by Maggie Wells
The timing might have been awkward and inconvenient, but he’d never tire of being the guy Chrissie greeted with fervor. He also knew his daughter’s unbridled joy at seeing him was a phenomenon destined to fade. The boy who’d once greeted him with equal enthusiasm trudged through the door, scuffing his sneakers across the carpet. Tyler’s backpack sagged off his narrow shoulders, the zipper gaping open. A second later, Rosie walked in, brandishing a sheaf of papers.
“All of these are for me? You’re not joking, are you?” the young woman asked his son. “Because if they are, I’m hanging them on the fridge.”
Tyler’s cheeks flushed pink, but he shrugged as if he didn’t love having Rosie display his artwork. The boy’s eyes narrowed as he watched his baby sister spin and dance in circles, unloading a garbled monologue of all the day’s activities in one long stream of consciousness. The minute she stopped for air, Mike greeted his son.
“Hey, big guy. How were things today?”
Again, Tyler shrugged a bony shoulder. “Fine.”
Mike held out his arm and Tyler moved in for a quick embrace. The papers crinkled and rustled as he gave the boy a pat. “I missed you guys.”
“Oh! Daddy! Daddydaddydaddydaddy,” Chrissie persisted.
Mike let Tyler slip from his grasp and shifted his attention to the girl beside him.
“Igoddatar,” she announced, flinging her arms out wide and twirling in celebration of this incomprehensible accomplishment.
As always, Mike looked to Tyler for translation. His son rolled his eyes. “She got a star,” he reported dutifully.
Giving a suitably impressed gasp, Mike gaped at the whirling dervish whipping around the outer office. “You did? A star? For what?”
“Nap!” Chrissie cried with glee. “I napped. I nappednappednapped.”
The little girl’s singsong happiness proved to be the perfect cover for Mike’s low, helpless groan. Chrissie had never been the best sleeper, even as an infant. As a toddler, the results of a nap were a double-edged sword. On one hand, the extra sleep put his temperamental daughter in an invariably good mood. On the other, her high spirits would last past what was already a combative bedtime and sometimes well into the night.
Rosie cast a wan smile in his direction. “A pink metallic star. Looks great on her chart.”
“I bet it does,” he replied dryly.
“You about to head out on a killing spree?” Rosie asked, nodding to the knife he’d thrust into the air.
“Oh! No. I, um…” The image of Georgie’s long bare legs and baby doll dress flashed into his head. “A client,” he managed to stammer, but with his hands full and a couple of kids crowding him, there was no way to duck for cover. “Georgianna Walters, the woman from Getta Piece Bakery, is here to sign her contracts.” He waved the papers as if they provided adequate defense.
“I think he was planning to hold me at knifepoint until I did.”
Georgie’s low, honey-sweet voice cut through the din in the outer office. Both kids whirled to stare at the stranger framed in his office doorway. Rosie turned, too, but she did a better job of hiding her astonishment than his offspring. Georgie smiled at the kids, but addressed her comments to Rosie.
“I’m sorry, I know I dropped in late in the day, but I had a pick-up for a bachelorette party, and I had to wait to close.” She approached and extended a hand to Rosie with the same straightforward set to her jaw as she’d used on him the other day, but her ready smile seemed to be tempered a bit. “I’m Georgie Walters.”
“Rosie Herrera.”
Georgie hunkered down in front of Tyler, short dress, high heels, and all. If the kid were about ten years older, he might have keeled over at the sight. Mike felt his blood pressure heading for stroke levels.
“Hi, I’m Georgie.”
Tyler blinked once, then took her hand. “Georgie is a boy name.”
She wrinkled her nose, and the tiny gemstone blinked like a beacon in the overhead lights. “I know. My grandpa’s name was George. My mom tried to girlify it by naming me Georgianna, but everyone calls me Georgie.”
“Pretty!” Chrissie exclaimed, extending one pudgy hand toward Georgie’s nose.
At last, instinct kicked in. Mike dropped the contracts. Everyone froze as the pages fluttered to the floor like feathers. Before Chrissie could complete her mission, he gripped her hand and pulled her grasping fingers away from Georgie’s face.
“No. Uh-uh.”
“Pretty!” his daughter insisted, her voice rising with indignation.
“Yes, very pretty, but no. No touching.”
Georgie grinned and tugged at the ruffled edging of his baby’s play-grimy top. “Yes, you are very pretty.” She shot a look of shocked disbelief at Mike as she rose. “Great kids.”
She directed the comment to Rosie, which earned her an enigmatic smile from his sharp-eyed office manager. Rosie sent a sly look in Mike’s direction. “They have their days.”
“I brought some cake,” Georgie announced. The kids squealed with delight and immediately started to clamor for cake. On meeting Rosie’s steady gaze, she winced. “Oops. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. They probably haven’t had dinner yet, have they?”
“Not yet,” Mike said, breaking into the weird eye contact game the two women were playing. Focusing on Rosie, he cleared his throat. “Hey, thanks for getting them for me. I owe you.”
“I’ve added two-hundred-and-fifty thousand dollars to your bill,” she informed him. With an extra-bright smile, she offered her hand to Georgie again. “Nice to meet you. If you have any questions about the service or need to make changes to scheduling, call me here at the office. I keep track of all the calendars and they are required by law to answer their phones when I call.”
“By law?” Georgie asked, her face a mask of confusion.
“Rosie’s law,” Mike clarified.
Hitching her bag high on her shoulder, Rosie headed for the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mike. Night, monsters!”
“Night, Rosie!” the kids chorused.
The door closed after her and Georgie stared at it. “She’s not—”
“No. Rosie’s our office manager, but these two belong to me.”
“Can we have cake?” Tyler asked, his eyes pleading and his tone wheedling.
Shooting Georgie a look of regret, he shook his head. “We really should wait until after dinner, bud.”
“You weren’t gonna wait till after dinner,” Tyler pointed out.
“Cakecake-cakety-cake!” Chrissie stopped spinning long enough to clutch the skirt of Georgie’s dress with both hands and tip her head all the way back. “Love cake!”
Georgie beamed down at the little girl. “I do, too.”
Tyler saw his opening. “Me, three.” He gazed at Mike, the very picture of hopeful innocence. “Don’t you, Daddy?”
“Good Lord,” Mike groaned in defeat. He nodded to his office. “Go, but don’t touch. Not one finger in the frosting. You got me?”
“Gotchu,” Tyler answered, shaking the backpack off his shoulders and making a break for the office.
Not to be outdone, Christine executed a flailing spin before darting for the door. “Gotchu!”
The second they were alone, Georgie looked him dead in the eye. “Married?”
“Divorced.”
“How long?”
“Almost two whole months, but separated two years.”
“Wow. Custody battle?”
Mike wasn’t entirely successful at keeping the rancor from his voice. “Yes, but not for the kids.”
She blinked in surprise. “No?”
“House, couch, everything but the kids.”
“Wow.”
“Their mother moved to Boston to be a big shot. Though she’d get a larger settlement from selling than from a buyout.”
The rapid-fire exchange took less than a minute but left him reeling. He chanced a glance at the open doorway and called out a stern reminder. “No touching!”
When their eyes met again, Georgie wet her lips. “You know, when I said I wanted you on this job, I was hoping there might be some touching.”
He swallowed, both intimidated and exhilarated by her take-no-prisoners approach. “I was hoping you were hoping so,” he managed to say at last.
“So we’re clear?”
He shook his head slowly, changed to a nod, then switched back to the negative. “Not at all. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in five years, so sometimes I need a minute to catch on.”
“I’m proposing a professional relationship with…personal attention.”
“Sounds highly unethical,” he said, his voice sounding choked to his own ears.
“Most likely is.” She cocked her head. “You know, we only have about ten more seconds before one of them does a face plant in your cake.”
“Probably too late.”
Georgie ran her fingertips lightly over the buttons on his shirt. “I suppose you’re chock-full of those pesky ethics.”
He caught her hand before she reached his belt and drew her fingers to his lips, never breaking eye contact. “I thought I was.”
“And now?”
He ran the pad of his thumb over the slick plastic bandage wrapped around her finger. What she was suggesting was wrong on so many levels he didn’t know if he could count them all. But for the first time in his life, Mike found he didn’t care about making the smart move. He placed a gentle kiss to the crown on Princess Clarissa’s head. “I think I was wrong. I’m probably as much of a scoundrel as Prince Johann,” he said, naming the unscrupulous villain from the animated film.
Georgie gasped. “No.”
“Is that a deal-breaker?”
“God, no. Bad boys are quite the turn-on,” she said in a rush.
He glanced at his office door. “This is the weirdest conversation I’ve ever had with a woman.”
“Surreal,” she agreed cheerfully.
“What do we do now?”
“Now?” She arched her eyebrows, looking shocked he even asked. “Now, we let them eat cake. This’ll keep.”
Chapter 3
Georgie did what she always did when the world got too complicated for her—she baked. While other people complained about insomnia, she latched on to any excuse to leave her too-empty bed and find refuge in her stainless steel palace. The kitchen she’d built in the back of Getta Piece took a sizable chunk of capital, but as far as Georgie was concerned, carving out her own slice of the world was worth every penny.
She smirked as she hit the switch and the commercial mixer ground to life. When she’d created her business plan, she had carefully omitted any mention of her intention to sell novelties from her storefront. Her father, as the administrator of the family trust, would never have approved such a thing. He was a public figure, after all. A political legend. And her only brother appeared to be set to follow in his footsteps. Gerald Carson Sr. would never have put his stamp of approval on the Va-Va-Velma cake. Even if he did like to keep a stable of similarly built young women on his payroll.
Georgie didn’t mess with her father. The man was ruthless and cold. A power pusher of the first order. She’d made the mistake once of tossing out a double-entendre about the number of women he liked to keep on his “staff” and found her cash flow cut off days before her move to Paris. Never having had to budget before, Georgie learned quite a few harsh economic lessons before being conditionally accepted back into the fold.
She had only three months to go until her thirtieth birthday. One more milestone, and she’d gain full control of the money her grandfather had earmarked for her. Until she got her money, she toed the line while indulging in small personal freedoms. The piercings she’d acquired in Paris nearly gave her mother heart failure, but once Georgie assured her the jewelry could be removed, she subsided. The tattoos were another matter. Georgie had thought their placement tasteful and subtle. Her mother declared them an unsightly blight.
Switching the mixer off, Georgie let the dough rest as she moved on to the task of removing various sizes, shapes, and flavors of sponge from their pans. She caught sight of the small script tattoo on the inside of her wrist. This was the only one of her marks of rebellion visible to her without the aid of a mirror, and the only one she truly needed.
A simple four-letter word. And not even one of the vulgar variety.
Everything else was window dressing. The hair, she changed on a whim. The piercings, she could take or leave. They were nothing more than another bit of ornamentation. The cupcake inked on the back of her neck was cute and flirty, but bore no special meaning to her. She dressed in cheap clothes for work because there was rarely a day when she wasn’t crusted in sugar and splattered with food dyes. Her nail polish was chosen because dark colors hid stains from food coloring. Georgie wasn’t about what people saw on the outside. She was more interested in the essence.
Her cell phone rang, jarring her from her mindless tasks. She glanced first at the name, then at the time. Her mother called every Monday morning at exactly five-thirty. The bakery opened at six. Meredith Carson’s social calendar usually ran late into the evenings as the week wore on. By unspoken agreement, they decided there would be no better time to disappoint one another than right at the start of the week. Monday calls gave them time to recover and rebuild hope for a miraculous personality transplant. No such luck so far.
Pressing the button to send the call to speaker, Georgie deftly removed a nine-inch round of red velvet cake. “Good morning, Mom.”
“Good morning, Georgianna. Did you have a pleasant weekend?”
Usually Georgie blew past the banalities without a thought, but this morning, the question brought her up short. Her weekend had been uneventful. As usual. Both Saturday and Sunday passed in a flurry of routine. The shop kept shortened hours on weekends to accommodate those who wanted to add something sexy to their festivities. On Sundays, she focused on life stuff—laundry, paying bills, cooking at least one extraordinary meal to provide leftovers for a day or two. Changing sheets she alone had slept on. Washing the few dishes she had used and left strewn about the apartment.
And daydreaming about a guy she barely knew.
“My weekend was fine. Busy,” she added. Not a lie. “And yours?”
“Fine as well,” her mother replied briskly. “We attended the loveliest fundraiser last night. At Jonquil,” she added in a cajoling tone.
Georgie rolled her eyes. Jonquil was the splashy new hotspot. While she was in Paris, one of her classmates from culinary school had caught the attention of a celebrity chef and been installed as head chef. Mario Brancuzzi held the Chicago fine dining scene in thrall ever since. Upon her return, Mario had offered her a job as chef pâtissière, and her mother had been horrified when Georgie rejected the position in favor of opening her hole in the wall bakery. The memory made Georgie smile. Meredith hadn’t even known about the special niche her daughter planned to fill.
Sighing, she asked, “How is Mario?”
“Divine as always,” her mother cooed. “He sends his love and said to tell you he’d gladly send Geoffrey packing if you’d only reconsider.”
Georgie gave the obligatory laugh, and a breezy, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Not for the first time, she wondered if Meredith had any clue handsome, macho Mario kept sweet, quiet Geoffrey on staff for more than his tarte Tatin.
“Honestly, Georgianna,” her mother said in the usual low, scandalized tone. “I could understand wanting to own your own business—though why you want to work so hard when you don’t absolutely have to is beyond me—but couldn’t you stick to more…traditional offerings?”
Georgie eyed the array of cakes she’d placed on cooling racks. Her
mother didn’t know four of those layers were going into the sweetest baby shower cake she’d ever designed, or the rest were earmarked for retirement parties, birthdays, and other happy celebrations. Some would be naughty, others nice, but all were repeat customers. The baby shower was being thrown for the same woman who’d been the recipient of one of the first Big Kahuna penis cakes Georgie had ever made, and every one of her bridesmaids had become devoted customers in the years since.
There was no point in trying to explain. Meredith didn’t want to hear about her successes.
“So, what was the fundraiser for?” she asked, hoping to distract her mother with talk of one of her many charitable endeavors.
Meredith paused for only for the space of a breath. “Well, technically, the gala was a party fundraiser.”
Georgie wrinkled her nose in distaste. She’d been to enough of her father’s political fundraisers to know exactly how un-fun they could be. “Oh, right. Gearing up for the election, huh?”
“Yes.”
“And have they picked their pony?” Georgie asked, moving back to the oversized stand mixer. She eyeballed the containers of chocolates, nuts, and other candies arranged on the shelf above her.
“Yes.”
She drew down the semisweet chocolate and butterscotch chips. No sense in bothering with nuts, since both Tyler and Chrissie had picked them out of the spice cake she’d baked to seduce their father with surgical precision. The guilty flush on his cheeks when he’d pulled the box of sugar cookies he’d been hoarding from the desk drawer haunted her. She firmly believed no one should be forced to hide those things that gave them pleasure. If the Simmons family was suffering a shortage of freshly baked cookies in their lives, she was just the girl to remedy the situation.
Dumping bits of chocolate into the mixture without bothering to measure, she plucked a paddle-shaped wooden spoon from the pottery bowl on the counter and began to fold the candies into the cookie dough. The muscles in her arms flexed. She welcomed the stretch in her back as she worked the stiff mixture.
This was heaven.
