The Girl Who Chased the Moon Read Free

down someone else’s.
    Tomorrow morning, Julia decided, she’d make an extra cake at the restaurant to take to her.
    Julia undressed and got in bed. Eventually the light went off next door. She sighed and turned on her side and waited to cross another day off her calendar.
    AFTER HER father’s death almost two years ago, Julia had taken a few days off work to come back to Mullaby to get his affairs in order. Her plan had been to quickly sell his house and restaurant, then take the money and go back to Maryland and finally make her dream of opening her own bakery come true.
    But things hadn’t gone exactly the way they were supposed to.
    She’d quickly discovered that her father had been deeply in debt, his house and restaurant mortgaged to the hilt. Selling his house had paid off his home mortgage and a small part of his restaurant mortgage. But even with that, she would have barely broken even if she’d sold the restaurant then. So she came up with her now-infamous two-year plan. By living very frugally and bringing in more business to J’s Barbecue while she was there, in two years she would have the mortgage paid off and could sell the restaurant for a tidy profit. She’d been perfectly up-front about it with everyone in town. She would be staying in Mullaby for two years, but that did not mean she lived here anymore . She was just visiting. That was all.
    When she took over the restaurant, J’s Barbecue had a modest but loyal following, thanks to her father. He had a way of making people feel happy when they left, smelling of sweet yellow barbecue smoke that trailed behind them like a dress train. But Mullaby had more barbecue restaurants per capita than any other place in the state, so competition was fierce. With her father’s personal touch now gone, Julia knew the restaurant needed something to set it apart from the rest. So she started baking and selling cakes—her specialty—and it was an instant boon to business. Soon, J’s Barbecue was known not just for fine Lexington-style barbecue, but also for the best cakes and pastries around.
    Julia always got to the restaurant well before dawn, and the only person there before her was the pit cook. They rarely talked. He had his job and she had hers. She left the day-today running of the place to the people her father had taught and trusted. Even though the barbecue business was in her bones, stuck there like spurs, she tried to stay as uninvolved as possible. She loved her father, but it had been a long time since she’d wanted to be like him. When Julia was a child, before she’d turned into a moody, pink-haired teenager, she used to follow him to work every day before school and gladly help with everything from waitressing to tossing wood into the smokehouse pit. Some of her best memories were of spending time with her father at J’s Barbecue. But too much had happened since then for her to ever believe she could be that comfortable here again. So she came in early, baked that day’s cakes, and left just as the first early-bird customers arrived for breakfast. On good days, she didn’t even see Sawyer.
    This, as it turned out, wasn’t a good day.
    “You’ll never guess what Stella told me last night,” Sawyer Alexander said, strolling into the kitchen just as Julia was finishing the apple stack cake she was going to take to Vance Shelby’s granddaughter.
    Julia closed her eyes for a moment. Stella must have called him the moment Julia left her last night and went upstairs.
    Sawyer stopped next to her at the stainless steel table and stood close. He was like crisp, fresh air. He was self-possessed and proud, but everyone forgave him for that because charm sparkled around him like sunlight. Blue-eyed and blond-haired, he was handsome, smart, rich, and fun to be around. And he was disgustingly kind, too, as all the men in his family were, filled to capacity with Southern gentility. Sawyer drove his grandfather to Julia’s restaurant every morning