Page 26 of Cuddling Carly

“The apartment I’m renting doesn’t really have the space or oven I need to pull this off.”

“No worries.” Eli turned to point at a building that was just beyond a currently closed swimming pool. “That’s the community center. Has a commercial kitchen right inside. Big mixer, multiple ovens. The works. And we can have the ingredients there this afternoon if you make a list of everything you’d need.”

“Again,” Stryker said, “please don’t feel pressure.”

“Yeah,” Harrison chimed in. “You might just want to enjoy your vacation.”

It wasn’t really a vacation, Carly thought. More of a place to hide out and hopefully heal. But she didn’t go into all that right now.

The baking might help with that endeavor, too. Perhaps it would be good for her to get back in the saddle, so to speak.

“I’ll do it.”

The group cheered.

“As the mayor of Mountainville,” Eli said, “I hereby award you the Halloween cupcake contract.”

“Hey, if you need some assistants, we can help,” Katie offered.

“Yeah, baking sounds fun. I’ve always wanted to learn,” Stella said.

“You want to go see the kitchen?” Eli asked. “The community center is cool. And the back room has our world-famous ball pit! Come on. We’ll show you.”

The ladies got off the swings and followed the guys into the community center.

Had they been outside just thirty seconds longer, the handsome cowboy who slowly rolled his pickup down the street would have noticed them and seen that sweet Little he searched for.

But he drove on, hoping that his hunch was right and that she was in fact somewhere in Mountainville.

Chapter Sixteen

Carly stood in the little apartment’s tiny kitchen and looked at the ingredients that rested on the countertop before her.

She’d dropped by the town’s grocery store and had purchased small quantities of stuff needed to make one batch of cupcakes. That’s all the oven in that apartment could handle, and she didn’t exactly have a lot of space to whip much up, anyway.

Which was convenient because she didn’t have the funds to buy many groceries.

But she needed to practice before she tackled things at the community center.

“Why?” she asked Mr. Pumpkin Head who sat on the counter next to a small bag of flour. “I’ve done this so much. I’m practically a professional baker.”

True, she thought, I don’t have my own bakery. But I sell cupcakes for a living.

That makes me a pro, right?

But there she was, nervous about doing what she normally loved—like a rodeo rider scared to get back in the saddle after a life-threatening fall off a wild bronc or something.

“Mr. Pumpkin Head, what’s wrong with me?”

She knew the answer to her own question, though.

Every time she thought of baking, images of what happened back in Valley Spring flooded her mind. She saw the sneers of the people she encountered on the street. She heard the words—and tone—of Mayor Sanchez as she explained the “troubling news” she and others had been made aware of.

In short, she felt the sting of the rejection all over again.

And she saw Wade’s face.

Or, what she imagined Wade’s face looked like when he saw the picture Kelly had taken of her in Little Space.