I Locked Two Rival Mob Heirs In, So Neither Lets Me Go novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: The Bakery

Mari's POV

Manny held the little velvet box out in front of him.

Dean sat up in my bed with the sheet at his waist and said nothing.

He reached for his jacket on the chair, took a second box out of the inside pocket and held it out too.

I looked at the two boxes and at the two men, one in my doorway and one in my bed.

I started to laugh.

Then I stopped, and I crossed the room in a sheet and closed their hands over the lids.

"Not yet," I said.

"Mari," Manny said, wounded.

"Not on a staircase, and not before I've said it," I said.

"Ask me when I've said it first. I'll say it when it's mine to say."

"And if that takes a year?" Dean said.

"Then you'll have a year of me," I said.

By December my mother had a new window, a second oven and a line out her door every Sunday morning.

She gave me the shop for one night.

She did not say why.

She put the keys in my hand at ten o'clock and told me the dough was in the proofer.

Then she went upstairs to my old bed and shut the door.

At midnight the ovens were still warm, and the steel table in the back room shone under one hanging bulb.

Flour hung in the air.

The shop smelled of yeast and butter and hot metal.

I stood at the head of the table in my mother's white baker's apron with nothing under it.

Dean and Manny stood in front of me, in their jeans, looking at the room.

"I run this room tonight," I said.

"Yes, ma'am," Manny said.

"Yes," Dean said.

"Shirts."

They took them off.

The ovens glowed orange behind them, and the light showed every muscle.

I turned and took two more aprons off the hook, long white ones, and tossed one to each.

"Put those on."

Manny held his up.

"Oshiro, this is for a woman who is five foot four."

"It's for a man who does what he's told."

He put it on.

It tied at his waist and came to the middle of his thighs, and he stood there in it with his arms out, solemn.

Dean put his on exactly, and tied the strings in a neat bow.

They looked ridiculous, and they looked entirely mine.

I lifted a handful of flour from the open bin.

I laid my palm flat on Dean's chest and pressed, and left a white hand there.

"Mine," I said.

"Yours," Dean said, very low.

I turned to Manny and did the same.

I pressed my floured hand over his heart.

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