She sighed. “I know; it’s a real problem for me. You see, I have resting smile face.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Resting . . . smile face?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. You’ve heard of resting bitch face, right? I would assume so—your picture is right next to the definition in the dictionary. Well, you see, I have resting smile face. It’s not my fault, I can’t help it. My face is just like this. People ask me for directions constantly. It’s not because I look like I know where I’m going, it’s because I look friendly.”

  “That’s probably because you are friendly,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Well, yes, but they don’t know that.”

  He rolled his eyes right back, and she laughed.

  “See?” he said. “This is why I didn’t know what your smiles meant! I didn’t know if you were smiling especially for my bakery—and, by extension, for me—or if you were smiling about something else and we just got the benefit of it. One day, you came in without a smile on your face at all, not even at the confetti cake with glazed-doughnut icing, which I knew you loved—”

  “I do love that cake,” she said.

  “And I almost ran out of the bakery after you that day to ask you what was wrong. But I thought you’d probably think I’d lost it, so I didn’t. I was worried until you came in two days later, smiling again.”

  She breathed in deeply. “Oh. I remember that day. That was . . . I had a real shitty day that day.” She’d messed something up at work, and a friend had blown her off, and it was a day when she’d already been depressed and anxious, so she’d gone into a bit of a spiral about whether she was really good at her job, or anything at all, and if she actually mattered to anyone.

  He’d noticed her that day. He’d seen that something was wrong.

  “I came to the bakery that day because I hoped it would cheer me up a little,” she said.

  “And did it?” he asked.

  She smiled at him. “It absolutely did.”

  She reached for the lemon curd doughnut and broke off a piece of it.

  “I have a question for you,” she said. She took a bite of the doughnut and sighed with joy. “God, these are good. I love lemon curd.”

  “I know you do,” he said. “So do I.” He took a piece of the doughnut too. “Ask me your question.”

  “Did you have a plan for what you were going to do here? You know, other than to give me free pastries and hope I realized that meant you were into me?”

  An embarrassed, wry look spread over his face. She enjoyed that.

  “That was pretty much the plan, yeah,” he said. “I hadn’t really thought further than, like, ‘Keep her coming back to the bakery, give her lots of baked goods.’ Nope.” He wrinkled his nose. “In retrospect, probably not the best plan?”

  She shook her head. “Not the best, nope. Especially since, you know, I thought you hated me.”

  He nodded. “Right, right, there’s that.” He leaned toward her, a tiny smile on his lips. “Okay then. What would a good plan be? You have a captive audience here.”

  This was, quite possibly, the strangest conversation she’d ever had. And that didn’t even take into account the trapped-in-a-bakery-because-of-a-natural-disaster element to it. But she was going to just go with it.

  “Hmm. Well, to start off, you could have said early on, like even on opening day, ‘Thanks for coming in,’ maybe even with a smile on your face? And I would have said, ‘Oh, the pleasure is all mine; I’m thrilled to have you in the neighborhood,’ or maybe I would have ended that with, ‘I’ve loved everything I’ve had from here; can’t wait to try more,’ depending on when you said it to me.” She stopped to think. “Then the next time, you could have said, ‘You’re Daisy, right? I’m Harris, nice to meet you,’ and I would have said, ‘I am Daisy! Nice to meet you too.’ And you would have said, ‘See you next time,’ and I would have said, ‘Yes, definitely, see you next time.’ And then, after that first time you gave me a free pastry, and I came back to try to pay for it, you could have said, ‘No need, it’s on the house,’ maybe with a little wink?” She paused and then shook her head. “No, not with a little wink. You don’t seem like a little-wink kind of guy.”

  “I’m not, no,” he said. “I’m glad you realize that already.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, better without the wink. But the next few times you gave me free pastries—or, at least, some of the times that you did it—you would make sure I saw you slipping an extra pastry in my bag. And I would say, ‘Harris, you don’t have to do that.’ And you would say, ‘But I want to,’ and I would swoon a little.”

  “You would?” He leaned a little closer. He smelled like blackberries and burnt caramel. She tried not to breathe in too obviously.

  “Yeah, I would,” she said. “What can I say? I’m an easy swooner, I can’t help it.”

  His eyes laughed at that. Why had she never noticed how big and warm and dark his eyes were?

  “Go on,” he said.

  She swallowed hard and went on. “But also you would be worried, this whole time, that you might be crossing a line, and you wouldn’t want to do that, because you wouldn’t want to make me feel like I would have to stop coming here. So you would pay attention and see if, like, I insisted on paying for the pastries, or how I reacted when you gave them to me.”

  “The last thing I’d ever want to do would be to make you feel uncomfortable,” he said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I thought you were that kind of guy.” She smiled at him, and he smiled back. She took a deep breath and went on. “And then sometime when I came in, you could drop a note in the bag with my pastries that just said, ‘Hi,’ and that you’d love to get to know me better, and if I wasn’t interested, it was no problem at all, but if I was, here was your number and I should text you.”

  He nodded slowly. “Putting the ball in your court. I like that. That’s a really great plan for what I could have done.” He put his hand on the table, so close to hers that she could feel the warmth from it. “Here’s the problem, though: those are all excellent ideas, but those are all ideas for what I could have done. I asked what a good plan would be, present tense.”

  Her face must have showed her confusion. He kept talking. “Because,” he said, “I can’t go back and change what I did in the past, you see. But what I can do is try to do something right here. Right now.”

  Oh.

  Her mind went blank. All she could do was stare at him. “I . . . um . . .”

  “I hope you have a good idea, because right now I’m sitting here, alone in my bakery with the woman of my dreams on Valentine’s Day, with a box full of pastries that I saved for her in the hope that she would come in today and they’d be waiting—”

  “You saved these pastries for me?” She probably shouldn’t have interrupted him—he’d just called her the woman of his dreams—but she couldn’t help it.

  He laughed, that low, rumbly chuckle that had been so unexpected to her when she’d first heard it less than an hour ago. Had it really been that little time since they’d been in here together? It didn’t feel like it.

  “Why did you think that, on one of our busiest days of the year, I had a box of pastries stashed away? You can’t think I do that every day as emergency prep, since you already know that I don’t know the first thing about preparing for an earthquake. And you seriously cannot think that it was just a coincidence that I made blackberry hand pies today, right after you mentioned that blackberry is your favorite. I picked and froze those blackberries last summer. I hadn’t planned to use them on Valentine’s Day, but then once you said that, I figured I had to.”

  “Oh,” she said. She had no idea what else to say.

  “I boxed up those pastries early today since I knew we’d be swamped and that we’d probably sell out early. You usually come in Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so I thought I’d see you today. At least, I hoped so.”

  “Those are the days I work from home,” she said. “I can’t believe—”

  “That I noticed?” He gave her that scornful look that she’d hated so much before today. “I notice everything about you, especially which pastries you like the best. So I put all of those in this box for you. But you didn’t come in when you usually do, and I thought you weren’t coming in at all. And I felt so stupid, especially since I actually shouldn’t even be here today. Some celebrity ordered a wedding cake from us, and I should have flown out there with the cake to supervise the last-minute decorations, but instead I sent Ella, so I could be here, just in case.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I just admitted that out loud. Anyway, I guess that was my plan, to give you some of your favorite pastries on Valentine’s Day and hope that—”

  She kissed him. He didn’t react at first, whether from surprise or unwillingness, she wasn’t sure. She started to pull away, but he wrapped his arms around her, pulled her close, and kissed her, hard. One of her hands went to the back of his neck, and one of her hands went to the front of his shirt, and she held on tight.

  She let herself go into that kiss. She forgot about the world around them; she stopped hearing the sirens and alarms outside; she forgot to be worried about her sister, who still hadn’t checked in; she forgot about everything except for his lips on hers, his arms around her, the way he made her feel, those small noises that he made.

  His lips were plump and firm, and good God, did they feel good against hers. He had remnants of sugar and lemon curd on them, and she licked them off. She felt his rumbling laugh, and he dove back in for another kiss. She ran her hand up his wide, solid chest, and he shivered. Her touch affected him that much. What an incredible turn-on.

  He pulled her off her chair and onto his lap, and she turned to face him. He laughed again and dropped kisses onto her cheeks, her hair, her lips.

  “Holy fucking shit, Daisy, you’re going to destroy me.” He buried his face in her neck, kissing her and nibbling at her skin until she cried out. He brought her face to his, and they kissed again, with their bodies intertwined and both of them breathing fast. She moved against him, and she could feel the length of him, right there, and he moaned against her mouth. That moan made her feel so powerful—she did that to him, she made him feel that way, she made him want her that badly.

  “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve dreamed of this?” he said in her ear.

  She shook her head as she looked at him.

  “So many times,” he said. “But the reality is far better than my imagination.”

  Was this really happening? Was he really saying all of this to her? He pulled her face back to his and kissed her again. The way his lips and tongue brushed against hers made her whole body shimmer. Well, that must have been the universe answering her question with a loud yes.

  She bent down to kiss him again, but right as her lips touched his, her phone buzzed in her pocket.

  No, ignore that, Daisy; this is much more important.

  But then her phone buzzed again, and again, and she jolted to attention. Right, there had just been a significant earthquake. That could be her parents or her sister, checking in or letting her know that something was wrong.

  She kissed his lips softly, then his cheek, and pulled back. “I should, um . . .”

  He nodded. “Yeah, of course.”

  She climbed off his lap and pulled her phone out of her pocket. He kept an arm around her as she sat down on the chair next to him.

  Mom: We are both okay! Lots of stuff fell down but nothing major. Check in when you can please!!!

  Dahlia: Can’t tell if any of my other texts went through or not, I’m in the bookstore, everything’s a real mess here and no power, but I’m fine and the staff is all fine. I sent everyone else home and I’m heading home soon

  Daisy burst into tears. Harris immediately pulled her close to him.

  “It’s okay, they’re all okay,” she said. “I was so worried. I tried not to be, but they’re all okay.”

  He brushed her hair out of her face and kissed her cheek. “I’m so glad,” he said.

  She leaned her head against his shoulder as she texted them back, then she scrolled through the rest of her messages. Apparently the cell towers were working again, and she’d gotten a bunch of texts in the however many minutes she and Harris had been making out like teenagers.

  Though, making out with Harris was much better than making out with people had been when she’d been an actual teenager.

  Amy: Is everybody okay??? The cats freaked out, power’s out, but I’m fine

  Kayla: Ditto to all of that. Well, except for the cats part, we don’t have cats. pretty shaken, don’t get me wrong, but ok

  Kayla: I really didn’t mean to make a “shaken” pun about an earthquake but you know, it’s true

  Daisy laughed at that as she wiped her eyes. She desperately wanted to text her friends, Guess what I’ve been doing with that hot baker while we’ve been trapped in the bakery??? But it was too risky to do that with Harris literally right next to her, so she just texted them back that she was fine and replied to a few other people who had checked in with her.

  She closed her eyes for a second and took a long, deep breath. She hadn’t realized just how scared she’d been. She looked at Harris and smiled up at him. She looked around at the bakery, where it felt like her whole life had changed in such a short time. Then her eyes widened. Oh shit. What had they been doing?

  She stood up. “I, um. Harris, I hate to say this, but—”

  He stood up, too, that frown back on his face. He took a step away from her. “I know what you’re going to say. It’s okay. Everything got out of hand, the earthquake and everything, you weren’t thinking; I get it. Don’t worry about me. No harm done; I can get over it. And please, I really don’t want you to feel awkward coming back to the bakery, truly. Let me see if I can get Julio to come help me move that sign so you can get out of here.”

  She had no idea where he was going with that whole speech until it was almost done. Then she laughed. “Did you think I regretted this? Or that I wanted to stop? Oh, God no. I was just going to say that we were sitting here, making out with me on your lap, straddling you in full view of everyone on the street.” She gestured to the big window at the front of the bakery, which, yes, was partially blocked by the sign, but only partially. “I’m glad we could give people who just went through a disaster a little show, but that’s taking food porn a little too far, don’t you think? I was going to ask if there’s a way that we can take this somewhere a little more private? My apartment is just a few blocks away, once we manage to get out of here.”

  A huge grin spread across Harris’s face, bigger than she’d ever seen.

  “Ohhhh. That’s much better than what I thought you were going to say.” He turned to look at the window and grimaced. “I hope none of my employees walked by just then. I am very glad I let them all go once we sold out.” His eyes danced at her. “I also hope no other customers were around. I don’t want to have to explain to them that they won’t get the same treatment.” He stepped closer to her. “But also, my apartment is right upstairs, if that suits you better?”

  She slid her hand into his. “Lead the way.”

  He took her to the back of the bakery, where there were two doors. He pulled keys out of his pocket and opened one of them. “The other door goes outside. This one goes upstairs.”

  He let her precede him up the stairs, and then unlocked the door to his apartment.

  “Um, sorry if it’s kind of a mess; I wasn’t expecting visitors today,” he said as he stepped back to let her enter.

  She walked inside, then burst out laughing. “I don’t think you created this mess, Harris.”

  Books, dishes, various plants, and more were strewn all across his living room and kitchen.

  He shook his head at the sight and laughed too. “At least the TV didn’t fall off the wall. Here, let me give you a tour.” He took her hand again. “There’s the kitchen, um, obviously.” They both looked at the broken dishes on the floor. “I’ll deal with that later. And then this way is the bedroom and bathroom.”

  His hand felt nice in hers. It was big, warm, strong. The skin on his palm was soft and supple, but he had small calluses on the tips of his fingers. The roughness on his thumb felt nice as it brushed back and forth against the back of her hand.

  A wave of nerves hit her as they walked toward his bedroom. Everything had been so easy, so fast, so good downstairs in the bakery. What if it wasn’t like that up here? What if that had been just fifteen minutes of magic and the magic was over? What if their chemistry disappeared, and he decided he wasn’t interested in her anymore? What if—

  She laughed out loud and let go of his hand as they walked into his bedroom. “Oh, wow, you really aren’t from California,” she said.

  He looked down at her, his eyebrows raised. “What, do real Californians only have linen sheets or something?”

  She kicked off her shoes and walked over to the head of the bed. “Not that—though I do love linen sheets very much. Look at all of these things you have hanging above your bed! No one who lives in earthquake country should hang anything above their bed. Someone must have told you that.” She climbed up onto his bed. “Three framed prints? All wooden, with glass in them? These could have killed you.”

  He walked over to her. “My grandmother gave me those.”

  She took the first print down and handed it to him. “That’s nice. But they’ve got to come down. I can’t do anything in a bed with things hanging on the wall above it. Not even on a normal day, but especially not right after an earthquake.”

  He took the second print from her. “Did you . . . um, were you . . . were we . . . going to do something in this bed?”

  She took the third print off the wall. She usually didn’t jump into bed with someone this quickly. Not because she thought there was anything wrong with it, but mostly because it usually took her a while to decide if she trusted another person with her body and her emotions. She’d tried having casual sex when she was younger, but after too much heartache, she realized that she always caught feelings. She had to give herself time to decide if someone was worth her feelings before she slept with them.

 

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