Page 90 of Delicious (Delicious #1)
Chapter One
Riley
T here was something about making bread that felt like a strange allegory of my life. Good bread couldn’t be rushed, it had to be allowed to take its time, and the more care you put into it, the better it turned out. It was knocked back a few times, but it always came out the other side.
You could take shortcuts, make it faster, cheaper, but it never turned out quite the same.
Making bread really did feel like the summary of my life.
Or maybe that was just the three in the fucking morning talking, and what I really needed was coffee, not to spend my time comparing the virtues of bread to my misspent youth. Because making bread had absolutely nothing to do with spending sixteen years bouncing around from job to job, trying to do anything except take life seriously.
It was only recently that I’d realised growing up didn’t have to mean taking everything seriously—but that I couldn’t coast by forever.
That and my discovery of how good making bread felt, like it was scratching the itch on my soul I’d been trying to soothe since I was fifteen.
I flicked the kettle on as I turned on all the lights and grabbed a clean apron from the pile in the far corner of the small bakery kitchen. Washing my hands in the sink, I looked at the list of jobs and reminders for this morning scrawled on the whiteboard. Someone, Kev probably, had written something about croissants, but I couldn’t make out the rest of his handwriting. I was going to have to remind him to write things in print if he wanted me to bloody well read them.
Humming to myself, I made a cup of coffee with an excess of gingerbread syrup, before I began on my list for the day, starting with pastries.
Toasty, the microbakery I’d started last year, opened at eight from Tuesday through to Saturday, supplying the small town of Swallow Hill with a selection of breads, pastries, and little sweet treats. We were only a small operation, with five members of staff in total, but that was all I’d wanted. At least until we got our feet under us.
Because I’d much rather we consistently sold out by early afternoon in a tiny premises than struggle to sell half our wares in a shop twice the size, even if the bigger one would give us a better position on the high street. I wanted to aim for quality and consistency, and I wasn’t fussed if that meant we were only a tiny enterprise.
It’d taken me long enough to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn’t going to risk losing the only thing I’d ever poured my heart and soul into.
I took a long swig of my coffee and then fetched the croissant dough the team had made yesterday afternoon and left in the fridge to rest overnight. Once rolled, shaped, and egg-washed, they’d need another two-hour proof before they were ready to go in the oven, so they were always my first port of call, followed by our pain au chocolat and fruit Danishes. Then after that, I’d be onto bread.
Luckily, being a microbakery meant I didn’t have thousands of the fuckers to make. Which was good because doing more than two hundred wouldn’t have been possible by myself, and then I’d lose my early mornings of quiet solitude in the kitchen.
Strange as it sounded, I liked getting up at half-two and walking through the streets of Swallow Hill to my secret sanctum, opening the kitchen and watching the night through the large window that looked out onto the street. At three or four, there was barely anyone around, apart from the odd delivery driver or someone heading to their morning shift.
Once or twice, I’d seen foxes walking past the window, looking into the warm light of the bakery, their noses whiffling at the scents creeping out from under the door. They’d been so funny to watch that I’d lost ten minutes just staring at them.
But that morning was different.
It was the morning I first saw him .
I’d just put the first of the trays of croissants into the proofing oven when I glanced out of the window to see a man standing on the pavement outside, looking at the bakery with soft curiosity on his face. I blinked hard and done a double take, because who the hell was wandering around Swallow Hill, a little town in the middle of the fucking Cotswolds, at four in the morning?
He was bundled up in a puffy, dark coat with a red scarf around his neck and a beanie pulled down over his ears, his hands stuffed in his coat pockets. It was hard to see much about him, because he wasn’t standing that close to the window and the streetlights were far enough apart to leave him standing in a pool of shadow.
From what I could see of his face, he didn’t look that old—maybe my age or a little younger, although I could have been way off since I’d always been rubbish at guessing these things. He had a square jaw and an aquiline nose, his lips slightly parted and the cold morning air frosting in front of him.
I didn’t mean to stare and I don’t think he had either because, as soon as he saw me looking, he stumbled backwards and shot off into the darkness like a ghost.
The whole thing didn’t leave me shaken, just confused.
I’d never seen him before and I doubted I’d ever see him again. So, I went back to work and started cutting out the laminated pain au chocolat dough into perfect rectangles and rolling them around little sticks of dark chocolate.
By the time six rolled around, when Charley turned up to help with the baking, I’d almost forgotten about him.
“Fuck me,” she said with a dramatic inhale, walking in and pulling off her coat. “I’ll never get tired of that smell.”
“That’s good, because you’re stuck here,” I said, as I retrieved the first tray of croissants from the proofing oven, putting them on a nearby bench so I could give them a second egg wash before they went into the oven.
Charley chuckled as she pulled on her apron, her green and blue hair pulled up into a tight bun on the top of her head. “You’d miss me if I wasn’t here.”
“Would I?”
“Obviously. Who else is going to keep your miserable arse company at six in the morning four days a week?”
“Someone nice?”
She snorted as she grabbed the trays of focaccia dough that I’d gotten out of the fridge a couple of hours earlier to bring up to room temperature. We let our focaccia cold ferment for seventy-two hours, which gave it a delicious, complex flavour with beautiful sour notes and the perfect bubbly crumb. “Nobody is as nice as me.”
“Says the woman having to say that,” I said, as I carefully slid some croissants into the oven, knowing the scent of butter and fresh pastry was about to flood the room. Like Charley, it was a smell I’d never get tired of. It was second only to fresh sourdough straight out of the oven.
Charley rolled her eyes as she began preparing trays with olive oil for the focaccia, which would need to proof for another two hours. It was a bread that was truly a labour of love, and the comments from our customers reflected that.
“What did Kev write on the board?” I asked as I began egg-washing another tray of croissants. “It looks like something about croissants but, apart from that, I’ve got no fucking clue.”
“Me neither,” Charley said as she scooped the fermented focaccia dough onto the trays. “He should’ve been a bloody doctor with that handwriting.”
“Well, when he comes in later, he can tell us. And we can hope it’s not important.”
“I fucking hope not,” Charley said. “Anything else going on this morning?”
I thought for a second, the image of the man on the street flashing into my mind. I still wasn’t completely convinced he’d been real, even though I’d never had random visions of people before. Maybe it’d just been a fluke—a stranger passing by on his way from here to there. Or a tourist with jet lag who thought a bit of fresh air would help him sleep.
And if he had been a ghost, then I’d have an interesting story to tell in the future.
The next morning, I’d been shoving the last of the croissants into the proofing oven when I glanced out the window to see the man standing there again. He was dressed in his thick coat and hat, the red scarf wound around his neck and pulled slightly up over his jaw, like he was trying to keep warm.
I didn’t blame him considering it was well below freezing, but why he was out in the first place still baffled me. If he had somewhere to go, wouldn’t he have kept moving?
He was stood slightly closer to the window this time, like he wanted me to notice him. Whether he was trying to attract my attention, trying to frighten me, or trying not to frighten me by making his presence known, I couldn’t say. I almost wanted to stick my head out the door and ask what he was doing, because if it’d been Charley here by herself, I wouldn’t have wanted anyone watching her.
But when he saw me frowning, he held his hands up sheepishly and backed away. The scarf slipped from around his mouth and I saw there was an awkward smile on his lips. I thought he’d tried to mouth something, but I was too far away to be able to see properly.
So I went back to my pastries and my sourdough, trying to put him out of my mind.
Until the next morning. When he appeared outside the window again with something clutched in his hand.
And when he saw me, he unfolded it and held it up for me to read: SORRY I DIDN’T MEAN TO SCARE YOU. I DON’T SLEEP.
I chuckled and shook my head as I tipped loaves of sourdough out onto a tray to be scored and baked, flour dusting my hands and making my tattoos look even more faded than they were. Which was probably for the best, because getting my knuckles tattooed at seventeen by a mate who’d barely started tattooing hadn’t been my best idea.
I wanted a way to respond to him, but he wouldn’t be able to hear me through the glass. He could see me though, so I walked over to the corner and grabbed a whiteboard marker out of the pot and the notebook we kept there for reminders, scrawling some words across it to hold up: VAMPIRE OR INSOMNIA?
The man’s eyes narrowed as he read it, and I wondered if the glare of the lights was making it harder to see. But then he burst out laughing, head tipping back and hat falling onto the icy pavement behind him to reveal a mess of fluffy dark hair that reminded me of a mullet or a badly grown out mohawk. He flailed slightly, like he’d almost overbalanced, then spun around looking for his hat as he patted the top of his head. The whole thing was comical but oddly endearing.
He stood up and smiled at me through the window as he held up two fingers. Insomnia then.
I grinned and scribbled something else on the notebook before holding it up: PROBABLY A GOOD THING. WE HAVE A LOT OF GARLIC IN HERE .
He had to squint to read it again, and I realised my handwriting had dissolved into a scrawl that was nearly as bad as Kev’s. But he still chuckled and when I met his gaze he mouthed something that looked like “good, I like garlic.”
I was almost tempted to open the bakery door so I could keep talking to him, but I wasn’t that foolish to let a total stranger in at half-four in the morning. Plus, I really needed to get back to work and make a start on the sourdough, which felt like it was watching me from the bench, reminding me of all the things I still had to do.
When I glanced back at the window, the man on the other side smiled and waved before pulling up the collar of his coat and wandering off into the darkness, his piece of paper still in hand.
I smiled to myself as I walked back to the bench and picked up a small scoring knife.
It was the first time I really hoped I’d get to see him again.