by Sara Whitney
“This size is a middle layer. We’ll do a smaller cake on top and two larger ones on the bottom. The shape was just a suggestion.”
“I love it,” Byron breathed, excitement suffusing his thin, drawn face for the first time since he’d walked into Love in Bloom Flowers. “It’s perfect.”
“Just wait till you taste it,” Erik said.
Richard laughed. “Damn, fella, that’s some swagger.”
He shrugged and picked up the onyx cake cutter. No false modesty here; cake he was good at. He made the first cut and held back a smile when a tiny squeak emerged from Byron’s throat as the blade traveled through the pristine iced surface.
He plated the first pieces and set them in front of the two men, who gave identical moans of approval after their first bites of the hazelnut. Erik folded his arms and took it all in. This was his favorite part. No huge reception hall full of guests losing their minds over his creations was as satisfying as watching the two people at the center of the day enjoying the first taste of their wedding cake.
“It tastes even better when I’m not eating it in a hospital room,” Byron said.
“Everything tastes better outside a hospital.” Erik picked up the cutter again. “Peach-pecan next.”
The men watched in surprise as he produced a new variety from a different side of the cake. He’d baked all their flavor choices and cobbled them together into a Frankenstein’s monster cake that he’d iced, both to show off the technique and to make sure everyone was on board with the final choices.
After the first bite of the peach, Richard sighed and said, “Tastes like home,” which was the exact response Erik wanted.
Once they’d approved of the pistachio crunch and the cardamom, Richard leaned back and patted his stomach. “That was the best thing we’ve eaten in weeks. Right, sweetie?”
Byron nodded at Erik. “Thank you so much. Truly. The samples you mailed were incredibly thoughtful, but seeing it all put together like this…” He swallowed convulsively, and Richard caught his hand again.
“It may not be exactly the wedding we thought we’d have”—Richard glanced at the cane resting against Byron’s stool—“but we’re so damn lucky we’re still having it.”
The palpable emotion running between the two men made Erik’s throat tighten. Since when did the whole wedding scene fill him with longing for what he didn’t have?
The answer was obvious, of course. Josie was the invisible presence in this meeting, the redhead who linked them all. And he’d been too much of a chickenshit to do more than text her once and hope she’d forgive or forget or… fuck, he didn’t know. Leave him be? Vanish from his memory so he could move on with his quiet, lonely life?
He grunted and pushed the thought away. “Want to take the leftovers home?”
“Oh, of course,” Richard said. “It may be all we eat between now and next Saturday. Nuptial nerves and all that. And I’m hoping we can take some with us on our honeymoon.”
Lily joined the conversation then. “Oh, where are you headed?”
“Camping at Big Sur,” Byron said.
Erik flicked a glance at Richard’s slim-fit suit and shined-up shoes, and the man raised a brow. “Don’t let my fine exterior fool you. This Georgia boy can hunt.”
“Oh boy, here we go.” Byron sighed. “And we made those plans before my new lack of mobility.”
“Then we’ll just have to get a hotel room and spend all our time in bed,” Richard murmured, and once again Erik was reminded of what it looked like when two people were truly in love.
Once the kissing had died down, Lily asked, “Can I steal them now to finalize the flowers?”
“Sure. I’ll start boxing.” Erik stacked their empty plates and moved his portion of the show-and-tell off the countertop, carrying it all into the back room where he rinsed the plates and set about transferring the remains of the cake to the glossy box he’d brought with him for that purpose. Before their… whatever… Josie had ordered large stickers with his logo and contact information on them, and as he’d stuck them on a few boxes that morning, he’d wondered if she’d be pleased he was bowing to her branding efforts and plastering his face on something.
His hands stilled as he closed up the box. He was a baker with his own bakery. It was real, thanks to her. And Josie had vanished from his life, a little sooner than expected, but better now than later, after he’d gotten really attached, right? The past week had only felt a little bit like torture.
He dawdled in the back as long as he could before pushing through the swinging door to face Josie’s friends once again. He set the box in front of Richard and, transaction concluded, prepared to gather his things and depart.
“Hey, Man Bun.”
He turned slowly, frowning to mask the pang in his heart at hearing Josie’s pet name for him. Richard tapped a finger to his lips and studied him for a long moment.
“You’re the one setting up the cake next week, right?”
Erik nodded, already dreading whom he might bump into there. Okay, dreading bumping into Josie. It would probably be smart to set it all up early and get the hell out.
“Have you got plans afterward?”
“I— No. Why?” he asked suspiciously.
Richard glanced at his fiancé, who inclined his head.
“Consider yourself invited to the wedding,” Byron said. “Set up the cake and stay for the whole thing.”
Erik opened his mouth to decline, but Richard jumped in. “Please. We had a few last-minute cancellations, and you’ve been so kind to us. Just come and watch us say a few vows. Then you can enjoy the sight of everyone demolishing all your hard work.”
“We promise not to smash any cake into each other’s faces,” Byron said with a delicate shudder.
“Thanks, but—”
“Oh, come on. Live a little.” That last voice belonged to Lily, and he turned to her in surprise. She shrugged. “They just invited me and Grant too. We can sit together at the oddballs table.”
“No oddballs at our wedding,” Richard said. “Just old friends and new ones. We’re grateful to you both, and we have a few empty seats to fill. No pressure. And it would mean so much to us.”
No. Say no. For God’s sake, man, open your mouth and say no. But one thought strangled his vocal cords: filmy blue fabric. He hadn’t been able to forget the dress Josie would wear as Richard’s attendant during the ceremony. It was soft. It was short. And God, did he want to see her in it even if she spent the night freezing him out, as he deserved. The dress had come to represent everything elegant and untouchable about her since she’d shown it to him when he’d visited her apartment, and it had featured in more than a few of his solo shower fantasies since then. And now he was being offered the chance to see her wearing it in the flesh.
Only an idiot would say no. Only a masochist would say yes.
“Thank you. I’ll be there,” he said gruffly, and this time Lily joined Richard and Byron in a round of meaningful glances.
Dammit. This was a setup, wasn’t it? They were plotting a scenario presumably involving Josie and either his humiliation or his apology. He should tell them all to go to hell.
And yet. This would give him the opportunity to explain things to her in person since she was only communicating with him in terse emails ever since last Sunday. Question was, did he have enough words inside him to do it?
He didn’t have an answer by the time he left Lily’s shop, rode the train home, and walked the block to his apartment. Well, Gina’s apartment now; she was officially his subletter, and he was officially moved into the second floor of the bakery.
He let himself into the transformed space; in less than a week, she’d turned it from a hovel into a home. His feet sank into the jewel-toned rug on the floor, and he set his serving supplies on a coffee table decorated with oversized art books and a decorative bowl of some sort. In the corner, Gina was engrossed in a project on her elaborate computer setup.
“Hi.” She swi
veled in her chair to face him. “How’d it— Whoa, why do you look shell-shocked?”
He shook his head and crossed to the bedroom without a word, laser-focused on the contents of one of the clothing boxes he hadn’t moved to his new place yet. He found it in the second one he pulled open: his black suit, haphazardly folded halfway down the stack.
“Going somewhere?” Gina asked from behind him.
He hated the material under his fingertips. He hadn’t worn it since Pops’s funeral, and he’d hoped never to have a reason to put it on again. “A wedding apparently.”
“The one that Fancy’s in?”
“Josie,” he said automatically, noting her amused smile out of the corner of his eye.
She pulled the suit from his hands. “Yeah, I don’t think you can go to a swank Chicago wedding in an off-the-rack suit from Liberty Valley, Iowa, especially since it barely fit you the last time you wore it.” She turned and eyed him speculatively, tapping a finger to her lips. “As a matter of fact, I need to upgrade my wardrobe a little bit too. A post-breakup, new workplace kind of thing. You know what that means?”
“No way.” But his mind got stuck on the memory of Josie’s little blue dress and of Jake, the suit-wearing, Jeep-driving, all-smiles accountant. That’s the kind of guy she liked, and even if he’d never be that guy, he could maybe, maybe dress like it for a night.
Gina must’ve seen the surrender on his face. “Yesssss,” she crowed. “Time to go shopping.”
Eighteen
“What’s so interesting?”
Josie jumped and almost dropped her phone. “Nothing!”
Richard pursed his lips in amusement. “Oh sure. That’s convincing.” Then he struck like a snake and plucked the device from her hand. “Today’s supposed to be all about me, remember?”
She looked pointedly down at herself, kitted out in the best-maid dress, and then at their surroundings. They were tucked away in one of the dressing rooms at the swank Parker House, where Richard and Byron were set to exchange their vows in less than an hour.
“This hubbub is all for you,” she pointed out, but he only had eyes for the images filling her phone screen.
“Aha!”
Good Lord. “Aha what?”
“You’re thinking about the delicious baker.” He smirked when she snatched her phone back and put her screen to sleep.
“I’m just making sure the website loaded properly! I put the final images up this morning.” She tucked the phone into her pocket—oh yes, her best-maid dress had pockets—and turned to the mirror, trying to approximate nonchalance as she studied her appearance. But she felt Richard’s eyes scorching the back of her neck.
“Sure.” He moved to stand next to her and adjusted the cuffs of his sleeves under his wedding suit. “You’re worried about the website. That’s why you had the page open to a close-up of Erik’s hot Nordic face.”
The only words of defense her scarlet-painted lips were able to conjure were “I like looking at him. Sue me.” She lifted her chin and poked at the pile of curls pinned to the top of her head.
Next to her, Richard said nothing, not even a quip or a jokey insult. She didn’t trust that silence at all.
“What did you do?” She spun to face him, turning so quickly that her chiffon skirt swished through the air before settling back against her thighs.
“Me? Nothing! It’s my wedding day. Why would you accuse me of scheming?” His face was all innocence, and she studied it with narrowed eyes.
“I didn’t accuse you of scheming, which tells me that’s exactly what you’ve been doing. Guilty conscious much?”
“I’m wounded.” He pressed a hand to his heart, taking care not to wrinkle his jacket. He’d chosen all white to go with his black tuxedo pants, while in the other dressing room, Byron was in all black and hanging out with his brother until go-time.
Richard’s phone vibrated in his pocket, and he fished it out. “Hey, could you run to the entrance and see if they have enough programs? I’m worried we didn’t make enough.”
“Okaaaay.” One didn’t argue with the groom on his wedding day, although what did he expect her to do if they didn’t have enough? She slid into her strappy gold heels and exited the dressing room, crossing the rustic wide-plank flooring of the open room where the ceremony would take place. A smattering of guests had already claimed seats in the rows of white folding chairs, and she waved at a cluster of people she recognized from Byron’s office as she breezed past.
Thirty seconds later, she’d confirmed that the program supply was holding up just fine, although Richard’s elderly aunt was ever so grateful that she’d checked to be sure. And two seconds after that, she laid eyes on something truly magnificent.
Erik. Andersson. Was in. A suit.
And not just any suit, but a beautifully cut navy-blue suit that accentuated his wide shoulders, his trim waist, his impossibly long legs. She’d deny it if anybody asked her later, but when she caught her first glimpse of him, silhouetted in the entrance to the venue with the late-afternoon sun pouring over his shoulders and his hair tied back in what she could only describe as a formal man bun, well… she might have whimpered a little.
Almost as if he heard her—and please God, don’t let him have heard her—his gaze sought her out across the space that separated them. The color of his suit made his eyes glow an even lighter blue, and her legs carried her across the distance before she was consciously aware of what she was doing. She met him just inside the door.
“Hi.” She was so overwhelmed by the shock of seeing him in the world’s most important formal wear that she completely forgot to be mad at him.
His response came even more slowly than usual as he dragged his gaze from her meticulously coiffed hair down to her gold-tipped toes and all the way back up again. “Hey.” He didn’t smile, but the intensity of his eyes told her that something was going on behind that calm mask.
“You own a suit, huh?” she said faintly. It was the best banter she could come up with; her higher-order brain functions didn’t seem to be working at the moment.
“Yep.” Even in the face of her judgmental question, his voice was as neutral as ever, and when he nonchalantly flicked open the button holding his jacket together—bam, a few of her wet parts were suddenly dry, and a few of her dry parts were suddenly wet. Mother Mary, have mercy.
“So this is the dress.” His eyes seemed to have gotten stuck on the neckline of her bodice.
“Y-yes,” she said faintly, the heat of his gaze flustering her almost as much as the sight of his arms in that fitted material.
He quirked his lips and took a step closer to her to avoid a large family that had just entered the hall. He smelled so good. Had he always smelled this good? Josie suddenly realized that this was the longest stretch of days that she’d gone without seeing him since their first meeting on the L.
“So I—” she started to say at the same time that he asked, “Can we—?”
They both broke off with a laugh, although it was slightly strained and nothing at all like their usual “I tease, you brood” vibe. Then she remembered her unwise kiss attack, and the smile dropped from her face. With dread pumping through her veins, she surveyed the entryway, looking for his surprise fiancée. Or not-fiancée. Whatever. But she didn’t see any trace of the friendly-faced Iowan whose man she’d accidentally tried to steal. Was he here alone? And why was he here at all?
Silence fell during her not-at-all subtle perusal, and she forced a laugh. “I should probably get back to Richard. You’ll recognize me during the ceremony. I’ll be the one up front in blue.”
Something moved behind Erik’s eyes when she said the word “blue,” and he did another of those long, slow sweeps of her body that should’ve offended her for the sheer male gazey-ness of it. Instead, it ignited a low, slow burn in her stomach. Unsure of what to say to defuse this strange tension or if she maybe wanted to ratchet it up until they both exploded, she turned on her stiletto heel and saun
tered away, her skirt fluttering in her wake.
The whole ceremony seemed to last only a few minutes. Richard and Byron exchanged sweet vows that they’d written in separate corners of the hospital room over the past weeks, after which Josie shed happy tears as she watched them walk down the short aisle as a married couple, hand in hand. Byron, who’d always been slender to start with, had returned from his hospital stay gaunt and a little gray around the gills, but today he was lit from within.
“He looks so much better, don’t you think?” she whispered to Byron’s brother, Cecil, as they walked arm in arm after the newlyweds on the way to the reception hall.
“Much better. I wish Mom and Dad had come.”
She squeezed his arm. At twenty, Cecil was eight years younger than Byron and the only member of his immediate family who’d kept in touch after Byron came out in college.
“Well, he’s thrilled you’re here.” She smiled up at him as he escorted her to their assigned table, where she set her small bouquet of ferns and wildflowers down next to her plate. Lily had worked wonders on the rustic arrangement, which matched the naturalistic swags of greenery that decorated the round tables in the intimate reception hall under the tulle-and-twinkle-lights-festooned ceilings.
By now the rest of the guests were trickling in to share their good wishes with the couple before finding their assigned tables, and she watched with a giddy smile as Richard and Byron received hug after hug from the people who loved them. They deserved this beautiful day.
Finn and her two escorts joined the throng of well-wishers, and after they exchanged a few happy words with the grooms, they headed toward Josie’s table. Tom, of course, only had eyes for his girlfriend, pulling out her chair and smoothing a hand over her exposed shoulder as he took the seat next to her, while Jake only had eyes for his phone as he took his seat next to Josie. Six years ago, his lack of attention would have been a crushing blow to her ego. Now it was only a mild bummer that she was seated next to a guy who looked good enough to eat, or at least to lick for a few hours, but neither of them was interested.
