by Sara Whitney
Josie’s friend stood smoothly and wrapped her into a hug, whispering, “Thank God” as he kissed her cheek. Then he guided her to the open seat in front of an array of cake slices.
Josie flashed the woman an apologetic smile. “I’m so sorry. Late night last night.”
The woman just scowled and adjusted the headband holding her cottony white hair off her forehead. “Well, now that everyone’s finally here, we can start. I’m Dora, the owner.”
She didn’t extend her hand for Josie to shake, but Josie hadn’t worked in marketing for five years for nothing. “Hi, Dora! I’m so thrilled to finally check out your bakery,” she enthused. “I’ve heard so much about your gorgeous cakes over the past few months!”
Dora’s watery blue eyes flicked over Josie’s North Face fleece jacket and leggings. Damn, she’d grabbed the pair with a hole over the knee. Why hadn’t she tossed them out last week when she’d noticed the snag? Her hand fidgeted to cover the exposed patch of skin, but she forced herself to stay still and act like she’d intentionally chosen distressed athleisure wear.
Dora sniffed. “Yes, I’m delighted that the good word is starting to get out. It’s thrilling to have the… best parts of Chicago society take notice.”
Shit. She should’ve taken more care with her appearance before she left the apartment. In her haste to get out the door, she’d ignored the first lesson her mother had taught her as a child: dress the way you want people to treat you. But over her Spandex-clad dead body would she let Richard and Byron get anything less than stellar service because of her.
“The best part of Chicago’s sitting right here,” she said, squeezing Richard’s elbow in its impeccably fitted suit. Thank God he was classy enough for both of them. “What flavor shall we start with?”
Richard pointed at the cake nearest him. “With chocolate, of course.”
“Of course.” She grinned at him and grabbed a fork.
Some people might have trouble gorging on cake before nine in the morning, but Josie wasn’t among them. She and Richard moaned their way through the chocolate fudge ganache with a hazelnut filling, the vanilla-raspberry, and the pistachio crunch, all under Dora’s disapproving gaze.
“Did I read that you’ve been in business for close to three decades?” Josie asked around a mouthful of Boston cream.
Any hopes she had that talking about herself might soften Dora up were dashed when the woman simply nodded as she watched Richard lifting his next bite to his lips. Josie forked up another mouthful and tried again. “So what made you explode on the wedding scene so recently, do you think?”
Dora sniffed and straightened the cuff of her floral-patterned sweater. “Payoff from years of hard work.” Then she lapsed back into silence, which was broken only by the scrape of Richard’s fork tines against the plain white china.
What appalling customer-service skills. The only other human being Josie had this much trouble conversing with was her own mother—and come to think of it, the two women did seem to share a certain disdain for people in general and Josie in particular. But unlike Josie’s mother, Dora at least brought some genuinely delicious cake with her.
“So what do you think?” Josie abandoned her attempt at conversation with Dour Dora and turned to Richard. “Byron’s going to flip for the hazelnut, no?”
Dora looked up from the pad where she was jotting notes, a thin smile on her face. “And who’s Byron?”
Richard’s whole body melted into besotted joy. “My fiancé. He’s out of town for the next few weeks, but we knew we needed to…”
He trailed off when Dora stood sharply, the chair scraping against the floor.
“Byron? He?”
“Yes. He.” Richard’s voice was calm, but Josie felt his leg tense where it brushed against hers under the table. Her heart sank. Please don’t go where I think this is going to go.
Dora’s eyes darted between Richard and Josie as she connected the dots. “Well. Well, that just…” Her accusing gaze landed on Josie. “You didn’t specify the couple’s names when you called to make the reservation.”
“You didn’t ask,” she said slowly. “You just took my name and made some assumptions.” She pressed her shoulder against Richard’s in a show of solidarity. “I’m his maid of honor. Or best woman. Did we ever decide?”
“It’s your call,” Richard said in a deceptively light tone, his deep brown eyes never wavering from Dora’s face. “Are we going to have a problem here, ma’am?”
Dora began jerkily whisking the cake plates off the table, dumping them into the nearby bin reserved for dirty dishes.
“Well,” she huffed. “It was bad enough when I thought…”
Her voice trailed off as her eyes darted between Richard and Josie again, and Josie’s temper spiked for the second time in less than twelve hours. “It was bad enough when what?”
Dora had no answer, but Josie could make an educated guess. She sucked in a deep breath. Keep it together. Don’t escalate, remember?
Richard was doing a better job of maintaining his calm. He casually leaned his elbows on the table, pointing first to himself and then to Josie. “It was bad enough when you thought I was marrying this pretty white girl, right?”
Dora pinched her mouth shut, but her narrowed eyes answered for her. “I think you should leave,” she blurted, circles of red burning in her powder-caked cheeks. “We won’t be able to accommodate your wedding.”
Richard flowed to his feet and spoke in a lethally polite voice. “This is a shortsighted way for you to run a business. I’d urge you to reconsider.”
Dora sneered. “I don’t need money from you.”
The disdain in the woman’s voice held such a strong echo from Josie’s own childhood that her fragile grip on her temper snapped. She’d had it with bigots and bullies today, and it wasn’t even noon yet. “Do you know what year it is, lady?” She surged to her feet, almost knocking her chair to the tile floor.
“Trouble, Dora?”
At the sound of the deep voice, all three heads whipped to the bakery counter where a man had stepped from the back room.
A mountain of a man. A familiar mountain of a man.
“You!” Josie gasped, not caring that she sounded like a character in a melodrama.
The big brute who’d rescued her on the L last night stood behind the counter, swathed in an apron, dusted with flour, and wearing those damn earbuds again. Not even a flicker of recognition registered on his face, and for a split second, Josie was crushed that she was so forgettable. But this particular moment wasn’t about her.
“Talk some sense into your boss please,” she snapped. “Refusing to bake cakes for two men in love is vile.”
Train guy’s stony expression didn’t budge as Richard rose and tugged his suit coat into place. “Don’t bother,” Richard said with a sniff. “I’ll serve our guests stale bread before I’ll serve them anything from here.” He linked his arm with hers and addressed Dora coldly. “You’re a dinosaur, and sooner or later a meteor’s headed your way. Enjoy extinction.”
He steered Josie toward the exit, but before they sailed through the door, she glared over her shoulder at the man behind the counter. “Thanks a lot. Guess we had to handle this one on our own.”
The tinkling of the bell over the door punctuated her words, and then she and Richard were on the street and hustling down the sidewalk. Once they’d turned the corner, Richard jerked to a halt, his body trembling.
“The whole time we’ve been planning our wedding, I’ve been braced for something like that. Was expecting it even. But when it actually happens…”
She pulled him into a hug. “Let’s go back and tear that place to the fucking ground.”
He gave a small sob and wrapped his arms around her to squeeze back. “I wish. I wish we could.”
He sounded so resigned that Josie’s heart ached. As awful as that scene had been for her, she couldn’t even begin to understand the pain it had caused her friend. So she kep
t her arms around him as his tears fell.
Once his breathing had returned to normal, she asked, “What do you want to do now?”
Richard exhaled hard. “Do you have time to get coffee and start researching other bakeries?”
“Absolutely. There’s a coffee place a few blocks over.”
They’d walked several steps before Richard sighed. “What a damn shame. That hazelnut filling was to die for.”
Three
The slamming of the door echoed through the bakery as Erik Andersson pieced together the influx of information he’d absorbed in the past two minutes.
First he’d received the shock of his life when he’d recognized the funny, smart-mouthed redhead from the L at the tasting table. Then his oh-so-helpful brain had pointed out that she looked just as good in stretchy black pants and a fleece as she did in her tight suit the night before. Then there’d been the brief, unexpected pang when he thought she was there to pick out a wedding cake with her suit-wearing fiancé. And finally, she’d started shouting, which reminded him that as hot as she was, she was exactly the kind of woman he’d tried to avoid his whole life.
It was enough to make him long for the safety of his kitchen. But this time he couldn’t walk away. He’d avoided this discussion for too long.
“What just happened?”
Dora’s color was high on her round cheeks as she collected the tub of dishes and marched behind the counter. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Just a pair of look-but-don’t-buy types. I asked them to leave.”
She brushed past him and moved to the back where she scraped the cake remains into the trash with angry motions while Erik turned over what he’d heard.
“Dora,” he said slowly, “how often do you turn people away?”
She didn’t meet his eyes. “Not often. Just couples who aren’t…”
His stomach roiled as he waited for her answer.
Finally Dora lifted her nose and announced, “If I don’t approve of someone, I don’t have to take their money. It’s my right.”
Goddammit. This was worse than he’d thought.
Dora had hired him as her head baker five months ago, and within a few weeks, his discomfort with her constant negativity had bloomed into full-blown loathing of her closed-mindedness about certain “people and lifestyles” as she put it. But he’d finally landed his ideal job after half a year of grunt work in some of the worst kitchens of Chicago, so he’d kept his head down and his earbuds in and did his best to ignore his boss unless she spoke directly to him. He’d told himself he could endure just about anything if she truly was as close to retirement as she swore she was when she’d hired him.
This though? This was too fucking far. How many people had she turned away since he’d started working for her? Muttered comments were one thing, but to actually refuse to bake for someone? Dammit, he shouldn’t have spent so much time drowning her out with music. He should’ve paid better attention. Bile burned the back of his throat.
“My business, my decisions.” She interrupted his thoughts, and when he didn’t respond, her voice sharpened. “Are we going to have a problem, Erik?”
He lowered his brows and shook his head. Nope. No problem he couldn’t solve.
“Good.” She pulled her ever-present notebook out of her pocket and flipped to the newest page, muttering the whole time. “My baker doesn’t say more than twenty words a day, and this morning he decides to use them all to question my business judgment.”
Her eye roll made it clear what she thought of his opinions, and he clenched his jaw. She really didn’t know the first thing about him.
Dora plucked a printed sheet from the counter. “Here’s today’s schedule. How are you coming with the Parker-Wilson cake? Get me a sketch for the design they requested by noon.”
Without a smile or a thank-you, she turned and swished out of the kitchen, leaving Erik alone in the kitchen that he’d made his own. He might actively dislike his boss, but he loved this place: the spotless ovens, the industrial fridge full of creative possibilities, the shelves lined with baking staples and rarities.
An odd, energizing melancholy swept through him. He knew what he had to do. It’d be hard as fuck, but it was the right thing. He’d been ignoring his conscience for too long, and it was finally time.
A glance at today’s task sheet confirmed that one thing at least was going his way. He crammed the paper into the back pocket of his jeans, then slipped his apron over his head and hung it on the hook on the wall for the last time. Shoving the few personal items scattered throughout the kitchen into his backpack, he took one more look around the place that had given him his break in the big city. Then with a long sigh, he slung the bag over his shoulder and pushed through the door.
Dora was shifting tables to prep for the next batch of tasters due in later that morning. Good luck to her with that. “Are the rest of today’s samples ready?” she asked.
He gestured behind him to the kitchen, where he’d left a neat row of glossily iced cakes. “Done. Along with this weekend’s orders.”
She nodded absently, not glancing up from the chairs she was nudging into precise right angles. “Good. Carla and Chuck will handle the setup.”
He walked to the exit, more certain about his decision with each step. The dread was still there of course, but he needed to do his part to handle it, as the shouty redhead might say. “Cakes for the next two weeks are in the freezer for you to decorate.”
That got her attention. Her head snapped up, and her mean little eyes zeroed in on his face. “What do you mean? Where are you going? I didn’t authorize vacation.”
“I quit.” No take backs now. Those two little words were both horrifying and freeing, like that moment of suspended euphoria when you jump off a cliff but before gravity grabs your ankle and drags you to your doom.
“What?” Dora screeched. “Not funny, Erik. Get back to the kitchen. We have people due in thirty minutes.”
If he wasn’t all twisted into anxious knots, he might have enjoyed the utter confusion on her face when he didn’t leap to obey. Too bad for her if she was only now noticing that her baker had a mind of his own.
“You can’t just quit like this.” She started sputtering. “It’s… it’s irresponsible. It’s unprofessional!”
He paused with his hand on the doorknob and studied her with all the compassion she’d shown anyone different from her—which was to say none. “I’m ashamed that I stayed as long as I did.” Then he voiced a suspicion that had occurred to him more than once since he’d started working at the Cake Shoppe. “Were you ever really planning to retire and let me take over?”
Her eyes narrowed, confirming his darkest thoughts. She’d been stringing him along, and he’d been so hungry for the promise of a safe future that he’d let it happen.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m leaving before that meteor hits.”
Dora’s face registered a moment of blank shock before twisting in anger. “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re quitting the best job you’ll ever have over… those people?”
His jaw worked silently as he gathered the control he’d need to speak civilly. “People like my best friend, you mean? And the pastry chef who trained me?” Her face hardened with each word, but he pushed past his disgust to continue. “Or how about my favorite high school teacher? Our city’s mayor? The guy who just left here? And what about every single couple you’ve turned away that I don’t even know about? Hell yes, I’m quitting.”
The guilt and discomfort he’d been shoving down for months came boiling out, and his rush of words still hung in the air as he pushed open the door and walked out, the tinkle of the bell clashing with the painful throb of his heart as he took his first steps into an unknown future.
He’d made it close to three blocks before his pulse slowed and his legs stopped devouring the pavement. He’d paused in front of an empty CTA bus bench, so he sat down. Well, collapsed, more accurately. Now that he was clear of Dora, every cell in hi
s risk-averse body was screaming in disbelief. He was alone in Chicago with no job and no prospects on the horizon.
What the fuck had he just done?
He slumped forward to rest his head in his hands, and for a moment he was ten years old again and being tossed around during a rootless, chaotic childhood. The acid churning in his stomach reminded him of the promise he’d made to himself all those years ago: he would never again be unsure of where he’d be sleeping that night and what he’d be doing the following day. For all her vast flaws, Dora had always provided him with that.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and exhaled slowly. Okay, it wasn’t as bad as it could be. When he’d first come to this unfamiliar city, he’d dragged himself to every restaurant and bakery in the area, forcing himself to make small talk with strangers until he’d landed the job with Dora. Finding work hadn’t killed him then, and it wouldn’t kill him now. Probably. At least he knew a few more people in the industry this time, and he had the Cake Shoppe’s recent track record to point to, assuming Dora didn’t poison his reputation all over town.
“Fuck,” he said softly. The Cake Shoppe’s success had been the result of his unique flavors and decorative flourishes, and he was well aware of the value he brought to the kitchen. But even the thought of having to prove all that to a new boss settled heavy on his bones. He leaned back against the bench, closed his eyes, and tilted his face toward the morning sun.
Two paths branched in front of him. One was slow and steady and safe. The other required risk and uncertainty. And he had to choose.
If only it were a few years from now and he was in a better position to open his own shop. If he’d spent more time researching possible locations. If he were an entirely different person who had any kind of handle on marketing and publicity and all the nonbaking things it took to get a new business off the ground.
Pointless fantasies, boy. His grandfather’s warning rang in his head so clearly the scowling man might as well be sitting on the bench next to him. And in the end, it wasn’t a choice; he’d been opting for safe ever since his mother had dropped him at Pops’s door, a scrawny kid with a dirty face and an empty belly, desperate for discipline and boundaries.
