Page 44 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
“I don’t think it’s okay to hit anyone.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never had to spank your daughter.”
“Vivvy? Never.”
Candace wiggled her lips out of a scowl to say, “Well, there you go. We already knew I was kind of terrible. I always have been. It’s amazing my parents kept me as long as they did.”
That was enough to get Laurin upright and looking at her. “I thought you said it was your ex they had a problem with, not you.”
Candace chuckled dryly. She couldn’t remember a time her family didn’t have a problem with her. “That was just the last straw. They had me ruled mentally incompetent, you know. I always struggled in school. Math, I was a whiz at, but if it wasn’t numbers, I was a disaster. I’m not saying I agreed with the ruling at all, but it wasn’t difficult when they had enough evidence, and I wasn’t fighting. I didn’t think I needed the money I knew I was losing. They didn’t cut me off then, either, just . . . quietly pushed me aside. Then my husband came along, and it was the perfect time for them to disown me entirely.”
Laurin paced through his thoughts. “So even after you ditched the ex, you never reconnected with them? Do they know?”
Candace nodded. “My aunt knows. She would have passed it along. And they were right to disown me in the end.”
“They weren’t right.”
“They were!” She couldn’t hold back a bubble of agitated laughter. “Things might have changed between us when I got older, who knows, but I ruined it. My father told me not to marry him. He said my fiancé was a bad man, and he knew better than me. My fiancé was a bad man. My father, my whole family, was right.”
Laurin fumbled on a step, looking like he was about to fall, but then he swung back and pulled Candace into his arms. “No. Family sticks together. They help you through it. They don’t abandon you. They might have to do some tough love, but they’re there for you.”
Candace wished it didn’t feel so nice having someone hold her and talk with such conviction about things she wanted to be true. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had ever put this much effort into lifting her up. And she’d always done it so well herself, getting all the way to the competition level of baking without any support, that she didn’t think she needed this.
But she did.
“There’s a point when you’ve caused so many problems for your family that—”
“My sister got pregnant when she was sixteen,” Laurin rushed out as though he was worried that he, of all people, wouldn’t be able to speak his mind if he hesitated at all. “The guy ditched her. She hid it for a long time, too long for her to have a choice in what to do. Our mother was furious. I was . . . not a planned pregnancy either, and her life was difficult for a long time for it.Mamannever abandoned her, though. Held my sister’s hand when she gave birth and everything.”
“Did your sister keep the baby?” Candace asked.
Laurin closed his eyes, bracing himself as he said. “No, I kept the baby. We should, ah, get back to work now.”
Thanksgiving without family sucked.
This was the first Thanksgiving Laurin had spent away from home since his football years, when he’d been in Europe so Thanksgiving hadn’t been a thing at all. But he’d embraced the holiday, ignoring the dark history of it in favor of the spirit of itand the traditions behind it, namely the gigantic feast. Yeah, he spent every day in a bakery, but he still loved spending an entire day in the kitchen. He loved inviting over friends and neighbors who didn’t have anywhere else to go. He loved the feast.
He didn’t even know what his family was doing, and it sucked. He was up all night, getting more and more irritated, but he’d at least been able to channel that into challenge prep. Lots of coffee, lots of cooking, lots of crafting.
Candace had apparently slept well; she was bubbly all morning, even going as far as to pick the station on the TV and sing along with the music she knew.
“It’s kinda weird, don’t you think,” Laurin mused when he nearly snapped at her for putting away the spinach before he’d finished with it, “that you’re the one in such a good mood this morning?”
Her eyes sparkled like sapphires in the morning sun. “It’s crazy, but I’m excited for this afternoon. I haven’t done Thanksgiving in ages. I know everyone’s grumpy with me, but if I get to eat a whole bunch of good food, I’m not going to complain.”
“You hardly eat any food,” Laurin pointed out. His sister had gone through a phase after having Vivvy when she mostly pushed food around her plate to make it look like she had eaten something. Candace did the same thing with most of her meals.
Instead of arguing with him, she shot him a fantastic smile and a playful tilt of her profile. “Maybe I’ve been saving up for today. Aren’t you excited about dinner tonight?”
Laurin dumped the spinach out onto a cutting board and sifted through it, picking out the leaves that had gone squishy and snapping off the longer stems. His spinach artichoke dipmight not have been the most original dish, but it was a crowd-pleaser. Candace had already retrieved an exceptional baguette from the oven and was busy slicing it into thick discs to liven the dish up a bit. Sourdough bread bowl of spinach dip? Tired. A crostini topped with creme d’artichaut? Wow factor.
“Thanksgiving has never been about food for me. It’s about family, right? And being thankful for all you have, I guess.” He knew everything he said to her was a landmine, but he couldn’t hold it back.
Laurin held himself back from asking her how she was even supporting herself right now. He was already doing a bang-up job of raining on her good mood.
She swished her basting brush across the ovals in beat to the peppy Beatles track playing and even swung her hips. “I don’t have much, but I’ll have dinner tonight. Oh, and now that we’re at the fourth round, we have eight thousand dollars we didn’t have when we started.”
“And our daily pay.”
