Don’t get me wrong, she’s not an unsupportive momster. She buys a box of croinuts for my dad’s law office every week, but perish the thought she’d ever taste her daughter’s creations and lose her twenty percent body fat.
I exhale heavily, and despite myself, I decide to educate her on my business I’ve worked a decade perfecting. “Cronuts have been done before. They’re trademarked and take hours to make. Mine are called croinuts. They’re still a donut-croissant hybrid, but my recipe only requires twenty minutes from dough to dish. My patented recipe alone is worth a pretty penny. That, coupled with the fun concept of customers taking a number to place their order, makes Rise and Shine a fun, original idea for a bakery. Business has gone up three hundred percent since I started the number machine. On average, we sell five hundred croinuts per day. It’s fun. It’s unique. And it’s why I’m opening a second location and getting ready to launch a national franchise. My business is a big deal, Mother.” I exhale heavily, feeling like I just hammered her with my business portfolio, but the look on her face makes me realize it’s fallen on deaf ears.
“Croinuts, Cronuts. Potato, potahto,” she scoffs, waving me off like I’m talking about the weather. “Just let Nathaniel be your date to our anniversary party on Friday. He’ll look so nice in the photos, and my Rusty Hinges aqua aerobics group can finally stop asking me if you’re seeing somebody.” She leans in and lowers her voice to add, “Nathaniel’s teeth look so much better after he got those adult braces. Let me show you.”
She reaches in her purse for her phone, and I immediately back up, pulling off my bandana and shaking my hair out. I’m normally very anal about the cleanliness of my bakery and require a hair net or head wrap on my employees at all times. But my mother shoving a childhood acquaintance in my face like he’s her last great hope to be a grandmother has me losing my damn mind.
Nathaniel is the son of my parents’ best friends, and the four of them have been trying to push the two of us together since we were teenagers. When Nate went off to college on the West Coast, I thought I’d seen the last of him. But for weeks, my mother has been talking about his return to Boulder to take over his father’s CPA business, and it’s like she can hear wedding bells even though I haven’t seen the man in a decade.
“You could do a lot worse, pumpkin.” My mother attempts to shove her phone in my face again, and before I spew my anger all over her and make a scene in front of my customers, I turn on my heel and storm down the back hallway to the rear exit.
Most of my conversations with my mother go like this. She meddles and tries to matchmake me until I explode, then she leaves. My father calls and guilts me into apologizing, and the pattern starts all over when another man she thinks would be perfect for me pops up. This has repeated since the moment I was old enough to start procreating appropriately.
The warm September air hits my face as I burst into the back alley. I really wish my mother could have had more children. She could then spread out her matchmaking, or at least, I’d have someone to commiserate with. But all she focuses on these days is my love life. It’s like she has my fertility clock set on her Apple watch or something. But Nate? God, I cannot go on a date with Nate. I haven’t seen him since we were teens, and well…we parted on pretty awkward terms.
My eyes land on the dumpsters behind the door, and my temper spikes even higher. “Rachael told me Zander cleaned up back here,” I growl under my breath and shove my bandana into my pocket as I bend over to collect the overflowing garbage. Rachael is my right-hand at the bakery, and both she and Zander know very well about my policy: the back of our business looks as good as our front—alley included.
I hear the door open behind me, and without looking back, I state through clenched teeth, “Mom…I’m not looking at that picture of Nate. I don’t care how good his teeth look now.” I toss an empty cream carton into the trash that smells so putrid my stomach churns.
“Who the fuck is Nate, and do I need to kick his ass?” a deep voice asks, and my stomach twirls all over again for a very different reason. I slowly turn around to see Dean standing in the alley, looking all…Dean-like.
“What are you doing back here?” I ask, my voice still breathy with adrenaline as I take in his appearance more fully.
He smirks and props himself along the rustic brick wall, looking like a damn J. Crew model. Dean’s one of those annoying fashionable guys who manage to make the metro-style look masculine. His glossy chocolate-brown hair and perfectly trimmed beard are always flawless. He usually comes into the bakery wearing crazy tight slacks and slick blazers with a unique dress shirt underneath. But today, he’s sporting a more casual look of designer (and super-tight) jeans cuffed over expensive-looking leather boots, and a fitted button-down without a single wrinkle. He looks hot.
Damn him.
He gestures toward the bakery with a sheepish look on his face. “You looked like you were getting ready to assault a senior citizen back there.” He holds his hands up in surrender. “I don’t usually make a habit of kicking asses of women with gray hair, but I could probably handle this ‘perfect teeth guy.’”
I roll my eyes and attempt to straighten my hair because I must look like a lunatic compared to his perfectly put-together self. “That was my mother making my life miserable. It’s kind of her specialty.”
Dean winces behind his dark-framed glasses. “I have one of those mothers myself. They can be a pain sometimes.”
“To say the least,” I murmur under my breath.
Dean crosses his arms over his broad chest and narrows his cocoa eyes at me. “I’m a great listener if you want to talk about it. I don’t know if that’s something Luke Danes would do for Lorelai Gilmore, but it’s something Dean Moser does with his friends quite regularly.”
I huff out a laugh as I stare back at him, waiting for the punchline—but I see he’s serious right now, which is…surprising. “Are we close enough to commiserate about family drama?”
He tilts his head and squints his eyes at the bright sunlight overhead. “I’d say we’ve been on the friend track for a while now, so I vote yes.”
I shake my head at that notion. Dean has been coming into my bakery for years with his computer and Clark Kent glasses to do whatever the hell he does on that laptop of his. Our interactions had been pretty surface level until my franchise developer, Max, officially introduced us sometime last year. Max told me his good friend Dean was a stock market savant with a new hedge fund company, and he was looking to diversify his wealth. And because I was looking for a financial backer to help start my second bakery in Denver, Dean was the perfect person for me to get to know better.
Now, Dean Moser is officially a silent investor in Rise and Shine Bakery-Denver. And ever since we signed on the dotted line, Dean’s been happily chatting my ear off at the bakery nearly every single week. His flirting is far from silent, but I’ve watched Dean in the bakery enough to know that’s just how he communicates with his friends. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say he was easy on the eyes and our exchanges every week gave a little extra pep to my step.
Regardless of our growing friendship, business relationship, or innocent flirting, Dean’s investment is crucial. Max says once we get my second location off the ground, I’ll have the cash flow to launch my franchise plan and go national and possibly, international—a pipe dream goal.