by Alina Jacobs
“Yeah, thanks but no thanks.” I was spending the next few days in bed with Meg.
“I don’t think you fully appreciate the gravity of your situation,” Greg snapped. “After that little stunt you pulled at the debate where your brain fell out of your open, gaping mouth, we have to have you as mayor. Otherwise, if Meg wins, she is not going to let a single one of our developments go through.”
“She will if Hunter’s sleeping with her,” Weston piped up.
“No she won’t,” Garrett sneered. “She holds all the cards. I mean, it’s not like Hunter can tell her, ‘Approve my development, or you’ll never see me again.’ He won’t be able to walk away from her. Look at him. His IQ has dropped about ten percent already, and now it’s in a nosedive.”
“I’m going to win,” I assured them. Wasn’t I? Now I wasn’t so sure. All I was sure about was that I was so close to Meg being mine forever.
Greg slammed a large baking book in front of me, making me jump slightly.
“First lesson,” Greg said. “Choux pastry.”
“It really is the blind leading the blind,” Mace remarked as we cleaned batter off the ceiling later that evening.
“Maybe you could hire a chef to teach him,” Parker suggested.
“I don’t think anyone is teaching him anything,” Greg said, watching us sourly as we cleaned.
“You could help, you know,” I snarled at my half brother. “Considering this is your idea.”
He frowned. “I should have had Weston run for mayor.”
Jeez.
As I took out the trash later, I texted Meg.
Hunter: Have any more fantasies you need fulfilled?
Meg: There is one with you dressed up in a sexy butler outfit.
Meg: You show up to my apartment in the middle of the night.
Meg: You catch me with a giant dildo, one of the vibrating ones, and I’m teasing my clit with it.
I dropped the trash bag, my mouth hanging open, willing her to continue.
Meg: You see me. You call me a filthy, horny girl.
Hunter: I’m fucking hard for you already.
Meg: You push me back on the bed. I spread my legs for you.
Meg: You look me up and down. Then you tell me you’re going to give me something much bigger.
God damn, I needed her right now.
Meg: Then you pull out a vacuum cleaner and clean my apartment.
Hunter: Are you fucking kidding me. Then what happens?
Meg: I don’t know. Then you clean my kitchen, and I take a nap.
Hunter: You’re driving me crazy.
Meg: *smiley face*
I grabbed the trash bag and threw it in the garbage can and blew out a breath, willing my erection down.
But over the next few days leading up to the mayoral bake-off, she continued to yank my chain. The text messages escalated.
One afternoon, she sent me a picture of her tits, huge and round and perfect, the pink nipple perky.
Meg: I want your cum right here.
The next day, she sent me another image of her in the mirror in a lacy teddy, her pink nipples barely visible through the sheer fabric.
Whenever my phone would go off, I knew it was something from her. I developed a tic whenever it buzzed in my pocket.
“Dude!” Archer yelled. “Stop ruining the eggs.” My phone had gone off, and the egg in my hand had cracked, sending shards everywhere.
“Give me your phone,” Greg ordered, holding out his hand. “You cannot mess this up. You have to be somewhat competent.”
“Don’t you dare touch my phone!” I yelled at him. Nobody saw those pictures of Meg except for me.
There was no way I was going to survive the bake-off. You just have to seem mildly competent.
But she didn’t even let me get any sleep. In the middle of the night, she sent me a video of her in yet another pair of sexy lacy panties, touching herself, making little whimpering noises, telling me how she wished it was my cock.
Hunter: Can I please come over?
Meg: I’m busy.
I thunked my head against the headboard as the video looped on repeat. “It’s just a baking competition,” I whispered to myself. “It doesn’t matter. You just have to do the bare minimum.” But I wasn’t even sure I was going to be able to do that.
53
Meghan
Had I gotten a bit carried away? Maybe. But I had a good reason to.
Hunter was a handsome guy and, as such, could get away with baking something that looked and tasted like roadkill, and everyone would pat him on the head and tell him it was cute that he tried. I was a woman. People would expect me not just to be able to bake but to bake well. Everyone expected me to win because girls baked and boys caught frogs. Sugar and spice and everything nice, right?
Except that while I loved to eat, I wasn’t exactly the baker in the family.
“No,” Hazel barked as I broke another egg yolk. “You need to scoop it out gently.”
“Can’t I use one of those cooking gadget things?”
My sister raised an eyebrow. “You mean like those little Japanese silicon ducks that suck up the egg?”
I nodded hopefully.
“No,” she said, rapping my knuckles. “They break the yolk and never even work. You need to be competent.”
“Do you think the bake-off dessert will be something easy?”
“I bet it’s not,” Minnie said as she ate the unburned part of my attempt at caramel.
“I can make cupcakes and brownies from a box. Maybe I can sneak a boxed mix with me.”
“Baking goddess,” Hazel said, raising her hands. “Please help my sister, for she hath not any cooking skills!”
“I’m a takeout and heat-up-a-frozen-pizza type of person,” I reminded her. “I lived in New York City for years. I never had any practice in a real kitchen. My last apartment had a hot plate, a toaster oven, and a microwave.”
“It’s sad,” Rose said, “because you spent all that money on fancy cooking equipment.”
“I liked the way it looked,” I said. “Ugh, Hunter is going to beat me.”
“They aren’t going to ask you to make anything too hard, surely,” Hazel said, frowning as she sampled my latest attempt at coconut cream pie.
I stole a swig of the cognac I was supposed to be putting in my cream filling. “With the way my life is going, I wouldn’t count on it.”
The contest was BYOBE, or bring your own baking equipment. I had my box of pretty but hardly used kitchen appliances, all in a blush pink. I also had more items at the house that I hadn’t been able to grab. The form to the bank still hadn’t been processed, and I was unable to retrieve the rest of my belongings.
Hunter grabbed the box from me, or tried to.
“Why didn’t you return my calls last night?” he demanded in a low voice.
“I’m in the baking zone,” I whispered back, “not the get-my-brains-fucked-out zone.”
“You can multitask,” he insisted. “I’d fuck you while you were making cupcakes.”
“And that might end up being on my Ways to Fuck Hunter list,” I said, “but I’m not making cupcakes right now. I’m winning a bake-off.”
“You have a list of ways you want to fuck me?” Hunter said, incredulous, finally wresting my box away from me.
“Maybe,” I said.
“What else is on it?”
“I’m not telling you.”
“Is it weird? It’s something weird, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I’d fuck you if you were wearing a giant hot dog costume.”
“It’s not a costume.”
“I’ll come clean your apartment then fuck you,” he offered.
“You volunteering for something other than lining your own pockets? I’m shocked.”
“I can be properly motivated,” he said. He looked me up and down. “Contest doesn’t start for fifteen minutes. Three minutes to walk to city hall, two minutes up to your office. I can be done in ten minutes
, eight if you really talk dirty to me.” He set my baking supplies on my counter.
I slapped at his hands. “Everyone will know if we just disappear together,” I hissed at him as I unpacked my box. I looked at him then over to his baking station. “Where’s all your stuff?”
His eyes widened.
I smirked.
“I didn’t know we were supposed to bring anything… shit.” He grabbed his phone and navigated to his email.
“It doesn’t say anything about bringing baking supplies!”
“Everyone knows baking contests are always bring your own supplies!”
“Crap. You’re doing this on purpose.”
I made a kissy face at him.
“Stupid small towns. What does baking have to do with being mayor anyway?” he grumbled.
Hunter must have sent his little brothers for baking supplies because several of them showed up right before the contest started, toting crates of tools.
“What am I supposed to do with these?” Hunter argued with them.
“This is all Parker had at his office,” Arlo said.
“He didn’t use this in one of his science experiments, did he?” Hunter made a face at the beakers and metal stirring sticks his brothers had brought.
“And we have a coffeepot from Weston’s office!” his little brother Nate said proudly. “And we brought a secret weapon!” He motioned Hunter closer so that I wouldn’t see what they had brought.
I chewed on my lip. I didn’t like the sound of a secret weapon. I needed Hunter to do badly so I looked like I knew how to bake.
Hunter was smug when his little brothers trotted off.
I kept glancing over at him.
“Keep your eyes on your own station!” he said loudly.
“Welcome to the Mayoral Bake-Off!” Sadie announced. Her skirt was festooned with dancing, happy cakes. I felt nauseated.
Hunter was like a cat with the cream, smug and sure of himself.
Please let it be something I know how to cook.
Hazel had made me run through all the various desserts she knew. Surely it would be one of those, right? My heart hammered as Dottie handed Sadie a large glass bowl with little slips of paper.
“And today’s baked good is… tiramisu. We have a mini grocery store ready for you, thanks to the farmers of Harrogate. We at the Rural Trust support our local farmers, and we hope you do too!”
Tiramisu consisted of espresso-soaked ladyfingers, usually the hard ones, not the spongy ones, surrounded by lightly sweetened, whipped eggs and mascarpone.
I breathed out a sigh. That wasn’t too difficult to make. Tiramisu was a simple Italian dessert that relied on fresh, high-quality ingredients. I selected the eggs, heavy cream, mascarpone, cocoa powder, sugar, and rum from the farmers’ tables.
“Good luck!” Ernest said, giving me a thumbs-up.
Hunter, sunglasses on, waited to see what I picked before he selected his ingredients.
I huffed at him, but he just smirked and winked at me over his sunglasses. I was going to have to strategize. Tiramisu was simple enough that Hunter only needed to copy me, and then he would make the dish!
I surveyed my ingredients. The little farmers market did not have ladyfingers. We would have to bake our own. Hunter could sit over there and copy me, but he didn’t have a stand mixer, a baking sheet, or a pastry bag and piping tip.
Tiramisu didn’t actually take that long to cook, once you had the ladyfingers and your espresso made. I gave a silent thank-you to Hazel for making me pack a French press.
Once my coffee was brewing, I thought about what to make to throw Hunter off the trail. I went down to the farmers’ table to pick up more ingredients, and he raced after me.
I bit down a laugh as I selected potatoes and celery.
“You need these turnips for that dessert, too, don’t you?” Ernest asked loudly, winking at me. He knew what I was up to.
“Shh!” I said exaggeratedly.
Hunter grabbed his own set of vegetables while I went back to my table, snickering to myself as I peeled the potatoes, and pretended to add them to my ladyfinger batter. Hunter was blatantly copying me. He was mixing up the batter for the ladyfingers by hand, and I was sure that he had added too much baking soda in addition to the raw potatoes.
Hunter is so going down!
54
Hunter
I did not have a potato shredder, so I had had to resort to cutting them into tiny little slivers with a knife.
“This doesn’t feel right,” I said to myself.
In the crash cooking class my brothers had given me, we hadn’t covered tiramisu. We had baked cookies, however. I had burned them, of course, but they didn’t have any potatoes or turnips in them.
Maybe these oblong Italian cookies are different.
I glanced over at what Meg was doing. She was separating her eggs, and it appeared that she was putting them in the bowl with the celery.
Fuck.
I hated cooking, and I especially hated baking.
No matter—I had my secret weapon. And as long as the dish was cooked, it would be fine, right?
“Thirty minutes!” Sadie called out.
Shoot. Meg’s cookies were already in the oven, but I didn’t even have my batter done.
“Fuck it,” I said, throwing in a few handfuls of flour, some sugar, and the potatoes into a bowl and stirring it around.
I shuffled through the box of junk my brothers had brought me. I did not have a pan. I did have Parker’s science beakers, so I distributed the batter into five of them and stuck them in the oven.
I carefully watched what Meg was doing. She had several bowls out that she was shuffling around on her station. She poured some rum into several of them.
I bet she’s trying to trick me, I decided. I bet you don’t need to have all those little bowls of different eggs. I threw all my eggs in a bowl with some sugar and cognac and mixed it up by hand.
At least I have a coffeepot. I put the coffee on to brew.
“I think your beakers are on fire,” Meg informed me with a snicker.
I swore, opening the oven. The cookies smelled disgusting. I swore again. “Hey, Meg?”
“No.”
“You don’t even know what I was going to ask!”
“I’m not giving you any of my cookies.”
I sidled up to her. “But you gave me some the other night.”
“Make your own.” She shoved me away.
My cookies were crumbly and didn’t smell like dessert when I chiseled them out of the beakers. The women in the audience tittered as I almost dropped the beaker.
Meg, meanwhile, was neatly soaking her cookies in the espresso she had made.
The coffee will chase off the burnt flavor, I assured myself as I poured it into the beakers. It was also going to help loosen the burnt cookies off the bottom of the glass. I looked over. Meg was layering her whipped eggs with the cookies. Hers were a lot fluffier than mine, which seemed a little runny.
“Five minutes!”
It was boiling hot, and sweat dripped down my nose. I jumped as Meg appeared right next to me.
“You’re getting sunburnt,” she said, reaching up to smear sunscreen over my nose. “You poor, dumb blond.”
“I’m not stupid!”
She looked down at my soupy eggs and chuckled. “You didn’t even whip your egg whites! I don’t think you should serve that to people.”
“I’m going to bake it, obviously.”
“You don’t bake tiramisu.”
“This is different.”
“Your cookies look like they’re dissolving,” she said. Her hand grazed my ass as she went back to her table.
“Crap.” I took a sip of the rum then a bigger sip.
My dessert was a mess. I scooped whatever I could salvage of the soggy cookies out of the beakers. I had one clean beaker left, so I used that to assemble my dessert. Meg was neatly layering her tiramisu in ramekins.
I j
ust dumped mine in with a generous helping of rum and added a thin layer of egg on top. Meg was dusting cocoa powder on hers. She had a metal sieve and was neatly sprinkling the dark powder.
I did not have a sieve. I tried to carefully pour some cocoa powder on top of my beaker but ended up with more than a light dusting.
“And time!” Sadie called. “Let’s have the contestants present their desserts to the judges!”
Meg carefully untied her apron. The motion was enough to make me forget about my terrible dessert. I wanted her. She had been working me up in a tangle of sex obsession the past few days. I could barely contain my desire.
“Meg, you’re up first.”
The judges oohed and ahhed over her perfect tiramisu.
Show-off, I mouthed at her. She blew me a kiss.
“Hunter.” Sadie waved me up. I grabbed my secret weapon and swung it over my back. The large industrial blowtorch was used at the Svensson PharmaTech factory to work on their heavy machinery.
“While I have never claimed to be a baker,” I told the judges, setting down my beaker of burnt, soggy cookies, raw egg, alcohol, and half a bag of cocoa powder in front of the judges, “it can’t be said that I don’t give a good presentation.” I turned the torch onto its highest setting.
“Hunter, don’t!” Parker yelled out.
The alcohol caught on fire first, blue-white flames licking the side of the beaker. In the next instant, the cocoa powder dust ignited and expanded, creating a fireball that shot up ten feet into the air, singeing the canopy covering the judges’ table. The fire department doused it with water, spraying the judges and me and waterlogging my dessert.
“My word!” one of the judges said after a moment. “I haven’t had that much excitement in years. What a presentation!”
“You didn’t even taste his dessert.”
