by Katie Allen
A free-spirited baker becomes the best kind of mess in her uptight landlord’s perfectly ordered life in this next installment of the Off Guard series by Katie Ruggle writing as Katie Allen
Leah loves everything about her bakery—the heavenly smells, the satisfaction of feeding people and, of course, unlimited cookies. The only thing she doesn’t like is her uptight landlord’s daily visits. Sure, the man’s drop-dead gorgeous, but for someone with an insatiable taste for treats, he’s anything but sweet.
Army vet Hamilton knows he comes off as rigid. He just can’t seem to bite his tongue around Leah—he might be a virgin but he can imagine a dozen better ways to use his mouth. But when the woman he considers absolutely delicious is threatened by an unwanted admirer, Hamilton intervenes, captivating Leah with his softer side.
Now the man Leah couldn’t avoid is swiftly becoming the one she can’t resist. Unrelenting temptation soon overwhelms them both, leading to an indulgence in everything they’ve been craving. But when past actions bring a fallout neither imagined, they’ll be forced to confront whether their affair is half-baked—or something to savor forever.
And don’t miss the first Off Guard book, Acting Lessons, available now!
This book is approximately 90,000 words
One-click with confidence. This title is part of the Carina Press Romance Promise: all the romance you’re looking for with an HEA/HFN. It’s a promise!
Carina Press acknowledges the editorial services of Deborah Nemeth
Also available from Katie Allen and Carina Press
Off Guard
Acting Lessons
Coming soon from Katie Allen and Carina Press in the Off Guard series
Marriage Lessons
Research & Desire
Erotic Experiments
Natural Selection
Carnal Chemistry
Double Dose
Also available from Katie Allen, writing as Katie Ruggle
Rocky Mountain Search & Rescue
Hold Your Breath
Fan the Flames
Gone Too Deep
In Safe Hands
Rocky Mountain K9 Unit
Run to Ground
On the Chase
BAKING LESSONS
Katie Allen
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Excerpt from Acting Lessons by Katie Allen
About the Author
Chapter One
There was something so irresistible about frosting.
Of all the things Leah made in her bakery, this simple whipped frosting was her absolute favorite. It wasn’t just the taste or the rush as a bite of straight sugar hit her bloodstream, although both those things were amazing wonders. What made it so utterly tempting, the Pied Piper of foods, was the glossy sheen it got when she’d beaten it long enough to fill it with air. As she slid her finger across the rubber spatula, she marveled at how light it was, how perfectly silky and shiny, like a wedding dress—an edible, sweet-tasting wedding dress. Lifting her finger toward her mouth, she closed her eyes, anticipating the moment when it touched her tongue.
“I hope you’re not going to put that utensil back in the frosting after touching it.”
Leah froze, the sweetness just short of her mouth as her eyes popped open. After the initial start, she recovered, sucking the frosting off her finger as she turned toward the intruder. The perfect moment was ruined, though. Occupied with presenting a bland, carefully unbothered face, she barely tasted the frosting.
Anthony Fitzgerald Hamilton III. As uptight and prissy as his name promised he’d be, her landlord was a thorn in her ass. Eyeing him, Leah took her time, slowly pulling her finger out of her mouth as she licked every last trace of frosting from it. As he watched, one corner of his mouth tucked in as it always did when she aggravated him. She added a hash mark on her mental scorecard. If she managed to get his eyelid to twitch, that was an extra five bonus points.
“Good morning, Mr. Hamilton.” She kept her voice as sweet as the frosting she’d just sampled, the frosting that still coated the spatula she was holding. “Going for a run?” If he was heading out for his daily 5:00 a.m. jog, she was running late. A glance at the clock reassured her that it was barely four. “You’re early today. Busy day ahead?”
His eyes flickered ever so slightly, his gaze dropping to the ground briefly, as if she’d thrown him off his judgmental course. Quickly, he recovered. “Yes.” He didn’t clarify which of her questions he was answering. “Well? You’re not putting that back in, are you?”
She smiled at him. “Of course not.” Making a big show of it, she dragged her tongue across the surface of the spatula. “I need to lick it clean first.”
His eyelid twitched.
Giving herself a mental fist-bump, Leah added five points to her total.
“You’re joking, of course.”
“Yes.” Running her finger over one of the flat sides of the utensil, she popped her frosting-laden digit into her mouth. Taking her time cleaning it off, she slowly drew her finger out. Hamilton watched the entire time. Now both of his eyelids were twitching. Leah debated whether that was ten points or twenty-five. Had she just annoyed him doubly or exponentially?
A tiny thread of guilt wove its way through her, as it always did when she talked with him. She wasn’t wired to torment someone, even a person as completely humorless and aggravating as Alexander Fitzgerald Hamilton the Third. Guilt punched holes in the enjoyment she was taking in torturing him, and she caved like an over-proofed loaf of bread. Using the spatula, she waved at the long butcher-block table, where an army of naked cream-filled cupcakes were lined up, waiting to be iced. “I made your favorite.”
His gaze flashed to the unfinished sweets and then back to her, and she saw a spark of red-hot desire that made her own body flare with heat in response. Cool it, she warned herself. Even though he was hugely attractive in an uptight sort of way, and more fit than a man with his sweet tooth had any right to be, Leah needed to nip her lustful impulses toward her landlord in the bud, especially because he wasn’t perving on her. That hunger in his gaze was all for the cupcakes.
She tossed the spatula into the bin of dirty dishes and washed her hands thoroughly, using the time to breathe and remind herself that crushing on her landlord would be a stupid, stupid thing to do. Grabbing a paper towel, she dried her hands and allowed herself to look at Hamilton. She immediately knew it had been a mistake. The raw want was still there, but he’d pulled it back, covered it with an expression that was almost tentative, like a shy kid who was dying to ask for a treat but was too timid to ask.
Once Hamilton saw that she was looking at him, his face regained its austere lines, but it was too late. Leah had been well and truly turned into mush. “Let me ice one for you.”
“I shouldn’t eat sugar before I run.”
Ignoring the protest, since Hamilton quite obviously didn’t mean it, as he was still staring at the cupcakes with longing, Leah grabbed a clean small metal spatula.
“Why not? You’ll burn it off in the first five minutes.” She slathered frosting on top of two of the cupcakes, glanced at Hamilton, and then iced one more. The man ran for two hours every morning, and his fine—and huge—arms and chest meant that he visited the gym a lot, too. He could handle three small cupcakes. “These won’t be as pretty as if I’d used a piping bag, but this is faster.” She swirled the spatula around the top of the third cupcake, noting with satisfaction that the frosting was almost as tall as the cupcake beneath it. “Here you go.”
When Hamilton didn’t move, she picked up the cupcakes—two in one hand and one in the other—and carried them over to him. She held them out as he eyed them with that same mix of bone-deep hunger and wavering self-control he always wore in her bakery, whether in the front during the day or in the kitchen in the pre-dawn hours. Leah wasn’t sure why, but Hamilton had gotten into the habit of stopping by before his morning run. His loft was right above her bakery, and her theory was that he couldn’t resist the smells of the cookies and cakes and croissants. She always fed him when he stopped by, so she was perpetuating the problem. He was her own very rich, very hot, very uptight stray dog.
Finally, his hand reached toward the cupcakes, slowly, as if he was still fighting with himself. Once he took one, though, it was gone in two bites, a look of absolute bliss spreading over his face. As soon as the first one was eaten, he was reaching for the other two. Any hesitancy had disappeared—as did the final cupcakes. As always when she watched Hamilton eat the food she’d made, Leah felt both gratified and startled at the speed at which he consumed her baked goods. He was normally so restrained that, when he finally gave in, it felt as if he lost all control. It always made Leah uncomfortably warm and a little melty inside.
“Thank you.” His words were stilted, his whole body held as stiffly as a G.I. Joe doll. The only thing that revealed his recent slip was a smudge of frosting on his lower lip.
Before she could reconsider, Leah reached out and cupped his chin. He froze as her thumb swept over that bit of frosting. His skin against her palm was hot and rough with stubble, but his lip was silky soft under her thumb. Without thinking, she released him and popped her thumb into her mouth, licking off the stolen taste of frosting before she realized what she’d just done.
She went still, her misbehaving thumb still in her mouth as her gaze jumped to meet his. They stared at each other for a long moment before Leah lowered her hand and broke the silence. “Sorry about that. It was just... I don’t know. Instinct?” She felt heat make its way up her neck and into her face, and she knew she must be as red as a cherry. Why had she thought it was a good idea to wipe frosting off of his mouth? Not only that, but then she’d licked it off, as if she was in some sort of cheesy porno. It was obvious that Hamilton thought that she was classless and overly friendly, and that was before she’d just fondled his mouth. She braced herself for his reaction, trying to stay calm by remembering that she still had ten months on the bakery’s rental contract.
There was no lecture, though. In fact, there was...nothing. Without responding to her babbled apology, Hamilton turned away, shoving through the back door into their shared stairwell. As Leah stood there in complete and silent humiliation, she heard the outside door thud as it closed. She was tempted to lock the kitchen door so that he couldn’t wander in after his run, with his muscles all tight and defined from exercise and clothes clingy from sweat. She didn’t lock it, though, telling herself that keeping it open made it easier for Quentin, the high-school student who worked a few hours before school, to get in. Ignoring the fact that Q had a perfectly good key that worked in both the front and back door locks, Leah turned back to her frosting.
Shaking off the adrenaline remaining after her Hamilton encounter, Leah grabbed a piping bag and an open-star tip—as well as an unlicked rubber spatula—and got back to work, pretending that a good and lusty portion of her brain wasn’t still with Hamilton as he started his run.
“Hi, Leah.” Q’s greeting made her jump a mile into the air.
“Q!” Her non-germ-infected spatula clattered against the side of the frosting bowl as she dropped the utensil. Wrapping her arms around his broad form, Leah gave him a huge hug. “How was DC? Did you have an amazing spring break? Are you happy you went, or do you wish you’d stuck around here and helped me with the enormous order for four hundred light-blue-frosting-filled, baby-sex-revealing cupcakes?”
With a final hard squeeze, she took a step back so she could look up at his face. As always, his smile was slow and wide and utterly infectious. “It was...interesting.” He moved to grab a clean apron from the stack in the dry pantry.
“Interesting good or interesting bad?”
Since Q’s hair was shorn very closely to his scalp, he skipped the hairnets and went straight to the hand-wash sink. “Interesting good, mostly.”
“Uh-oh.” Leah returned to shoveling frosting into the piping bag, concentrating just hard enough on what she was doing to not make a mess. Most of her attention was focused on Q. “There’s a story there. Possibly several.”
His slow, wide smile came again. Q didn’t answer, but he didn’t deny it. Instead, he glanced down at the army of filled cupcakes. “Mr. Hamilton’s favorite again?”
“I can’t help it.” She flipped a hand at him, shooing him away from the table and her too-obvious attempt at pleasing a certain prissy landlord. “It’s my nature. If someone isn’t happy, I feed them until they’re either happy or avoid me. Sir Hamilton does neither, so I am compelled to continue trying.” She didn’t add that his unbridled hunger for sweet things rang an inner bell she hadn’t even realized she had. It made her want to crawl inside him, but that was out of the question. All she could do was make him cupcakes.
“I know.” Q wasn’t lying. He did know. After all, she’d done the same thing to Q when he’d first started stopping by the bakery after football practice. Leah had a huge weakness for people who truly appreciated food, especially her food. Eventually she’d hired him, her one and only employee, and she had never, ever regretted it. Q picked up things quickly, had a borderline OCD approach to cleanliness, and was the only one who could wrangle the cappuccino machine into submission when it was feeling ornery. Also, Q had a fan club of besotted teenage girls that accounted for about half of the bakery’s sales between three and six on weekdays—and all day on Saturdays.
“Ignore my neuroses and tell me about DC.” Leah used her most stern voice.
Judging by the smile slowly stretching until it covered half of his face, Q wasn’t cowed by her tone. He did let the Mr. Hamilton thing drop and launched into an accounting of his week-long trip as he started washing dishes.
Leah welcomed the distraction and the change of subject. If Q hadn’t arrived, Hamilton’s visit would’ve replayed in her head over and over as she picked apart both of their reactions. It wasn’t healthy, this odd relationship she had with her landlord, but she couldn’t stop intentionally annoying him, feeling guilty, and then trying to make up for it by feeding him. He, apparently, couldn’t stop coming into her shop, being aggravated, and then eating what she gave him.
With a huge effort, Leah shoved Hamilton out of her brain and concentrated on what Q was saying. There’d be plenty of time to obsess about her landlord later.
* * *
Leah hated the hour between two and three. The lunch crowd had come, loaded up on sugar and carbs, and returned to their various workplaces, most likely to fall into a food coma. Q was still in school, so it was just Leah and her least favorite customer—Jude.
“Leah. Leah! Leah!”
The front of the bakery was tiny, with barely enough room for four café tables and the display cases. There wasn’t anywhere to hide. Her shoulders dropped with defeat as she looked up from the to-go boxes she was pretending to organize. “Sorry, Jude. I was deep in thought.” About how much I wish you would go away. “What can I get for you?”
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“Why don’t you come out here and sit with me?”
“Thank you, but I can’t.” Leah forced politeness into her smile. “The high-school crowd will be here soon, so I need to finish up back here before they descend on the place.” She gestured vaguely at the space behind her counter.
“You need to take breaks, too.” Jude pushed the chair across from him with his foot so it slid away from the table. “Take a load off. Just five minutes.”
Her smile felt stiff at the corners. “I really can’t. Thank you for the offer.” She started sorting through the unfolded bakery boxes again. Q was going to give her his patented disappointed look when he saw what a mess she was making of his neatly organized stack of boxes.
Her attempt at avoidance was all for naught, because Jude stood up and came over to the other side of the counter. “I got a promotion at work.”
“Congratulations,” she said as enthusiastically as possible. “That’s great.” The usual guilt was starting to seep in. It wasn’t that Jude was intentionally rude or obnoxious, but Leah still found him unbearable. When she looked at him objectively, he was attractive enough, in a he-seemed-like-a-nice-guy, I-never-would’ve-guessed-he-was-a-serial-killer kind of way. His hair was light brown, and he carefully cultivated a few days’ worth of stubble. He was tall and fairly trim, with muscular arms he liked to show off with too-tight polo shirts. As much as she didn’t want to think about her completely ripped landlord, Hamilton had become the model she unwillingly compared all men against. Whenever the two men were in the bakery together, Jude faded into the background, losing the little bit of distinction he’d had in comparison to the striking Hamilton. Leah caught herself in mid-landlord-thought and quickly dragged her attention back to the present. It’s like my brain is a dog and Hamilton thoughts are a meaty bone, she thought, annoyed at herself for falling into the trap once again.
“I should’ve mentioned it when I bought my croissant.” Jude leaned on the top of the display case, his palms pressed against the glass, and Leah swallowed a smirk. That was going to take the heat off of her, since Q would notice the smudgy case before he noticed the shuffled boxes. “Then you could’ve given it to me free as a congratulations-on-my-promotion present.”
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