There was always dark stubble shading his angular jaw. It never turned into a full beard. It was always rough, rugged, manly… like the rest of him. My fingers itched with the need to run my hands along that stubble.

His eyes were blue. Strikingly blue. Like a Siberian fucking Husky. I’d only locked onto them a handful of times even though he'd visited the bakery every weekday.

Five days a week he tortured me with his pure masculine allure. With the ludicrous reaction I had every time.

“You know, you can’t call someone a boyfriend when you’ve never actually spoken to them before,” Fiona commented, her eyes on him as he settled at the end of the small line.

“I’ve spoken to him,” I hissed, my eyes jerking down to the cupcakes I was arranging on a tray before he could glance my way.

“Asking him ‘cash or card’ doesn’t count,” she countered dryly.

I knew she was still staring at him without shame. Fiona could stare at whomever the fuck she wanted because she was comfortable in her own skin. Because she was movie star gorgeous but in a way that didn’t make you hate her since she was so down to earth, friendly and utterly confident. You wanted to be her best friend.

Like Blake Lively.

Fiona was my best friend and lived up to all the expectations you had of her upon first glance. Then she exceeded them.

“You’re not engaged anymore,” she continued, still staring. I knew that because my gaze flickered from him as it did when he got too close—when those Husky eyes locked with mine—and I focused on Fiona, who was not at all worried about meeting his gaze or having him see her staring at him. She was not worried about him thinking she was some kind of deranged stalker. Because no man would think Fiona was a deranged stalker if she was staring at him; he would think God had somehow shined luck upon him and he’d be counting his blessings, likely melting into a puddle of masculine muck, ready and willing to do anything to make her his.

I knew this because I’d seen it happen. Many times with many men. They all fell at her feet. The ones who weren’t married or gay, and a disappointing amount of married men discreetly tried to fall at her feet too.

Fiona did not get tangled up with married men. The rest she was more than happy to get tangled up with.

But this man, this man who I’d imagined was my boyfriend long before I ended my engagement, the man who I looked at, fantasized about, and ran away from when he got close to the counter… He did not fall at Fiona’s feet.

I knew that because when she served him, I spied on them from the kitchen. She had tried, when he first started coming in, to flutter her eyelashes, just being the sex goddess that she was because anyone with an attraction to the male sex would be tripping over themselves in order to try to get close enough to that man to lick his biceps.