of no-nonsense response to attitude. Alison wasn’t going to let a chip on the shoulder make her angry, she wasn’t going to get into a fight with a child, after all. But she didn’t cater to it either.
“You will do better next time,” Alison said, “because I can eat one mistake cake, but if I have to continue eating mistake cakes my jeans aren’t going to fit and then I’m going to have to buy new jeans, and that’s going to have to come out of your paycheck.”
She patted Violet on the shoulder, then walked through the double doors that led from the kitchen to behind the counter. The shop was in its late-afternoon lull. A little too close to dinner for most people to be stopping in for pieces of pie. During the summer, they often got people stopping in after dinner, whereas during the school year she got a mini rush just after elementary school let out and parents brought their kids for after-school snacks.
She decided to take the opportunity to check the freshness of her baked goods. She opened the glass-backed display case, grabbed a piece of wax paper and pressed gently on the first row of muffins, then moved on to a loaf of cinnamon chip bread.
A rush of air blew into the shop and Alison looked up just in time to see a tall, muscular man walk in through the blue door. A pang of recognition hit her in the chest before she even got a good look at him. She didn’t need a good look at him. Because just like the first time she’d seen him, in Ace’s bar, the feeling he created inside of her wasn’t logical, wasn’t cerebral. It was physical. It lived in her, and it superseded control.
For somebody who prized control it was an affront on multiple levels.
He lifted his head and confirmed what her jittering nerves already knew. That beneath that dark cowboy hat was the face of the man who
