The Comfort of Favorite Things (A Hope Springs Novel) by Alison Kent Read Free Book Online

had to buy out the place? Why not sit out front?”
    “The bistro tables?” she asked, and when he nodded, she said, “Those belong to Bliss.”
    “Yeah, wouldn’t want to get towed,” he said, Thea snorting at the joke as he sliced off a big bite of white cake iced with a lemon cream-cheese frosting, though he left the candied lime slice on the plate. “Wow,” he said, and sliced off another. “Just wow.”
    “Good stuff, huh?” She’d moved to the strawberry cake. It had bits and pieces of strawberries in the very pink icing.
    “Oh, man.” There was the second-best sort of orgasm going on in his mouth.
    “You always did have a sweet tooth,” she said, licking icing from the fork’s tines, and grinning. “I guess that hasn’t changed?”
    He did his best to ignore the flick of her tongue, but he felt the memory of it and had to look away. “Coming to live with Tennessee and Kaylie, and her baking dozens of brownies every day . . .” He shook his head. “It’s a wonder I don’t weigh a ton.”
    “You might before we’re done here.” She glanced over as the door opened, watching the woman at the counter greet the customer as if they’d known each other for years. Then she looked back, taking him in as she chose a bite of cake with a whipped caramel icing. “And I’ll have to join you in that wheelbarrow. This is freakishly good.”
    “I don’t know why I’ve never been in here.”
    “I have, but not often enough. For obvious reasons,” she said, going for the vanilla.
    “Desserts were one of the things I missed most while in prison,” he said, taking a bite of what he thought was Italian cream. The cake was nutty and moist and insanely good. “I mean, we’d get a cookie, or bowl of what was supposed to be banana pudding. But everything, even the scrambled eggs, tasted like chemically preserved cardboard. I guess the bread wasn’t bad. If you like the white stuff. Tear off the crust. Roll it up into a ball. Those things can hurt if they hit you right.”
    She was slow to set down her fork, slower still to pick up her coffee cup. She held it with both hands, sipped through the slot in the to-go lid. Her hands were shaking just enough that the lid was a lifesaver. “As much as I missed you after you left,” she said, looking down at the cup and not him, “I missed Indiana almost as much.”
    They’d agreed not to talk about the past. He should probably remind her of that. Problem was, he’d brought it up first. “How so?”
    She shrugged. “Indiana?” she asked, and he nodded. “We started hanging with different crowds for some reason, so we didn’t see each other as often, or really at all unless we met up somewhere. I would still call her, but after a while, if I didn’t catch her at home, she stopped calling me back. She had a really hard time with you being gone.”
    “Yeah,” he said, drawing out the word as he toyed with a maraschino cherry that had come unglued from its cake. He didn’t know what else to say.
    “I should’ve been a better friend.” She shook her head and blew out a huff. “What am I saying? I should’ve been a friend, period. I knew she needed one. I guess I figured she had truer ones than I’d ever pretended to be. But I was having a hard enough time of my own without you around, and since selfish was my middle name . . .” The sentence trailed off and she shrugged. “I suck.”
    That would’ve made him laugh if his whole gut wasn’t knotted up at the thought of what Indiana had gone through after he’d left. Tennessee had been there for her, sure. But Dakota’s sentencing had been a quick affair. He’d been guilty, and Robby’s parents had pushed hard, wanting Dakota punished to the full extent of the law. Good behavior had gotten him released after three years.
    He lifted his gaze to meet hers. “Sometimes I wonder if keeping what had happened to ourselves, you and me, Tennessee and Indiana, wasn’t a mistake,” he said, the wall