Page 6 of Crowbar

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for the help.” The toothpick rolled. “Indoor person.”

Then he was gone, the bell chiming behind him. I stood at the register with my lips slightly parted and my heart fluttering.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Biker,” I said with a dreamy sigh.

Chapter Two

Spencer

“Hang on!” I shouted from my kitchen, setting another muffin pan of strawberry cupcakes carefully on the cooling rack. Flour dusted my forearms like I’d been tossing it around instead of baking with it.

Wiping my hands on the dish towel slung over my shoulder, I navigated the obstacle course of my apartment—shoes I’d kicked off by the couch, a stack of library books I kept meaning to return, and the laundry basket I’d been constantly stepping over. After three days of getting in my way, it was now considered furniture..

My apartment was small. A studio, technically, though the landlord had called it a “junior one-bedroom” with a straight face. The kitchenette bled into the living room, which bled into the sleeping area, which was just a mattress on a platform frame pushed against the far wall. Everything I owned fit in four hundred square feet, and most of it was secondhand.

But it was mine. Every scratched surface, every drafty window, every piece of chipped paint. Mine.

The knocking came again. Impatient. Two sharp raps followed by a pause then a third, like a signature.

My hand froze on the deadbolt.

I knew that knock.

It was a sound I never thought I would hear again.

I just stood there, my hand on the knob, while feeling my home shrink around me. All of it suddenly felt like a stage I’d built for a version of myself that was about to get dismantled.

“Spence.” The voice came through the door, slightly muffled but unmistakable. “I know you’re home. I can smell your baking from the parking lot.”

Ken.

My ex-nightmare. The man who’d spent two years convincing me I was the problem and then another six months after the breakup convincing me he was the solution.

I pressed my forehead against the cool wood of the door, praying he would turn around and leave, but he never did.

“Come on, babe. Five minutes.” His voice grew soft and sweet, the one he’d learned how to weaponize against me. “I just want to talk.”

Five minutes that would end with me apologizing for something I hadn’t done and him leaving with a piece of me I couldn’t get back.

I pulled the dish towel off my shoulder and wrung it in my hands, my body remembering what happened when he didn’t get his way.

“I’m busy, Ken.”

“You’re baking.” A soft laugh through the door. “That’s not busy, that’s avoidance. You always bake when you’re stressed.”

The fucking audacity. Ken had been the reason behind my anxiety the entire time we were dating. The cupcakes were stress cupcakes. The muffins I’d made yesterday were stress muffins. The banana bread currently in the freezer contained enough stress carbs to feed a small country.

I’d been a hot mess since a certain blue-eyed biker had walked into The Cat Nap three days ago and rearranged my nervous system. I didn’t even know Crowbar, but here I was, stress baking because I couldn’t stop thinking about storm-cloud blue eyes.

Or that beard.

Those lips.

Or the quiet laugh that had made my stomach drop, then lift, then fill with something hot and needy.

I forced away the thought before I ended up baking half a dozen pies.