by Amelia Wilde
The Baker’s Bad Boy
Get Wilde #2
Amelia Wilde
Contents
The Baker’s Bad Boy
Mailing List
Hello, hot stuff!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Epilogue
More from Yours Truly
Books by Amelia Wilde
The Baker’s Bad Boy
I don’t give second chances.
I’m definitely not giving one to Adam Walker. He humiliated me in high school. We’re done.
I don’t care if he’s older now. I don’t care if he’s so gorgeous it makes my heart ache. I don’t care if the sight of him makes me want to tear off my chef’s hat and the rest of my clothes and straddle him right here in the kitchen.
I don’t.
But one taste can’t hurt…can it?
Originally published as Silver Bells, Wedding Bells in We Wish You a Naughty Christmas, a time-limited multi-author bundle.
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Hello, hot stuff!
Welcome to my series of sweet, dirty short stories and novellas! These are bite-sized love stories for when you need a taste of that happily-ever-after vibe. Take a moment for yourself…and, as always, enjoy!
1
The cake is utterly perfect.
I put my hands on my hips and gaze at it. Four tiers, covered in flawless buttercream, the first and third done over with a hand-piped lattice pattern in a delicate matching color, though with a hint of glitter. Shining Swiss dots. The second and fourth I also did by hand, but the design is much more intricate—flowers so detailed they could leap off the cake, but in the same shade as the lattice.
Still, inside—inside is where it really shines. I made the vanilla bean cake in a marbled rainbow pattern I’d never done before. It took two days to get it right.
But get it right I did, because I am the best damn baker in Forestview, no matter what Cynthia Hayes thinks. I can practically see her now, sitting at home on Christmas Eve, stewing about the fact that Penelope Chadbourne chose me for her wedding.
I take a deep breath and release my built-up resentment into the air. I asked Cynthia for some tips on starting a bakery five years ago. To say she looked down her nose at me would be an understatement.
“You’ll never be able to compete with me.” Then she’d ushered me out the front door of her store—in a premium location on Main Street, of course—and closed it sharply behind me with a firm click.
Penelope Chadbourne is another story. Penny was a class above me in school at Forestview High—literally and figuratively. Nobody was more popular than Penny, and she basked in it, reveled in it. She once looked at me after an entire year on the same student council committee together and narrowed her eyes. “If you’d been here the entire time, I’d have remembered.”
“It’s Valerie Mitchell,” I’d whispered, but it was too late.
Of course, it’s easy to stay at the top of the food chain when you never leave Forestview.
That’s not fair. She did leave, just like I did, to go to some fancy college out east, where she connected with—you guessed it—another Forestview expat who, not coincidentally, makes a ton of money. Why they’re having a Christmas Eve wedding is beyond me, but there was no way I was going to turn down this job. Even if it means spending my Christmas Eve in the bakery, putting the finishing touches on and delivering the cake. It’s set to go in t-minus three hours, so all I have to is a little bit of disassembly and a lot of waiting.
This is my big shot.
I glance from the kitchen into the main store—not a sign of anybody, and I’ve been here for four hours with the open sign flipped, just in case. I baked a fresh batch of Santa Claus cookies and some pastries on the off chance that somebody would stumble across one of the few open stores on Fifth Street in Forestview on Christmas Eve and decide that baked goods were for them.
What’s Penelope Chadbourne’s dress going to be like?
The thought comes to mind just as I register the first flakes of snow drifting to the bare sidewalks. Winter is coming a little late to Forestview this year. I punch my fist into the air. Who needs a white Christmas when it just means a harrowing drive to the Forestview Country Club in…two hours and forty minutes?
I turn back to the cake and give it a firm nod. Everything is good to go. I just need to carefully, so carefully, remove the top two tiers and put them into their separate boxes, prepared just for this occasion.
I reach for the second tier and slide my hands underneath. They don’t shake at all as I lift the weight up, and to the side—in a few moments I’ll place them onto the table next to the bottom half, and then—
The front door of the shop slams open, the bell smashing against the window, and I’m so deep in thought about moving the cake, about Penny Chadbourne’s dress, that nagging thought that I wish I could be her, I wish I could be—that the sound startles me, my entire body jerks, and the cake—oh, God, the cake—
It slips.
It slips out of my hands in slow motion. I try to tighten my grip, though I try to shift my weight to get it back in balance, it just falls, colliding with the ground in an explosion of rainbow cake and Swiss dots.
I stand over it, mouth frozen half-open, and stare at the ruins of my career.
Which might seem dramatic, if you didn’t know how much sway Penny Chadbourne could have over my fledgling bakery.
After several long moments I turn my head to see what hellish creature has caused this to happen. At first, all I see through the kitchen door is a man, standing in the middle of the shop with his hands in his pockets and his head cocked a little to the side, like he’s trying to figure out what the noise was.
Well, it was just my dreams crashing to the ground, Mr…
My heart leaps in my chest, then plummets to the ground next to the pile of buttercream frosting and broken dreams.
It’s the last person I want to see in the world.
2
“Is…is everything okay?”
His voice, despite the fact that we haven’t seen each other for nine years, is exactly the same. The sound of it would shock me to the core if I wasn’t already rendered numb by the fact that the most important cake of the year—of my lifetime—is half-destroyed on the floor of the bakery, with two and a half hours to go until it absolutely has to be at the Forestview Country Club.
I tear my eyes away from him and back to the rainbow mess, then back to his…oh, god, his body, the sheer masculine perfection of it underneath an army green jacket, the tattoos he started to get in high school snaking down to just over his right wrist bone.
“Shit.” I mean to say it under my breath, but it comes out louder than that. Much louder. Almost a yell. My voice is high and thin with panic. Two and a half hours.
All at once, my body snaps into motion like it never stopped. I rush out through the open kitchen door and come around in front of the counter until we’re sharing the same space in the center of the store, only I don’t stop. I do inhale a big whiff of him as I go by, and my insides go liquid at the scent—somethin
g soapy, spicy, him.
It had to be Adam Walker. It just had to be.
I stride to the door like it’s the most important thing I’ll ever do and flip the open sign so that CLOSED faces out toward the street. Then I flip the switch that turns off the icicle lights I strung around the front windows.
Then I turn back toward him, my heart pounding.
“We’re closed.”
He straightens up. “You were open a second ago, when I walked—”
“Something’s come up.” I raise my chin a little and fix him with what I hope is a steely glare. “Is there anything I can bag up for you before you go?” I put the slightest emphasis on the word “go.”
He turns back toward the display case, which contains all of the cookies and pastries I made this morning. This should be an easy decision. While he’s not looking I smooth my hair back, tucking a few loose strands back into the protective netting that covers most of my head. Damn it. If I’d known I was going to see Adam again today, I would have worn—
This. I would have worn this. I would have worn the black pants and fitted top I wear to the bakery every day, with my white apron over the top. I would not have put on anything special. Not for him. Not after—
“How much are the cookies?”
“Two-fifty.”
“And the pastries?”
Oh, my God. “Listen. You can have three of each of them. On the house.” I hustle back around behind the counter and snatch up a piece of wax paper and one of the bags with my logo on it.
Adam steps to the side, craning his neck to see into the kitchen. “What fell?”
“Nothing fell.” The lie is instinctual, though I’m not sure why it makes any difference if Adam Walker knows that I’ve destroyed half of the most important cake in the world.
“It sounded like something fell.”
I stop shoveling the baked goods into the bag and look across the counter at him. When he senses my gaze he looks back at me. His eyes are attentive, blue, deep, electric—just how I remembered. I remember those eyes in other places, too. Like behind the gym, where he kissed me for the first time, and my entire body lit up with a need for him like I never experienced in my life, before or since.
The truth tumbles out of my mouth before I can stop it. “A cake.”
“Oh, shit.” The corner of his mouth twitches upward, and my heart seizes.
“Yeah. So, if you could just go, that would be—”
“Is there anything I can do?”
Since when does Adam Walker care about helping me?
“No.”
The moment the word is out of my mouth I want to shove it back in. The truth is, if he has steady hands, if he has any patience whatsoever, there’s a chance that he could—
No. No way.
After what he did, I never want to owe him anything.
“You sure about that?”
Every cell in my body aches for him, for his strong hands on my body, even though it’s been nine years and his hands are hardly the same as they were back then. They’re stronger now, a little bit rougher. What’s he been doing since then?
My mouth drops open to ask him, but instead, the mortifying truth rears its head.
“Not…not exactly. I’m a little pressed for time.”
“What kind of cake is it? Birthday?”
“You think I’d be closing my shop over a dropped birthday cake?”
He gives half a shrug, his eyes shining, but he doesn’t smile.
“It’s a wedding cake.”
He raises his eyebrows, nods.
“It has to be at the country club in two and a half hours.”
“Put down that bag.” Adam starts shrugging off his jacket. “We have to hurry.”
3
I hurry into the kitchen ahead of him, my heart jumping and dancing in my chest, competing with the sinking feeling in my gut at the sight of the fallen cake.
Adam Walker isn’t the type to show up after nine years and pitch in. He’s a total asshole who never cared about me, not even a little.
I raise my hand to my lips as I rush over to the handwashing sink. Even after all this time, the sensation of his mouth on mine, kissing me as tenderly as anyone ever did back in high school—although admittedly it wasn’t that many people—still burns underneath my fingertips, almost as badly as my cheeks did when the gym doors opened to reveal six of his friends from the basketball team.
In slow motion he jerked away from me, grinning into the sneers on their faces.
“Walker, what are you doing?” Colton Chamberlain, the king of the basketball team, had glanced at me like I was a bug to be crushed under his shoes.
“Nothing,” Adam said quickly. “Just fooling around.”
He shot me a look then that I read as dismissal. For weeks I afterward I tried to convince myself that there was some sorrow there, but when he ignored me, stone cold, in the hallways, I let the flame die out.
Or so I thought.
I wash my hands with a meticulous focus, not daring to look back over my shoulder in case he’s watching, then dry them. Squaring my shoulders, I turn back to face the destruction of my baking career.
“You should probably wash—oh.” My words die in my throat. Adam is sweeping up the remnants of the cake with a broom he located with startling efficiency. While I stand there like a frozen idiot, he tips the last of the crumbs into the waste bin I keep in the supply closet. Then he rolls the bin back into the closet, hangs up the broom and dustpan on their designated hooks, and moves toward me.
The space between us closes, narrows, and something goes tight and hot in my chest. Is the air thinning out in here? His eyes are an electric blue even under the fluorescent lights of the kitchen. I turn half-toward him, my breath shallow, and he stops a foot away, the energy between us crackling.
Our gaze locks. I’m painfully aware of the fact that I’ve been here for several hours, that there’s probably at least a little flour in my hair, that I’m wearing the most ridiculous hairnet in all of history.
His mouth turns up in the same half-smile that drove me absolutely wild in high school and I return it without having to think. Maybe none of this matters. Maybe he came here because—
“Adam,” I say, at the same time he says, “Excuse me.”
“What?”
He cocks his head to the side. “Gotta wash up—there’s no way I can help you salvage this cake disaster with dirty hands.”
The color surges to my face, but Adam doesn’t mention it. He just waits patiently while I step to the side and flee as far away as I can get—to the oversize fridges where the quarter-done replacement layers are waiting.
I always have a backup—every baker does—but this time I got overconfident. This time, I didn’t finish the full decoration because—and I could completely slap my past self across the face—I spent every waking moment over the past week getting the “official” cake just right.
God. Cynthia Hayes is probably right. Cynthia Hayes—she wouldn’t even be sweating right now. She’d just pull out the replacement layers and drive smugly to the country club without missing a beat.
It’s all I can do not to drop my head into my hands. Instead, I pull the door of the fridge open and remove the first layer—the third one, second-smallest, and carry it gingerly to the decorating table. Then the top layer, the smallest.
All I have going for me is that they’re frosted with buttercream. That is as far as I got.
Adam comes to stand beside me and every hair on the back of my arms stands up. I want to reach across for his hand, but he makes no move toward me, just considers the two halves of the cake.
“So…I’m assuming all this decoration is supposed to match.”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m assuming it took a lot longer than…” He raises his arm, turns his wrist. He still wears a cheap watch. “Two and a half hours to do all this.”
“At least…at least these ones are smaller.”
&n
bsp; He laughs, and the sound sends bubbles of delight through my torso.
“You’ve got that going for you.”
What do you have going for you? I want to ask. Where are you on your way to?
“Let’s get started.”
“What can I do?” Now he does put his hand on my arm, and I turn toward him. His eyes are overflowing with sincerity. “Anything you need, I’ll do.”
4
“Okay.” My breath hitches in my lungs, but I draw in a lungful of air and try to steady myself. “The first thing we—” The “we” slips out before I can stop it, but with two hours and fifteen minutes to go I don’t have time to do anything but notice the flash of a smile on Adam’s face as I flick my eyes from the cake on the table over to him, then back again. “The first thing we need to do is make the frosting for the decorations.”
He turns away from me, somehow knowing exactly which bowl I prefer to mix everything while I flit around the kitchen, gathering together the ingredients. It’s a simple buttercream with the perfect ratio of edible glitter to give it that sparkle and shine. My clients love it.
At the thought my heart picks up speed. The clients that will drop me like a hot potato if word gets out that I ruined Penelope Chadbourne’s wedding.
I shake my head a little as I run the mixer through the bowl one final time. That kind of thinking is ridiculous. If she’s really so fragile that a tiny mishap with the cake could derail her entire day, she has some serious reevaluation to do.
“Done.” I scoop a generous portion of the frosting into a brand-new piping bag, seal it off, and lay it on the table. “Oh—”
