Page 35 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
“Life’s easier and happier if you accept the kindness of others,” Laurin told her then. His mother had said that to Laurin more times than he could count. Now she said it to Vivvy. It sounded prettier when she said it. Everything sounded better in French.
He blamed the English translation for Candace’s snort of disapproval. “People are only kind when they want something out of you.”
Laurin sighed instead of arguing with her. “You can be miserable in here all day if you want, or you can come sit by the fire and relax. I promise you’ll feel better out there.”
She pouted a little longer, but Laurin heard the water drain soon enough. When she eventually emerged from her bedroom, he did his best not to laugh about the lavender velour onesie she was buried in. Vivvy had one identical to it.
“That your normal pajamas, or are you just showing off your sweet gear?” he asked without looking up from the puzzle he’d scored from the camp hosts.
Candace huffed from beneath the hood and flopped down next to him on the sofa. She cracked open her book and didn’t say anything for a while, although she occasionally looked up and took a sharp breath as though she was going to speak.
After a dozen false starts, Laurin sat back and looked at her. Only her petite, upturned nose was visible under all the fluff. “Stop thinking about saying it, and say it.”
“Go back to your puzzle.”
He shook his head but did as she requested, fishing an edge piece out of the box. He was thoroughly surprised when she said, “I don’t know if I ever said it properly or not, but thank you.”
“For last night?”
“What about last night?” she squawked, then hissed, “Puzzle!” when he turned to look at her.
He grinned, understanding at least a small part of her. She wasn’t comfortable with piety when she was being watched.
“Yesterday. The cake,” she clarified. “Thank you for saving me . . . even though I don’t know why you would, considering how awful I am.”
“You’re not awful. You’re hurt. I get that you’re scared to open up, that you’ve been mistreated by the people you cared about, by your ex-husband and your family and Lucas.”
“I wish I’d never met that disgusting—”
She clammed up the second she noticed her outburst had drawn Laurin’s attention to her.
He went right back to the puzzle. “If I promise to keep my eyes right here, will you tell me what happened? I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I think you need to.”
She was silent for about a minute, holding her book so tightly it started to shake. Laurin stuck to his promise about not looking at her while he reached out to the book and eased it down to her lap.
She breathed out a heavy sigh. “Lucas started directing the show two years ago. I was already separated from my husband then, and he asked me out to dinner one night. I didn’t get it . . . I’d been with my husband since college, and I never did anythingwithout him. I guess I should have noticed that he was, umm, controlling me — gaslighting me, I guess — but I just didn’t think about it. At first, I’d say, ‘Oh, I’m going out with Adam,’ and he’d say, ‘I’m not doing anything, mind if I tag along?’ and then one day I stopped trying to sayI,and it was justwe. I never thought about how he didn’t actually let me do anything by myself, so . . . so I was so used to doing a lot of platonic things, you know, that when we split, I didn’t think of those things as being dates.
“Lucas and I had a nice dinner, nothing special, and the stuff he asked me, I figured it was him getting to know his veteran contestants. Purely professional. It . . . it wasn’t.”
Laurin had to fight his instinct to look at her, to read her face, but his back went stiff, and his eyes wouldn’t focus on the puzzle. “Did he force you to—?”
“No!” Candace said quickly, but it was a knee-jerk reaction, and her clarification illuminated the lie in her truth. “Not then. He tried to kiss me, and I said no. I told him I was separated but still married, and with our relationship, mine and Lucas’s, our professional one, anything between us was impossible anyway.”
“It didn’t stay like that, though, did it?”
“I shouldn’t have been so polite about it or made excuses or . . . or . . .”
“Don’t you dare blame yourself,” Laurin growled, hating where he knew this was going.
“Right, but . . . if I had just said no, I’m not interested . . . Summer Bakes was going to be his last Bake-Off. The network was putting him on another show. And my divorce had just been finalized. I thought he was seeing Kate — hewasseeing Kate — and I didn’t want to jeopardize my chance of winning that season by upsetting him. I was doing really well, and it was nice to havea distraction from everything at home. I turned him down for dinner a few times, pretending like I’d made plans with others, because I had this gut feeling, you know? But he was with Kate, so I thought I was seeing things that weren’t there. I’m so dumb. I—”
“You’re not dumb, Candace.”
“I am. If I’d been firm with it, told him right then and there that I wasn’t interested, he wouldn’t have cornered me in the pantry. He wouldn’t have given me that whole speech about how it was fate that everything timed up so perfectly and we were meant for each other, how if I gave him what he wanted, he would get me the prize and . . . and . . .”
She leaned forward, rapidly digging through the puzzle pieces. Laurin wasn’t going to push her to say anything else.
“And he put his hand up my skirt.”
