Their Sweet Haven (The Men of Evergreen Mountain #6)

1. Hannah

ONE

hannah

I love baking.

I grew up with it. Countless memories with my mother, my aunts, my grandmother, all over a hot oven, creating such delicious and sweet treats.

It’s become my life’s work, and some would say I have a dream job, being surrounded by sweets and all the joy they bring.

Except it’s still a job. And the Sweet Stoppe is still a business.

So I’m in the back, hunched over a laptop with a bunch of spreadsheets open and doing all the business expenses to make sure I don’t make any sudden bad financial decisions.

It’s not like the bakery is living on the edge. It’s always made a tidy little profit, more than enough for me to live on.

But the books are still stuff that has to be managed, and I have to decide what special recipes keep getting made, and which go back into the recipe rolodex, retired for a few years and that I may bring back later to see if tastes have changed.

A knock sounds on my door and I shoot my eyes up over the laptop. The door isn’t closed, but Lavender is just the type to be that considerate. “You got a moment, Hannah?”

“I always got a moment for you, Lavender,” I smirk.

Lavender’s a bit of an outlier when it comes to most of the folks in Evergreen Valley. She’s going around with purple - she’d call it lavender - hair and looks amazed at everything around her. Possibly because she’s not originally from here or anywhere like here. This rich city girl just wandered into my bakery one day and asked for a job, and I couldn’t think of a good reason not to hire her.

She’s been one heck of a hand in the year or so since. A lot has changed for her in that time, such as finding love, getting married, and the very, incredibly large round bump that she’s been carrying around for the past couple of months. She approaches my desk very delicately and takes a seat. “I got some bad news for you, Hannah.”

“It’s finally time to take your maternity leave?”

Lavender is slightly surprised by my words. “Uh, yes. How did you know?”

I gesture toward her abdomen.

“Oh, right. But maybe I wanted to work as much as possible. Some women do that, you know.”

“Some do. But I’d feel ashamed of myself as a boss if I let someone so pregnant work until their water broke.”

She lets out a long sigh. “I’m sorry, I don’t want to be a hassle for you.”

“You’re not a hassle. What do you think I hired Melanie for?”

“To help run the bakery?”

“So that you could take off without feeling guilty that you’re putting me in a bad spot.”

Lavender’s shoulders sink, she seems a bit relieved by my words. “Thank you, Hannah. You’re the sweetest boss I could hope for.”

“Well, I do deal in the sweet,” I say, my smirk growing.

“I think I got two weeks before I have to take off," she says.

“Take off when you need to, Lavender. But I won’t say no to any help you can give me.”

I finish off the work I need to do on the laptop and close it. The two of us get up and go out to the counter, where my new hire, Melanie, is tending to the register.

She’s just come back from college, and has that ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ phase that we all have, and I think it’s especially worse as someone who’s gone to college and comes back to a small town.

“Four dollars, sir,” she says to the man across from her.

“Oh, let me get my wallet.” The doddering old man who is my current customer was Ben, who ran the local gas station. Evergreen Valley was the kind of small town where everyone knows everyone, and there’s usually only one gas station and one Chinese restaurant; and up until recently? One bakery.

Ben paid for his muffin and took the scent in. This is his routine. He’s here at 10 am every morning. If you want to get gas without your credit card at that point? Tough cookies, Ben needed his breaks. We always made sure to have a fresh one ready for him with how punctual he is.

He takes a bite. “Oh, this is heaven. This is what gets me out of bed every day.”

“That sounds awfully depressing,” Melanie says.

I glance at her with scorn, silently telling her not to judge the customers.

Ben cradles his muffin. “Your muffins are just that good. I don’t know what I’d do without them. Thank you, Hannah.”

He takes his leave, heading out the front door, until another semi-familiar face makes his way in. This one is in a suit and about half Ben’s age. Arguably, he’s twice as pathetic, though. He clears his throat. “Hannah Lee of Hannah’s Sweet Stoppe?”

“Yes, that’s me. You know who I am, Fred. We went to high school together.”

Fred’s always rubbed me the wrong way. He’s the type of person who reminds the teacher they forgot to assign homework. Upon graduation, he went off to Smithport to get an office job, since there aren’t a lot of opportunities for a professional brown noser in Evergreen Valley.

“This is a random inspection, I come on behalf of the Smith County Health Department. I need to investigate your bakery to make sure it’s up to code for restaurants and eateries for our fair county.”

“Sure, Fred, do whatever you have to do.”

I had nothing to hide, and this wasn’t my first. Most of the regulations made sense; they wanted to make sure I was not poisoning people for a quick buck. The only thing annoying me is Fred’s sense of importance as he struts about.

Doing whatever is needed to hurry Fred out of my shop, I open the door to the back for him and leave him to go about his business.

The bell hanging above the door rings again.

And the customers keep on getting worse and worse.

“I can’t believe this is what this town has had to deal with for a bakery all this time. This is pathetic.”

Lavender and I exchange glances. We’ve been dealing with this headache of a man for a bit.

“What do you want, Henry? Are you going to buy something or will I have to ask you to leave?”

He dramatically sighs. “If I must buy something to justify my presence, then I will. Give me one of those brownies,” he says, pointing at the furthest left item in the display.

Melanie pulls it out and wraps it up in wax paper before handing it to him, the usual modus operandi when it comes to to-go orders, because even a newbie like Melanie wanted Henry to go already.

No such luck. He immediately unwraps it, and takes a bite. There’s a slight smile on his face, then he forces a frown. “This is atrocious, you call this a brownie? It tastes like raw eggs.”

I cross my arms and my expression. “I’d prefer that your criticisms make a lick of sense, Henry. Even if it was undercooked, the flavor of eggs would be overpowered by, well... everything else in there.” I didn’t even know what raw eggs tasted like on their own, to be completely honest.

“Miss Lee?” I hear from the back.

I go to the back. “What do you need, Fred?”

“Miss Lee, why is there a rotting chicken breast on your counter next to your cookie batter?”

I squint at him, and look at where he’s pointing in utter disbelief. There it was, a chicken breast, and it utterly reeked. It was filthy and dirty, like someone had just fished it out of the dumpster.

“Where did that come from?” I say, gawking at the offending poultry. I look around for paper towels and cleaning spray, wondering how you even clean up such a mess.

“Miss Lee, are you serving your customers rotten food? All of this is ludicrously unsanitary.”

“I don’t have any chicken items on my menu, Fred.”

He clicks his pen and jots something down. “No chicken items? You don’t use eggs to bake?”

“What? Yes, of course I do. Actual chicken meat and eggs are vastly different.” I scratch my head in thought. The audacity of it all did confuse me for a moment. “Even if I guess they come from the same creature?”

“Miss Lee, I’m going to have to shut this bakery down. An egregious health code violation and then lying to an inspector? That can’t stand.”

“What? Lying? Because I told you that eggs and chicken breast have different culinary purposes?”

“You lied to me, and that’s what matters.”

Fred pushes past me and walks to the front door. He cuts off a potential customer by slapping a sticker on my window. ‘Closed due to Critical Health Code Violations’.

It’s a devastating thing to see as a small business owner.

“Wow, now I know why your brownies taste so much like eggs,” Henry says as he watches it all happen. “Because you don’t bake anything right. It’s a good thing I’m here to save this town from having no decent bakery.”

The smug grin on Henry’s face as he followed Fred out the door.

Something stunk.

And not just that nasty ass chicken breast.

“Um, does this mean I’m fired?” Melanie says, sheepishly.

“No,” I say. “This is nonsense. I’m taking this right to the county seat. This is all happening way too fast, and way too conveniently for Henry there.”

Lavender raised an eyebrow, deep in thought. “Why don’t we sell something with chicken? I think we could do a really tasty chicken bake. They’d go gangbusters.”

I shake my head. “I appreciate the idea and the enthusiasm, Lavender. Really. But now? Not the time.”

She shrugs. “Sorry.”

I take off and hang up my apron, grab my car keys, and call out instructions to my employees. “Close up the shop. Put everything away. Follow the rules. Just because someone is trying to use them against us doesn’t mean they’re bad rules.”

“Will do, Miss Lee,” Melanie says, saluting me.

“Don’t do that. And it’s Hannah, as I’ve told you for the fourteenth time.”

The County seat is a bit of a hike from where I am, and I am in for a long drive. I usually wouldn’t make such a trip on a whim, but for SOME REASON, I didn’t have a bakery to run today, so it all kind of works out.