As Beautiful as the Bay Read online

  As Beautiful as the Bay

  Blue Penguin Bay Book Two

  by Serenity Woods

  Copyright 2017 Serenity Woods

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter One

  “Do you know the muffin man?” asked Ellie, the new young waitress.

  Ginger wiped down the last stainless-steel counter and took the cloth over to the sink. “The muffin man? Who lives down Drury Lane?”

  “Ha ha.” Ellie stuck her tongue out and clipped the dishwasher shut. “You know who I mean. The sexy baker.”

  Ginger gave her an amused look as she rinsed the cloth. “You mean Sam Pankhurst?”

  “He’s the sexy one, right?”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I’d go that far. He’s all right, I guess, if you like scruffy and grumpy and grouchy. And other dwarves.”

  Ellie looked puzzled. “Are we talking about the same guy? Runs the All or Muffin bakery?”

  “Yeah. Are you going to make a joke about his buns now?”

  “Quite possibly,” Ellie said, unfazed. “He has a great bum.”

  “Ellie!”

  The young woman laughed. “Well he has! Really nice and...” She held up her hands, fingers curved, and made a movement as if she were squeezing something firm and squidgy.

  “Jesus.” Ginger put the cloth into the washing box and cast a last glance around the room. “Okay, I think we’re done for the day.”

  It was five p.m. on Sunday, and Ginger could have slept for a fortnight. Three months of working ten-hour days, seven days a week, was starting to take its toll. Air New Zealand would have made her pay an extra luggage allowance for the bags under her eyes.

  “I go in the bakery every morning for a muffin,” Ellie grumbled, “but he’s always out the back, working. So... I was thinking... maybe you’d put in a good word for me?” She turned hopeful eyes to Ginger.

  “Ellie.” Phil, the sous chef, collected up the tea towels and threw them into the washing basket on top of Ginger’s cloth. “For God’s sake. Sam Pankhurst’s one of the finalists for the Bay of Islands Gold Food Awards, just like Ginger. I hardly think she’s going to be in the mood to be playing matchmaker.”

  Ellie’s mouth formed an O. “Shit! I didn’t realize. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.” Ginger picked up the basket. “I’ll take this through to the laundry room, and then I’m heading off. Can you lock up, Phil?”

  He nodded, and she flashed them a smile, then headed off down the corridor.

  In the laundry room, relieved to be alone at last, she blew out a long breath, then loaded the washing machine. Once it was going, she left via the back door, walked around the edge of the building, and sat on the wooden bench that overlooked the vineyard.

  For a while she just sat there, too tired to move.

  She felt frazzled, and not only from the long hours. Ellie’s words had nipped at her nerve endings like a school of piranha. It wasn’t the waitress’s fault—she’d only been working at Blue Penguin Bay’s restaurant for a few weeks. She wasn’t to know about the riptide that flowed beneath the apparently calm waters.

  Ginger looked out across the fields of vines that sloped down to the sparkling Pacific Ocean, and shivered. It was nearly the shortest day, June twenty-first, and she missed the warm evenings she’d experienced when she’d first arrived in New Zealand. The websites hadn’t lied when they’d described the Northland as the ‘winterless north’, and the temperature hadn’t dropped anywhere near freezing yet, but the days had cooled, and Ginger was a summer girl at heart.

  “Hey. Are you actually sitting down? I need to call the Guinness Book of Records.”

  Ginger looked over her shoulder to see her sister, Winifred, approaching with a smile. “Hey.” She patted the bench next to her. “How’s your day been?”

  “Long.” Fred sat beside her and yawned. “I’m worn out.”

  Ginger grinned. “Mac keeping you up late, is he?”

  “Worn out from working,” Fred corrected wryly. Then her lips twisted. “But yeah. I’m not getting a lot of sleep.” Her arranged marriage to the vineyard’s estate manager had eventually morphed into a real one, and the two of them had been living together for three months. Fred looked so happy at the thought of being chained to the marital bed that it brought a lump to Ginger’s throat.

  “How are you?” Fred asked.

  “Good. The new spicy fish bites were a real hit. We’re definitely keeping those on the menu.”

  “That’s great.” Fred put her arm around her and gave her a hug. “You okay?”

  Ginger gave her a puzzled look. “Yeah, why?”

  “Phil asked me to check on you.”

  Ginger rolled her eyes. “I’m fine.”

  “Come on Ging, spit it out. Phil wouldn’t have said that if he wasn’t worried about you. Something bothering you?”

  Ginger lifted her face to the last rays of the setting sun and briefly closed her eyes. She didn’t want to discuss it, but Fred wouldn’t give up if she thought one of her sisters had a problem they needed to discuss. “Ellie made a comment about Sam, that’s all.”

  “Ah.”

  Ginger narrowed her eyes. “Don’t start.”

  “I said ‘ah’. How’s that starting something?”

  “It was the way you said it.”

  Fred pursed her lips. “Has he asked you out this week?”

  “Yeah. On Wednesday.”

  “And you said no?”

  “Of course I said no.”

  Fred tipped her head to the side. “He’s pretty persistent. Have you thought that maybe the way you’re feeling is because deep down, you’d like to date him?”

  “No! Absolutely not! A hundred and ten percent no. Not even if there’d been a zombie invasion, and he was the last man on Earth and we had to repopulate the planet.”

  “Right.” Fred chewed her bottom lip. “You don’t think that would be even a tiny bit fun?”

  Irritation swept over her. “What do you want me to say? If you’re hoping I’m going to admit I’m secretly in love with him, you’re going to be in for a long wait.”

  “Who said anything about love? You can’t deny that there’s a zing between the two of you. I’m just surprised you haven’t had a fling.”

  Ginger couldn’t deny it. When she’d first set eyes on Sam Pankhurst, at Mac and Fred’s wedding at the vineyard, she’d felt the thud of Cupid’s arrow deep inside. Not in her heart—the tingle of attraction had been farther south than that. But it was there, and she knew Sam felt the same, because he’d asked her out on a date once a week si
nce then, every week, without fail.

  “Is this about the award?” Fred asked gently.

  “Of course it’s about the award.” The familiar stab of hurt made her stomach clench.

  Fred eyed her evenly. “I think you’re viewing it all wrong.”

  “What other way can I view it? He didn’t enter for the award, Fred, not until he discovered that I’d entered for it. And now he’s determined to beat me to the finish line.” She gritted her teeth with indignation. “You’ve seen what little he’s done to promote the bakery. But it’s a family business. The locals bought their bread there when his dad owned it, and probably before then. He’s going to win all the local votes with zero effort.” The thought of seeing the Gold Food Awards badge on All or Muffin’s sign outside the bakery made her feel sick with fury.

  “You stand every chance,” Fred soothed. “Come on, all the local papers are full of Blue Penguin Bay. Everyone’s talking about the vineyard and the way you’ve overhauled the restaurant. People are coming from all over the Northland, and farther afield, to eat here. We’re having to turn people away.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’ll win.”

  “No...” Fred frowned. “I don’t understand why this is so important. We knew it would take time to make the vineyard work, as well as its restaurant and bed and breakfast. We’ve actually done much better than we thought we would when we first came here. Don’t you remember the despair we all felt when Mac told us what his father had done?”

  “Yes, of course.” The memory was not a pleasant one. Ginger, Fred, and their other sister, Sandi, had come to New Zealand to take over the running of the Blue Penguin Bay estate following the death of their father, only to discover that James MacDonald, the previous estate manager, had spent all the profits and run the estate into the ground. The girls’ father, Harry Cartwright, had, for some bizarre reason they still didn’t completely understand, tied up their inheritance for when they got married. Desperate to right the wrongs of his father, Mac had proposed to Fred after only a week so she could access her share of the money. Luckily, the two of them had fallen in love, so the story had a happy ending, and Fred’s fifty thousand dollars had gone a long way to restoring some of the estate’s former glory.

  “I’m thrilled with what we’ve achieved,” Ginger said. “You and Mac have worked so hard on the vineyard, and Sandi’s done wonders with the B&B. But the restaurant...” She hesitated.

  “Is yours,” Fred finished with a smile.

  Ginger sighed, a little ashamed. “Yeah.”

  “And getting the Gold Food Award would make you feel as if you made the right decision coming here.”

  “Yes.” Ginger knew her sister understood. Emigrating to the other side of the world from England had been tough on all of them. It didn’t matter that they’d been glad to see the back of the U.K. after their mother died, nor that they all loved their new home.

  Adjusting to a new culture—even one that seemed so similar to England’s at first glance—had been harder than any of them had expected. They’d come to ‘Godzone’ on a work permit, but had all applied for permanent residency after Fred and Mac had decided to make their marriage a real one. Soon, they would have all the same rights as those born in the country.

  But Ginger didn’t feel like a Kiwi. She had an English accent, and English ways, and always would have. People frequently asked her if she was there on holiday, and she suspected that would probably happen even when she’d been living there for twenty years. Winning this award would be the first step to feeling as if the country was accepting her. For a start, award winners went forward into a national competition, which would be a huge thing for her considering she’d only recently started up.

  But it wasn’t just that. Back in England, she’d been terribly betrayed by the man she’d loved, or thought she’d loved, and it had ruined her career, as well as her love life. The award had become a symbol of her new start. It would be a confirmation that everything was going to be all right. That she was going to be able to pull herself up by her bootstraps, and that she didn’t have the word disaster tattooed across her forehead.

  “I’m not stupid,” she told her sister. “I know Sam has every right to enter the competition. And I know that my entering it was more of a jog for him, a realization that he might as well give it a go. But he’s so... bloody... smug and confident.”

  “He is a bit,” Fred acknowledged. “You know he’s winding you up, though, right? It’s part of the mating ritual. If he were a baboon, he’d be waving his red butt in your face.”

  “Thank you for that image. Yeah, I get it, but it’s hardly endearing him to me. Buying flowers and chocolates is also a mating ritual. Why can’t he pick something like that?”

  “He doesn’t strike me as the flower-buying type.”

  “Yeah. Well, I want the flower-buying type.” Frustration rang in Ginger’s voice. “I deserve it, don’t I? After what I’ve been through? I want to be romanced. I don’t want some bloody scruffy local yokel thinking he’s doing me a favor when he asks me out. You know what he said on Wednesday?”

  “I’m afraid to ask.”

  “His elaborate proposal was ‘the new Bourne movie is on Saturday at the cinema. You coming or what?’”

  Fred stifled a laugh. “All right, I accept that’s not the most romantic way to do it.”

  “You think? He could at least have picked a chick flick or something that didn’t involve an explosion every five seconds.” She sighed. “I like him, Fred, I really do, and I know he’s Mac’s best mate, and part of me thinks it would be such fun for us to go out and double date, but... I want more.”

  “All right.” Fred squeezed her shoulders again. “Fair enough. He might be hot as, but you’re right, you do deserve more.” She got to her feet. “You going home now?”

  “Yeah, I’m done in.”

  Fred paused. “Have you given any more thought to letting Phil run the place without you one day a week?”

  Ginger looked out to sea. The sun had set, and the Pacific Ocean was rapidly turning from maroon to a deep, dark blue. Twilight didn’t seem to exist up in the Northland—it went from day to night in what seemed like seconds. “I will soon, I promise.”

  “Only you’re going to make yourself ill if you carry on like this. You’ve worked so hard, and it’s time you started easing up a little. And Phil’s a good guy—he’ll manage.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Fred sighed. “All right. I’ll catch you tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, see ya.”

  Ginger watched her sister head off to the big house farther up the hill that she shared with her husband, and then she turned her gaze back to the sea. The moon, half full and on the wane, hung low on the horizon like a broken china plate. It was so odd that it was upside down compared to England. She’d never get used to that.

  He might be hot as... Against her will, Ginger’s lips curved up at her sister’s Kiwi phrase. Deep down, she had to agree with Ellie’s description of him as the sexy baker. Whenever he was around, her heart beat a little a faster, and the sun shone a little brighter. But his insouciance grated on her, as well as his arrogant assumption that if he would only continue to ask her out, she’d inevitably cave at some point.

  He’d also told her in no uncertain terms that he was going to win the Bay of Islands Gold Food Award, and although she accepted that he seemed to enjoy winding her up on purpose, she suspected that deep down he believed his own words. Well, waving his red butt in her face was going to get him nowhere. Ginger had given up men over a year ago, and it would take a lot more than the muffin man—no matter how sexy he was—to convince her to get back in the saddle.

  Chapter Two

  On Monday morning, Ginger rose at six, showered and dressed, and took her usual early morning walk along Russell’s seafront.

  She’d grown to love the little town, with its scattering of tea shops and seafood restaurants, its colonial-style buildings, and the way it
tried hard to pretend its nickname had never been the ‘hell hole of the Pacific.’ She stopped on the pier and watched the first passenger ferry of the day making its way toward Paihia, and wondered what the place would have looked like back in the early nineteenth century. Rough-and-ready whalers would have come ashore for food, rum, and female company, and she could imagine how it might have looked like a scene out of Pirates of the Caribbean. Now, it was peaceful, most shops not yet open and tourists still on holiday time.

  She walked along the pier and talked to a couple of the fishermen who’d just arrived, bringing in the first catch of the day. She chose a bucket of scallops, a box of crayfish, two dozen snapper, and several large tubs of huge green-lipped mussels, her mouth watering at the thought of the sauce she’d cook for them later, with tomatoes, onions, and garlic, all served up with crusty bread.

  And talking of bread... The smell of freshly baked loaves was drifting along the seafront, not helping at all with her rumbly tummy.

  She wasn’t going to buy from Sam Pankhurst. Turning her back on the shops, she finished haggling with the fisherman. She could fix herself something perfectly adequate when she arrived at the restaurant.

  The gorgeous aroma didn’t abate, however, and anyway she had something to drop off to his dad. So, eventually, after finishing her conversation, she walked back along the pier and turned left toward the All or Muffin bakery.

  Was there anything as nice as fresh baking? The warm, yeasty smell mixed with the fruity scent of raisins and the spicy aroma of cinnamon spoke of grandma’s kitchen, and floury arms wrapping around her, comforting and protecting. She couldn’t imagine anything bad ever happening in a bakery.

  She walked into the shop and smiled at Ally, who was behind the counter, serving a businessman who’d obviously called in to pick up something for his lunch.

  “Morning,” Ally called out.

  “Morning.” Ginger hovered in front of the cabinets. She was only going to window shop. But ohhh... the muffins were as big as the palm of her hand, and that one with the chunks of white chocolate and fat raspberries looked amazing.