Shortbread and Shadows - Amy Lane Page 0,2

been nobody. Lately, he’d been dreaming about that kid—big gray eyes, sand-colored eyebrows arching expressively. At first glance Bartholomew appeared pale with just the slightest tan on his face and wrists, with perfect skin.

A little closer and Lachlan could make out freckles on his nose and a teeny brown mole in the corner of his mouth.

And his smile was crooked—almost physically so, because he bit his lower lip on the right side every time he let his lips quirk up too far.

Lachlan pulled his attention back to Morty with an actual groan of frustration. “Morty, I swear by all that’s holy and unholy, Bartholomew Baker is crushing on me as bad as I’m crushing on him. He’s just too shy to so much as have a conversation.”

Morty scraped back his thinning hair from his shiny scalp and blinked at Lachlan through little teeny rodent eyes. Lachlan wasn’t sure which branch of the family Morty was really from, but his mother had always told Lachlan to be nice to Cousin Morty because he was blood.

Lachlan had sometimes suspected she meant “He gave blood,” but that was immaterial.

“Well, that’s a laugh riot in a relationship,” Morty muttered. “The actual hell, Lock! How are you supposed to have a good time with someone who looks panicked and bolts every time you say ‘Good morning’!”

Breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Meditation. And Morty might live to set Lachlan’s schedule for yet another week.

“Haven’t you ever looked out across a calm lake? It’s beautiful at first. Everything’s reflected in the surface—the sky, the mountains, the trees.” Like Bartholomew’s eyes, he mooned, but he wasn’t going to say that to Morty. “But underneath that pretty surface, there are some really awesome things going on. Fish are fighting the good fight, downed airplanes, hidden treasures, and the pureness of water itself. Don’t you want to dive right in?”

“To where some mutant fish just swam out of a skeleton to nibble on my toes? No!”

“Oh my God, you’re missing the point!” No wonder the guy had two ex-wives.

“Yeah, probably,” Morty admitted, rolling his eyes. “But that doesn’t change the fact that the floor is open in fifteen minutes, and you need to finish setting up, and Mr. Wonderful still isn’t here!”

Lachlan had to check the vendors’ floor again to be sure, because Bartholomew was always at least half an hour early. He had to be. He had too much to do, including set up luscious draperies in teal green and turquoise blue with his logo in the center that he used as tablecloths, and a wooden rack that was somewhat substandard in workmanship but very clever in design in that it showcased row upon row of tidy loaves of different kinds of sweet bread without ever once allowing the soft little bricks to squash each other. He also had a rack—again, the workmanship was substandard, but the purpose was perfect—for row upon row of large wrapped cookies and blocks of shortbread, all with a sticker showcasing his business logo and a website and phone number for Shortbread and Shadows baked goods and catering.

And that alone would be a complex setup, but Bartholomew wasn’t a one-man show.

He had a smaller rack that advertised soaps and essential oils that his friends made—Jordan’s Oils and Kate’s Boudoir—and another rack that sold bright pot holders and hanging kitchen towels made by another friend—Pincushion Products. And of course, he needed to bring in his back stock, because nobody could bake like Bartholomew, and it didn’t matter how shy he was, those tiny loaves sold big.

In one of his rare moments of volubility, Bartholomew had professed that he’d thought of selling those giant jelly jars with the dry ingredients of a recipe mixed inside and the list of wet ingredients that needed to be added on the lid.

“Why don’t you?” Lachlan had asked, enchanted. When he did speak, Bartholomew’s gray eyes grew wide and luminous, and his cheeks got this excited little crescent of pink along the cheekbone.

And his voice was so much deeper than anyone expected, every single time he talked.

“Because I don’t know if it will turn out the same,” he confessed, his face going blotchy and scarlet. “When I bake, it feels like magic, right? And sometimes I throw in ingredients that I never would have thought of and call it my Magic Cookie or Magic Loaf for the day, and make that part of my recipe. I wouldn’t really have a chance to… you know, touch my