Page 2 of Sharp Lies

I pulled my head back into the real world and set to work reorganizing the display case, which was looking a whole lot emptier now that Mr. Barker had taken his half-dozen croissants. We were definitely running short on products today. Some of the sourdough hadn’t baked correctly this morning, and I’d been selling people French bread instead, which meant we were down to about half of what we’d usually have right now. I could bake more, but this late in the day, that might mean we had to close tonight without having sold all our stock. And no one wanted day-old bread from a bakery.

Which meant...

My mom was at her other job all day, and the bakery was mine to run for the afternoon. Which meant all the decisions belonged to me.

And if we ran out of bread, I knew exactly what I’d be doing: closing early and taking the afternoon off.

My heart jumped at the thought, and I glanced through the doors to the street, wondering whether I could go out there and sell things by hand, just to move them sooner. I was about to start piling stuff onto a tray to carry around when someone came skidding to a halt right in front of the bakery.

I tipped my head, surprised. Who the hell was driving fast enough that a stop like that was even necessary? And come to that, who drove a car like that? The thing was flashy and bright red and looked fast as hell. Exactly the sort of car you’d see in the city, not here in a town all the way out in the middle of nowhere. Tourists, maybe?

I glanced at the sky, thought, and shook my head. This little town in the middle of Illinois didn’t get much in the way of tourism to start with, and right now, in the middle of the rainy season? Definitely not.

But that car belonged in Chicago, not Oakville.

When the driver stepped out, however, I knew exactly who it was. Tony McCarthy. Son of the local real estate tycoon and the man who’d come back to town thinking he was going to build a big development in the corn fields that stretched between here and Chicago. Tony’s father had grown up in Oakville and lived here part-time, but he’d never bothered us with any big development.

Tony, on the other hand, had moved home with big ideas in mind. He’d gone to high school in Chicago and then moved on to Dartmouth, and from what I’d heard, he’d made plenty of trouble at school. Lots of rumors that things had been rocky and only his father’s money had saved him. I hadn’t had anything to do with him yet, but no one had been happy when he moved to Oakville and started throwing his weight around. He wasn’t a local. He hadn’t grown up here.

And by all accounts, he didn’t fit in.

By the looks of him, I thought those accounts were right. He was tall and almost too handsome to be legal, his dark hair sweeping over his forehead in a swoop that must have taken a whole bottle of hair gel. Green eyes and a square jaw–with a dimple in his chin–completed the picture, and with those broad shoulders and narrow hips, plus the obviously expensive suit...

Yeah, the guy was good-looking enough to stop a girl in her tracks.

When he turned and walked into the bakery, I felt a chill run down my back. I didn’t want trouble in here. I’d just been planning an early afternoon.

But when Tony turned and looked at me, his mouth caught in a crooked smile, that chill turned into something a whole lot warmer. And when his eye met mine, butterflies exploded through my stomach.

“Coffee?” he asked, his voice deep and gravelly.

“Um,” I croaked. I cleared my throat, horrified at the sound, and gave him my best smile. “Of course.”

He wasn’t a native, I reminded myself. He was a troublemaker and was trying to build a big development outside of town. We didn’t like him. We wanted him to go back to Chicago.

But somewhere between turning around to hand him his coffee and the electricity that jumped up my arm when our fingers brushed, I sort of forgot about all of that, and before I knew what was happening, I was looking for him when I was out and about. Going out of my way to pass him when we were both in the market at the same time and grinning like an absolute fool whenever he came into the bakery to get coffee and a cinnamon roll. Tony flirted outrageously with me every time I saw him, acting like no one else was in the room except us and leaning close to whisper things in my ear.

And with each of his breaths rushing across my skin, I fell deeper under his spell.

When he finally asked me out about a week later, after several mornings spent talking over coffee in the bakery, I said yes without a second thought.

And only afterward, when I forced myself to consider it, did I remember that the rest of the town didn’t like him and that they thought he didn’t fit in here, with those of us who actually belonged to Oakville.

I put the thought away and went upstairs, already trying to figure out what I was going to wear and how I was going to manage through an entire dinner of conversing with Tony McCarthy, who was the son of a rich man and a graduate of an Ivy League university.

I’d graduated from high school with top marks but hadn’t gone to any university.

Still, I was thinking that if he liked me as much as he’d been saying he did, he wouldn’t mind if I didn’t know how to talk about rocket science or advanced physics. At least I hoped not.

CHAPTER 2

LILY

Four Months Later

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I FLEW THROUGH THE house, trying to get everything that I’d done that day put away and organized. I’d done the laundry but hadn’t put it away yet, and I’d unloaded the dishwasher without putting the dishes in the cupboard.