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How do I get around it so nobody for sure knows my secret? Simple. I prep them at home.
They’re our bestselling item, and we’re also known for our beautiful cakes and our adorably decorated sugar cookies. And this morning is busy. We have an order for two hundred cookies for a gender reveal party—so a hundred boy and a hundred girl-themed cookies.
Cora, my colleague, and I baked the cookies two days ago, flooded the icing yesterday, and today we need to finish up the decorating by noon so they’re dry by the time they’re picked up tomorrow morning. This afternoon I need to work on ten dozen kitchen sink cookies ahead of the weekend, and I also have to decorate a birthday cake. This business is no joke, but I’m doing what I love.
Except this morning…I’m moving slower than usual.
“You okay?” Cora asks when I pick up my fifth cookie to decorate, a heavy sigh blowing out of me as Poppy walks by us.
“Yeah. I broke up with Colin last night,” I admit over the whirl of the mixer Dom is operating on the other side of the kitchen.
“You what?” Poppy and Cora squawk at the same time.
“Haven’t you been together for, like, years?” Cora asks.
I nod. “Five of them.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” Poppy laments. “Take the rest of the day off.”
“Why is she getting the day off?” Dom asks.
“I broke up with Colin, and I’m not taking the day off. We have cookies to decorate, and honestly…I’m not really all that sad about it. It was time,” I admit.
“What did he say?” Cora asks.
I press my lips together. “I may have had a few drinks before I made the call in the middle of the night, and he may have thought I was drunk dialing him since I woke him up because of time zones. But then I repeated several times that it’s over, so I think he got the message.”
Cora laughs. “Only you, Ava. I swear.”
I shrug and set another finished cookie down. “My slow speed and heavy sighs today are more about the hangover than the breakup.”
“Really?” Cora asks. “You’re not even sad?”
I shrug. “Not really. I sort of just feel free. And that tells me it’s the right thing for me.”
“Let’s take this girl out tonight!” Dom suggests.
Cora nods enthusiastically. “Yes! I heard the new players who were traded to the Aces are coming into town for a press conference, and a couple friends and I are going to that bar across the street from the practice facility so we can try to snag a baller. Anyone want to go?”
Wait…
What?
Grayson Nash might be in town tonight? And there’s a bar where he might go? And I’m single for the first time in five years?
Sign me all the way up. I’ll be first in line.
I tamper down my enthusiasm—or maybe it’s the hangover talking. “I’m in,” I say. “And Kelly will come, too.”
And then I speed my way through to the end of the day so I can get home and get ready to potentially see the boy I had the biggest crush ever on a decade ago.
Chapter 4: Grayson Nash
Nash 24 on Black and Red
“I’m Kyle Broderick with the Vegas Sun. Grayson, tell us your initial reaction to the trade.”
I nod at the reporter. “I’m thrilled to be playing for my oldest brother and with my youngest brother. This has been in the works for a while now, and I don’t know if it’ll be my last season or if I’ve got more in me, but I knew I couldn’t hang it up until I had the chance to play with my brothers.”
