Melodies of the Heart: A Pinewood Grove Sweet Romance (10 page)

The hard, incessant beeping of the alarm on her phone brought Kassidy out of the deep sleep she’d been enjoying. Her dreams had been happy ones – ones of kissing Levi over and over again, of him promising to come back to Pinewood Grove if even he did have to leave at some point.

And the best part was, they weren’t entirely dreams. It had happened, but during her sleep, her mind had replayed them over and over again. She got to relive telling him she loved him, and having him kiss her fingertips when the rain had let up and they’d run home together.

But that had only been a few short hours ago and she needed to get down to the bakery and get to work. Her alarm told her she was already half an hour late, and she knew she was in for trouble. She’d promised to be back early, and she’d lied about where she’d gone.

But it had all been worth it to spend such a magical night with Levi. The rain and thunder had only made it better and she didn’t care that she’d come home soaked and out of breath. It had been perfect.

Or at least nearly perfect.

He hadn’t said the words she’d longed to hear, but he’d been honest with her, at least. One day he would be able to say, “I love you,” to her, and she had to be patient and wait for it. They were not words that should be rushed or said because it was expected of him.

His kisses said more than his words needed to. Each time she remembered kissing him under the gazebo, her lips tingled and her belly fluttered. It was love, it had to be, and he would tell her that one day and they would fall into each other’s arms and be happy.

She didn’t have time to stay in that fantasy for long. Her parents would be expecting her downstairs for work, and she was already late. After she pulled on some track pants and a t-shirt, she raced downstairs and stepped into the bakery, but instead of the hum of the mixer, she heard voices.

“You need to go to the bank and get an extension,” her mother’s voice filled the bakery.

“They turned us down when we were there a week ago,” her dad shot back, his voice loaded with deep anger and resentment. “They aren’t going to change their minds now.”

“But we can’t pay the bill right now,” her mother said, and Kassidy’s joy turned sour in her mouth. She’d been so occupied with her feelings about Levi that she’d nearly forgotten just how slow the bakery had been lately.

“What about the cake for the Miller wedding?” her dad was asking. “They put the deposit on it three days ago. That should cover something.”

“Yes,” her mother said. “It paid the electricity bill. Now we need to make a payment on the loan.”

What loan?
Kassidy wondered to herself. They’d never mentioned it to her. Her parents always made a point to tell her not to go into debt or take loans. They owned the building the store was in, along with the apartment upstairs, which was more debt they were avoiding, but now they had a loan and worse, they couldn’t pay it.

“Well, you can take it out of the savings account,” her dad said.

“What savings account?” her mother said, her voice strained and thin. “We emptied that six months ago.”

Six months?
Kassidy fretted. It was worse than she’d imagined.

“Well we need to make more money,” her dad said, though he didn’t offer a way to do that.

“What do you want me to do?” her mother shot back. “Give baskets of bread to Kassidy and have her go around selling them door to door?”

“You know she won’t do that,” her dad argued. “She doesn’t care about this place anymore.”

“Yes she does,” her mother came to her defence.

“You’re blind,” her dad told her. “She isn’t going to want to take over this place and its lack of business now that she’s dating some rock star. She’ll be too busy taking off to La-La Land with him to run this place. Maybe we should... God, maybe we should throw in the towel.”

“It’s just a fling,” her mother said, and that hurt just as bad as what her dad had said. “It’s normal for a girl her age. Just you wait, that boy will go back to Los Angeles and she’ll remember Paul is around and he’ll take care of her. His family has money and she won’t need to worry about selling much to keep the lights on.”

“You’re being foolish,” her dad said. “I can’t deal with this – or you – right now.”

His words were meant to hurt. They weren’t even directed at Kassidy, and she knew it was stress talking, but they’d stabbed her right in the gut all the same. The people she cared about most were in trouble, but she had no idea how to help them.

“Dad,” she said as her father stormed out of the back, but he rushed right past her and out the door. She had no idea where he was going, and she didn’t follow him. Instead she went to check on her mother.

“Mom?” she asked as she stepped into the back, but her mother was standing there in a daze, her fingers not just on her lip, but in them while she gnawed at the tips of her fingernails.

“Mom, stop biting your nails,” Kassidy said, but her mother didn’t even hear her.

“I need to go lay down,” she said. “I’m not feeling well. Take care of the shop, okay, honey?”

“Okay mom,” Kassidy said and she waited for the little bell above the door to chime before she let herself react to what happened.

“Oh my gosh,” she mumbled, fighting the urge to cry. “Oh no, this is so bad.”

With no customers to occupy herself, and none of the machines up and running, Kassidy was at a loss for what to do with herself. She couldn’t leave. Someone had to stay in case of a customer coming in, and she paced the kitchen while she debated what to do.

While she paced, she started to tidy things as she worked. She hadn’t meant to clean, but suddenly that was what she was doing, putting things away, sorting old moulds, and throwing out stuff that had piled up.

But then she spotted them. Two moulds that were haphazardly tossed aside, but together they looked like two hearts, joined together.

“Cute,” she said aloud to herself. “Really cute.”

It was more than cute. It was serendipitous. With a little elbow grease, she got the moulds clean and then managed to stick them together. They’d once been for mini-cakes, usually to stick on the top of a wedding cake, but now Kassidy had a new idea.

She moved without thinking, heading to the fridge and getting the ingredients she would need. She’d made vanilla cupcakes so many times that she could do it in her sleep, and she began to mix the batter, but then she got creative.

There were some strawberries in the fridge, leftovers from the strawberry shortcake that Mrs. Duong had ordered a few days ago, and she threw them in a blender.

Bit by bit, her vision came together and she popped the concoction into the oven. Kassidy couldn’t be sure how it would turn out, but while it baked, she made up some simple buttercream frosting and waited.

“Well, it baked okay,” she said as she removed the newly baked, oversized cupcake out of the mould. It had come out a beautiful pink color, and with a bit of white icing on top, she finished it with a tiny strawberry just in time for the bell above the front door to chime.

“Coming!” she called, not sure whether she wanted it to be her parents or a customer more.

It wasn’t her parents, but two girls who couldn’t have been older than sixteen. They were wearing impossibly short shorts and t-shirts with the Fable Heart logo on them.

“Hello,” Kassidy greeted them, and it was only then that she realised she was still holding her double heart cupcake.

“Um, hey,” one of the girls said. “Do you guys sell those French macarons?”

“Sorry,” Kassidy said. “We don’t.”

They had sold them in the past, but they were so much work for very little return. Few people bought them, mostly because the price was so high, and then ShopMart started selling them too. Theirs were ordered in and stale by time they arrived, but people bought them all the same and Mrs. Olsen had decided they weren’t worth the trouble anymore.

“Crud,” the girl said and turned to leave, but before she reached the door her friend stopped her.

“Hey,” the second girl said as she came up to the counter. “What’s that?” she asked as she pointed at Kassidy’s food invention.

“Oh, it’s a little something I whipped up,” Kassidy said.

“How much?” the girl asked her. “It looks cool.”

“It’s not really for sale,” Kassidy said. She had no idea what to charge for the thing, and she had to be honest with herself and admit she wanted to be the one to eat it.

“Come on, I’ll give you ten bucks,” the girl said.

“You know what,” Kassidy told her. “It’s on the house.”

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah, go ahead,” Kassidy told them. Her parents would kill her if they learned she was giving stuff away for free, but she hoped the girls would tell their friends how awesome the bakery was and then they’d bring more people back next time.

“Cool,” the girls gushed and they reached up for their free treat. Without meaning to, each girl reached for it and to everyone’s surprise, the two halves split apart easily, right along the center.

“Oh wow,” Kassidy said when she realised her double cupcake had perfectly split into two.

“That’s amazing!” one of the girls said.

“So cute,” the other gushed, but Kassidy knew the gimmick wasn’t enough. She could only hope it tasted as good as it looked.

Kassidy watched with bated breath while the girls each bit into their half and she breathed a deep sigh of relief when she saw their faces light up.

“Strawberry,” the one girl said, her voice closer to a moan than anything else.

“So good,” the other said as she quickly stuffed the rest of the treat into her mouth.

“I have to show Daniel,” the first girl said. “I’ll take two more.”

“Sorry,” Kassidy told them. “That was the only one. It was, um, a prototype.”

“Really?” the girls asked.

“Yeah,” Kassidy said. “You guys got the very first one.”

“Well, make more,” one of them told her. “Seriously, get on that. That was the best thing I’ve ever eaten and it’s cute, too. If you make more, put a sign out or something. I’d buy a dozen.”

“Me too,” her friend said. “Everyone is going to love them.”

“Thanks,” Kassidy said as she watched them go. At first she’d been hoping that they’d buy something else, but now she had something even better. Her creation had been a hit, and somehow she just knew that part of the credit belonged to Levi.

She would never tell her parents, but it was her love for him that had inspired her to make the heart shaped treat. She couldn’t promise them it would be a hit, but by time they’d finally cooled off, she had a dozen of the double heart cupcakes in the display case, with a price of six dollars for one.

“They’re sweetheart cupcakes,” she explained to her mom. “I can do different flavors if you want, but these ones are strawberry vanilla and I promise they’re really good.”

“But it’s so big,” her mother said as she looked at the treats filling the display case.

“Because you share them,” Kassidy said. “You pull them apart and it makes two hearts. It’s cool, I promise.”

“Kass, I don’t know,” her mom fretted.

“Dear,” her dad stopped her. “I think we should be proud of Kassidy for this. Now, I don’t know if anyone will get it, but tomorrow when we open, I want a bunch of those in the window display. Think you can do that, kiddo?”

“Definitely,” Kassidy said. She didn’t care if that meant spending her Friday night baking, she’d make as many of the cupcakes as they had ingredients for. Come morning, she just knew they were going to have their best Saturday in a long time.

Humidity hung in the attic room and Levi let it sit on his skin like a fine film of sweat. He’d never minded the heat, but as May was coming to a close, it was the humidity that was starting to get to him.

The little room he was renting out was nothing like the hotels he’d spent the last six years in and out of. It certainly wasn’t anything like the mansion he’d bought in Malibu a couple years ago, the one he’d probably spent all of two weeks in since he’d bought it off some washed up actress.

And yet he was happy in the humid little room. It was more real to him than any place he’d stayed in since Fable Heart made it big and he had no intention of trading up any time soon.

Even doing chores for the woman who ran the boarding house, Mary Alice, didn’t get on his nerves. He’d scrubbed her floors since arriving, mowed her lawn a few times, and had even helped her shuck corn. Corn! It was so rustic that he almost didn’t believe it was real.

There was only one thing he’d said no to when she asked. The night before she asked if he wouldn’t mind helping with bingo over at the retirement home on Main Street, but he’d declined. He was too lost in his own head to be good company for the elderly, and it wasn’t until after the old woman had left that he remembered that Kassidy was her assistant for the game.

He had thought about getting up and going over to Main Street on his own, but his own doubts had stopped him. Only a couple nights before, he’d been out until three in the morning with Kassidy, and he still hurt from not being able to say the words he knew she wanted to hear.

Levi’s real regrets came from not being able to say those three little words to her. The way she’d looked at him with those pale green eyes, her cheeks flushed pink – not from embarrassment, but with love. It should have been so easy for him to tell her that he loved her, but he couldn’t.

Not yet.

There was no denying that he was falling for her. When he wasn’t with her, all he thought about was seeing her again. He’d started writing half a dozen songs that all centered on a beautiful country girl with strawberry-blonde hair and a heart of gold.

He’d written about her legs, her eyes, her fingertips, and most of all, about her smile. That smile that told him that everything would be okay, that she had his back and truly cared for him. She wasn’t after his fame or money, not like every other girl he’d dated since he’d turned twenty-one. She only wanted his heart, and yet he hadn’t been able to give her that.

It was for the best that he hadn’t said it, or at least that was what he kept telling himself. He was too scared to let himself love her. Too scared of breaking her heart, too afraid of her realising that he isn’t the man she thinks he is.

You don’t deserve her
, an ugly voice inside his head told him. It was the same voice that had told him to have flings with models, to try drugs, and to throw his life away because he didn’t deserve any better. It was a voice he’d been struggling to defeat for years, and a voice he’d heard less of when he was around Kassidy.

Do something to deserve her
, he told himself, pushing that dark voice deeper inside himself, so deep that he could at least ignore it. He needed to do something that would show her how much he really did care about her, how much he wanted to be with her, even if he couldn’t say the words, “I love you.”

“Actions speak louder than words,” he told himself as he pushed himself off the bed. He didn’t have much time. Mary Alice would be leaving in ten minutes, but this time he was going to join her.

“Oh, Levi,” the blue-gray haired woman greeted him as he came down the stairs. “You startled me.”

“Sorry,” he told her. She was already in her Sunday best, a light cream suit with shoulder pads straight out of the eighties. She was even wearing a heavy strand of pearls and a pillbox hat.

“Is there something you needed, hon?” Mary Alice asked, and Levi realised he was actually nervous to ask her.

“You, well, you don’t mind if I join you for church, do you?” he asked.

He could have sworn a tear came to her eye when he asked her that, and a smile bloomed across her face.

“Of course you can, darling,” she assured him. “Though not in those clothes.”

She had a point. Everyone in Pinewood Grove took church very seriously, or at least dressed like they did. There was no way he could just show up in his jeans and a dirty t-shirt.

“You don’t happen to have anything I could borrow, do you?” he asked, and a part of him hoped she said no so he had an excuse not to go.

“You know, I think I do,” she told him. “Come on upstairs.”

He followed the woman into her bedroom and for a flash he felt decidedly inappropriate about being in there alone with her. He’d had no problem going into women’s bedrooms before, but now it was different.

It’s this town
, he told himself.
It’s just so wholesome.

All those thoughts and concerns vanished when Mary Alice brought out a musty smelling suit. “I wish you would have said something earlier,” she sighed. “I would have had some time to air it out.”

“That’s fine,” he said. He doubted anyone would notice the smell over the light brown jacket and its huge shoulders and lapels.

She must have noticed how he was looking at the suit, and thankfully she laughed. “It was my husband’s,” she told him. “He’s been gone, oh, thirty years now, but I just haven’t had it in me to get rid of his stuff. At least it’s getting some use now.”

“Well, I appreciate it,” Levi said before he took the suit upstairs to change.

It had looked silly on the clothes hanger, but actually on him, it didn’t look too bad. With a splash of cologne and his hair fixed, he looked like he might fit in at the local church after all.

He left Mary Alice’s house with the old woman on his arm, feeling confident about his idea, but by time the church came into view, he was starting to regret his choice all over again.

It had been at least fifteen years since he’d stepped into a church and suddenly he was very afraid that he just might not be welcomed there. He hadn’t exactly been welcomed into town – save by some of the younger women – and he had a feeling church would go the same way.

But the moment he saw Kassidy, all his fears melted away. She was wearing a pale green dress that looked like it could have belonged on a Fifties housewife, her own strand of pearls, and her long hair done in loose curls. She was divine, beautiful, and heavenly and before he knew what he was doing, he was walking toward her.

She didn’t see him until he was nearly right in front of her, and when she did notice him, she looked like she’d seen a ghost.

“Levi,” she gasped. “What are you...?”

“I thought I’d see about joining you and your family for church,” he said and then he had to do something really terrifying.

“Mr. Olsen,” he said as he shook Kassidy’s father’s hand. “Mrs. Olsen.”

“Mr. Thayne,” Kassidy’s dad replied, the hard look in his eyes was the exact opposite of the joy in his daughter’s.

“I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind if I sat with you this morning,” Levi asked. He couldn’t believe how nervous he was by the whole ordeal. He’d sung live in front of stadiums full of people, and on TV at the Grammy awards, and yet this topped them all when it came to his nerves.

“I don’t...” her father started to say, but then Mrs. Olsen cut in.

“That would be lovely,” she said, speaking over her husband. “Just come with us.”

Levi did as he was told, walking side by side with Kassidy as they followed her parents into the quaint church. He wanted to hold her hand, not just to touch her, but for the support, but he thought better of it. He was treading a thin line that he didn’t want to fray any more than it already was.

The family’s usual spot was near the front, only three rows back, and he sat on the right of Kassidy, relieved to have her there for whatever support she could offer. The whole thing felt so familiar yet foreign to him and he didn’t know whether to laugh or take off.

But he did neither and sat quietly as everyone shuffled into their seats. Beside him, a young girl of no more than thirteen took her seat and then slapped her hand over her mouth when she saw who was sitting beside her.

“Hi,” Levi whispered, and the girl giggled so hard that her mother had to shush her, but not before shooting Levi a dirty look.

“You okay?” Kassidy asked as the pastor stepped out into the pulpit.

“Yeah,” he lied. “It’s just been a while.”

“You’ll be fine,” she promised him, and she let her hand rest on his. He knew her parents wouldn’t like it, but in that moment it was the support he needed. He was so scared of not belonging that he’d almost let himself forget why he’d come in the first place.

But as the sermon commenced, a strange nostalgia washed over Levi. Psalms, stories, life lessons, it was everything he’d grown up with, and everything he’d left behind in an effort to make it big in music.

The longer he sat there, his fingers joined with Kassidy’s, the more at home he felt. He started to realise that he should have known better. He wouldn’t have been kicked out or not welcomed, that’s not what church was about. It was about being welcoming and forgiveness, two things he sorely needed.

“If we could all stand,” the pastor requested. “I think it’s time to sing one of my old favorites.”

Kassidy stood, but Levi didn’t follow her. He’d made his living singing, but now he was paralysed at the thought of it.

“Come on,” she whispered to him, a confident smile on her lips. “It’s fun.”

He agreed to stand, but didn’t think he would sing. It had been too long since he’d sung a hymn, but when the organist began the first few notes of
How Great Thou Art
something new came over him. Something great.

He didn’t need the sheet music that had been provided. He’d sung the song hundreds of times before for his grandmother when he was a little boy. With the rest of the worshippers around him, Levi opened his mouth and let the song flow forth, losing himself in the music.

It overtook him and he closed his eyes to savor just how good it felt to sing like that again. No pressure, no expectations, just the beauty of the song as it filled his heart and left his lips.

This is wonderful
, he told himself as he sang. He’d thought he’d lost his joy for singing, but in that moment he had found it once more. He couldn’t deny that to himself and he was actually disappointed when the song came to a close.

“That was lovely,” Kassidy’s mother said as she leaned over her daughter. “Really beautiful.”

“Thank you,” Levi said with a slight nod of his head. It was nice of her to say so, but there was only one opinion he was really interested in.

Kassidy didn’t need to tell him what she thought, not with words. There was a smile on her lips and love in her eyes and she squeezed his hand even tighter.

Yes
, he told himself as he squeezed her hand in return.
This is what I want
.

But you don’t deserve it
, that ugly, mean voice whispered from the darkest recesses of his mind.
A girl like that deserves better than you
.

He didn’t want to listen to that voice, but he couldn’t stop himself. It was right, he knew it was. Kassidy was too good for him and his greatest fear was that eventually she would figure that out for herself.