Page 38 of Coveted By the Bear

She thought she knew, but she didn’t.

The survivor between us was crying softly in her room.

Chapter Fourteen

Mira

Four o’clock came early, and I struggled out of bed. I would need to get on a better sleeping schedule. I had gone to bed early in hopes of being well-rested for my second day of work at the pie shop, but thoughts of Caleb kept me up. Kept me angry.

He was trying to hurt me, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Had I been wrong about him?

Maybe he was just like everyone else.

Perhaps it was my fault for thinking so highly of him.

I had set myself up for the disappointment, not him. My current hurt was all on me for trusting a stranger. For trusting anyone.

On and on my thoughts tumbled until, at last, I had fallen into a fitful sleep a couple of hours before I needed to wake up.

The town was hushed when I arrived at the bakery. The street lights lit the dark before dawn with somber halos of yellow and white. The air was still as the town slept. I had never seen it so quiet, so otherworldly. It felt tranquil.

One step into the bakery and the chaos that contrasted the peace outside was a shock. Opal was worse at mornings than I was—by a lot.

“Start brewing the coffee. That will be the first thing you need to do every day,” she clipped out as I shut and locked the door behind me.

She wore electric blue pajama bottom pants and a shirt that read kiss me, it’s my birthday. A tired frown peeked out from under her glasses. Opal showed me how to brew coffee and then oversaw as I baked croissants, French rolls, fresh-made bagels, and muffins. When the breakfast items were in the oven or cooling, we started lessons on the dessert items we would need for the day. Pies, cheesecakes, cookies, chocolates. Opal had a way of doing everything faster. Every item to bake, she had down to a science. She had her recipes carefully written out, but she didn’t need them. Every ingredient she told me from memory while I scoured the instructions.

I stayed in the back as the first customers ambled into the shop around eight. My idea. I didn’t want to scare off business, and Opal had a way of talking to people that left them with a smile when they walked out the door with their bag of breakfast. She was kind, but with a wicked wit. She had a foul mouth and a dirty mind, but she joked in such a manner that people wanted to figure her out, not snub her. The curiosity with her small stature was also something that seemed to bring people in. No one asked her about it, but plenty stared. Opal, as it turned out, was a professional whisper-ignorer. I watched her closely and realized she didn’t take anything that anyone said seriously because she didn’t take herself too seriously. She was impossible to figure out. She could be the most confident woman in the world or the most insecure, but I hadn’t a guess. She was self-deprecating, but in a way that begged a laugh.

“Vertically challenged coming through!” she would say when she needed to refill the coffee lids. Or when an old friend came in and joked that he would open another bakery next door, “Horace Jenkins, just because I have to stand on a stepstool to kick your ass, doesn’t mean I won’t do it!”

“Pixie high five!” she said, when she tasted the lime mayo I had whipped up. Except she didn’t wait for me to hold my hand up. Instead, she smacked the back of my locked leg and it buckled under me. I grabbed the counter to right myself, much to Opal’s cackling amusement. I smiled but didn’t turn around. She didn’t need the encouragement.

“Mira, take the register,” Opal chirped when we ran out of her special sandwich sauce in the middle of the booming lunch rush.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I whispered.

“Course it is. I’m faster at making it, and you need to learn to take the orders. Hup, hup.” Opal shooed me to the front counter and scrambled to the ingredients station.

I wiped my hands on my apron and smiled uncertainly at the next person in the long line. “Can I help you?”

“Hey, you look familiar,” the older gentleman said with a slight frown.

The clean clothes, ponytail, and makeup were probably throwing him off.

“I’d suggest the Finger Lickin’ Good,” I said, ignoring his scrutiny. Opal had been creative with naming her sandwiches.

He cleared his throat and shook his head. “No, I’ll have the Monday Funday with chips and a drink. Can you make that to go?”

I wrote his order down. “Sure thing,” I said as I punched the price into an oversized, purple rhinestone calculator and figured out the tax. Opal didn’t put much stock in computers. Instead, she had a red antique cash register that had been refurbished. I counted out his change and thanked the powers that be that I had finished my schooling. Math wasn’t my strong suit, but I was able to do this much comfortably. When I turned around to add his order to a clip on the counter, Opal gave me two thumbs up with an over animated grin on her face. I turned back to the register with a smile, which disappeared right from my face when I saw who our next customer was.

“Crazy Mira?” Becca asked, her perfect pout thinning as her eyes narrowed. She turned to the rest of the line. “Crazy Mira works here. I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t want to eat food made by a witch.” She slid her purse off the counter and sashayed out the door.

Everyone froze. And stared. And then talked in a hushed whisper. Half of the line headed for the door.

Opal cursed softly behind me. “Well, sugar tits, we knew this was coming. Help me up.”