Total pages in book: 143
Estimated words: 138881 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 694(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138881 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 694(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 463(@300wpm)
Mabel gazes at her arm, coated in frosting, which is…hmm. Sort of gray, maybe white? “Goodbye, cake,” she says to the remains of her creation. “You were a good cake. One of the best. You would have served me well.”
Ah, hell. There’s real sadness in her cake eulogy. She’d been working hard on that confection before it all went south with a rogue butterfly. I can’t let her wallow.
I swipe a finger through the sugary mess coating her arm. “You’re right. It did go out in a blaze of glory.” I bring the frosting to my lips for a taste. “It’s fantastic.”
Not the first time I’ve said that about her baking. I’ve tried the caramel chocolate brownies and chocolate chip candy cane cookies Theo’s brought to hockey games. Mabel and I even made raspberry lemon ricotta cupcakes together for the surprise party she threw for him last year. She’s magic with dessert, and her frosting is almost, almost, as good as sex.
“Thanks,” she says. “The universe giveth and taketh away. Good baker, but a terrible competitor.” She shakes her head in obvious frustration.
“Good thing baking isn’t a—” I’m about to say a competitive sport, but there’s no such thing as a competition-free job. I backpedal. “You can be a great baker without winning fancy competitions. And I bet you’ll start a smash-cake trend. Now let’s get you cleaned up. I’m under strict orders to return you in”—I check my watch—“thirteen minutes now.”
And I’m the kind of guy who follows orders. Well, most of the time.
But when Mabel shifts her gaze to me, her frustration shifts with it. “Look, I appreciate the whole knight-in-shining-armor thing you have going on. It’s on brand and all. But you don’t have to stay. I can clean myself up.”
“I know you can,” I say evenly. She radiates independence. I swear I see it shimmering, like waves of heat. I’m not going to treat her like she can’t manage the situation on her own.
“Why are you helping then?” She’s skeptical, but I realize I’m not the target of her suspicion. Just the bystander.
“There was a whole crowd out there not helping,” I explain, because it’s that simple. “Didn’t want to be like them. That work for you?”
She squeezes her eyes shut for a few seconds, dragging her hand through her hair, and oh shit…Before I can stop her, the damage is done. She’s combed frosting all over her pretty locks.
I wince but then school my expression when she opens her eyes.
“It’s not you,” she begins, her tone tinged with sadness. “It’s, well, my ex just told everyone who watches Romance Beach, which, for the record, is pretty much the entire world, that I suck at life.”
What the fuck? I’d tuned out the Romance Beach promo and lasered in on Mabel’s mad cake skills, so I missed that. But I’ll deal with it later.
“He’s wrong.” I hand her the towel from next to the sink. “Now, let’s get you ready for the photo. Show the crowd out there that when you fall, you get back up.”
She frowns apologetically. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have argued with the one person being nice to me.”
“I’ve been hit harder in hockey games. I can take it.”
“Stop trying to make me smile,” she mutters, but she’s smirking, and that’s good. I’d rather see that than her feeling sorry for herself.
She tosses the towel over her shoulder and scrubs her arms over the sink. Once they’re clean, she dries them off, then wipes most of the frosting from her apron too. She peers around, like she’s looking for a mirror before she asks, “I think there was some in my hair?”
I stifle a laugh. “Some being the operative word.”
“Seriously?”
I point at her hair. “Remember when you got so annoyed with yourself you shoved your hands in your hair, oh, about three minutes ago?”
She lets out a low moan, like a tire leaking air. “Noooo.”
“Yesssss.”
Since there’s no mirror, she has to rely on me. “How bad is it?”
I should resist touching her again, but my hands seem to have a mind of their own around her today. Maybe I have a thing for cute women in aprons with llamas kissing on them.
Maybe you have a thing for the woman you wanted to ask out the day you met her.
Setting a palm on her shoulder, I spin her around and…wow…it’s a fucking nest of frosting and cake. “On a scale of one to desperately-in-need-of-a-wash, I’d say it’s one hundred.”
The sound that emanates from her is now death-moan level. But Mabel’s undeterred, and that’s nearly as sexy as her attempt at a smash-cake save. The woman doesn’t let the small stuff get her down. She beelines for the locker-sized bathroom and squeezes in to deal with the problem. She attempts to wipe off bits of frosting from her hair with her towel, but her elbows bump against the wall. The bathroom’s so small she can’t quite get the right angle.