Page 1 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
Chapter 1
“Do you hear banjos?”Candace Coale asked as her Uber driver turned off the road. I-75 had been a six-lane highway when they first started on it an hour ago, but the 575 branch of it had since dwindled to two lanes with the occasional traffic light or stop sign. What they now turned onto was less a road than a driveway to nowhere, not quite wide enough for two cars to pass each other and shaded by a heavy canopy of trees coated in dense, green vines.
The Food2Love Network had flown her into Atlanta several times, but there’d always been a shuttle service before, one that took her to the studio downtown. This wasn’t Atlanta anymore, let alone downtown. This wasGeorgia. This was peaches and pecan pie and sweet tea thick as maple syrup.
Candace was sure there must be banjos lurking somewhere.
“What was that, ma’am?” the driver asked.
She wanted to correct him aboutma’am, but who was she kidding? No matter how much makeup she caked on or how many hours she spent at the gym, she was a 30-year-old divorcee, and she wasn’t getting any younger or less divorced. She was firmly in her ma’am years.
“Nothing,” she muttered, not wishing to explain to him her deep-seated belief that she was safe wherever she was as long as she couldn’t hear banjos. She’d lived her entire life in Trenton,New Jersey. She’d dealt with everything from rich, creepy pedos to meth heads to gluten-free soccer moms. And it wasn’t that she didn’t like being in natural settings. She loved hiking and camping. But there was a difference between day-tripping to the Poconos and being driven to a location unknown in the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia. “This is just . . . a long way from what I’m used to.”
The man looked around as though he wasn’t sure where they were, either. “Yeah, never gotten a ride this far from the city. You wanted Jasper, right?”
Candace already had the address memorized, but she pulled up the four-day-old email on her phone to check again.
Congratulations, you’ve been selected as a contestant in the Food2Love Network’s Christmas Spectacular Bake-Off!
She hadn’t expected an invite after the scandal she’d caused the network last time, not after she’d gotten caught on camera with the producer’s hand up her skirt — not that she’d wanted it there to begin with. She certainly hadn’t expected the invite only four days before the show was scheduled to film. Even more surprising was the plane ticket and the postscript that she’d have to find her own transportation from the airport. They did promise to reimburse for that, but it was still strange.
Most shocking? The $100,000 cash prize. That was enough to drop every one of her commitments through the rest of the month, including Thanksgiving. That $100,000 was exactly what she needed to get herself back on her feet, if it was possible at this point. She didn’t know if she’d ever be able to rebuild the bakery she’d lost in a freak flood over the summer — no flood insurance — but she’d be able to build something with that money, even if it was a food truck. She just needed to do herabsolute best and play the game the way the network wanted her to play.
She’d always been a villain, even before the incident with Lucas Barrett in the pantry. It wasn’t anything deliberate on her part. She happened to have a resting bitch face and a driven, impersonal attitude that could easily be edited into a nightmare. If the network was inviting her back so soon after the scandal, clearly that was what they wanted. She would be their villain.
If the banjos don’t get me first,she thought as the Uber driver maneuvered his Mazda onto a path that was more mud than pavement. At first, she thought it wasn’t a road at all, rather a dirt trail, until she saw the heavy grooves left on either side of the lane by trucks too wide for the narrow blacktop.
“Never seen nothing like that,” the driver said as Candace craned in her seat to get a better look at the Goliath that appeared in front of them when they reached a clearing. The contraption shrieked and shook violently as it spewed white foam all over the trees surrounding it.
A harried young woman with skewed glasses, a blouse half-tucked into professional slacks, and neon Chuck Taylors darted out toward them. The Uber driver rolled his window down, letting in a belch of exhaust and white plastic tendrils.
“Hiya!” the girl squeaked as she peeked in. “Who’s your—oh, Candace! Hiya! Big fan!”
Unprepared as ever for the pep and the fan-girling, Candace sat as far back as she could in her seat.
“I’m Jordyn-With-a-Y,” the girl said as though the phrase itself was on her birth certificate. “I’ll be your talent liaison for the next two weeks.” She pulled a twenty out of her pocket and handed it to the driver along with directions to turn off at thenext fork and drop Candace off at Gate 5. She waved them on as another car pulled up, but the morning sun’s glare obscured whoever else was arriving.
This time, there really was no pavement. Candace sprawled her arms and legs to pin herself in her seat as the driver launched them over the most unintentional roadway she had ever seen. There was no way this wasn’t a horror movie. That foam had to somehow be made of corpses.
“What’s a talent liaison?” the driver asked.
“A gofer who needs her own title so she can tell her friends and family she’s special,” Candace guessed through gritted teeth.
“Are you famous?”
Candace snorted. “God, I hope not,” she muttered as the driver parked next to a big number 5.
“Well, good luck,” he told her as a couple of crew members scurried out from nowhere to get her luggage.
She was going to need that luck after the Summer Bakes debacle. Truly, no one was as surprised as she was to be invited back to a Food2Love competition.
“We’ll be alright if you don’t win this,” Pauline said for the thousandth time, somehow managing to keep her voice pert while shouting over whatever the deafening machinery was on the other side of the Mazda stopped in front of them. “We’ll figure something out.”
Laurin’s stomach churned, a ghost of gameday nerves. He’d thrived off that sensation once upon a time, but his ACL made sure he’d never again feel it on a pitch in front of fifty thousand people. He would never admit to his family that he hoped to feel that gameday churn again in a fake kitchen in front of a few cameras while competing against sweet old ladies, but once a champion, always a champion.
And Pauline was wrong. It would not be alright if he didn’t win. Not because of the damage it would do to his pride but because without that prize money, they’d have to decide between their bakery and their house. And since the bakery was their sole source of income, the choice was obvious.
The Mazda moved on, giving Laurin a clear view of the beast making the ruckus. He was impressed by the fake snow machine, but Genevieve’s eyes went wide as she clenched the armrests of her booster seat. Laurin worried, not for the first time, that the next two weeks were going to be hard for both of them.
