Page 70 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
Have a safe flight, bonbon.
LAURIN
maman had to pull the car over so I could vomit on the side of 575, but don’t worry, I have those little disposable toothbrushes. We got this.
LAURIN
I see you. You’re talking to Jannie, and you haven’t seen me yet. You’re so beautiful. I don’t care how creepy this is. It’s too latefor Manon to take my phone away now. What are you carrying? I bet it’s cookies.
Candace knew deep down in her heart that Laurin was not deliberately sabotaging her. She’d had an entire month to assess every one of his actions, all of his competition entries, every word he’d said to her. To obsess about them. To read news articles about him. To chronologize his sports career, starting as a first-year star at university, when he was still baby-faced and starry-eyed, to the image of him sitting on the field, his teammates forming a perimeter around him as medics hustled in from the distance, the look on his face not of the excruciating pain he must have been in but of sickening, heartbreaking awareness. The articles were sparser after that, each failed surgery getting less coverage, but he’d known the moment his leg got tangled up with the other player’s and twisted the wrong way that his career was over.
Everything about Laurin proved that he was as wholesome and clean — outside the bedroom, at any rate — as he proclaimed, but the moment he and his family showed up at the campground, Candace’s chances of winning the competition went from slim to none.
She could no longer hear the words Jannie said to her for the rush of blood pounding through her ears, but she felt her phone buzz, the dot dash dot dot pattern she’d set up for Laurin. He was texting her right now, the bastard.
“Are you okay?” Jannie asked.
“Yep, fine, why,” Candace replied reflexively, staring Jannie dead in the eye like a challenge, even though she couldn’t even manage to inflect her words properly.
Jannie chuckled. “It looked like I lost you for a second there. And what’s with the cookies? You won’t be able to use them, you know.” She leaned in to whisper, “They won’t help with the challenge, don’t worry.”
Candace screwed her calmest expression onto her face, letting Jannie finish as she braced herself to finally respond with, “They’re for Laurin’s daughter he asked me to bring them.”
That sounded okay, she thought, even if she forgot to pause in the middle there. No way Jannie would know speaking his name was a punch in the gut.
A punch she’d done to herself so many times that she’d changed that vibrate setting for maximum impact. No more second of uncertainty while she looked at her phone to see who was texting her before her world froze for a heartbeat.
“Oh perfect, they’re right over there!” Jannie said with a pleased smile that spoke more than her words did. Laurin hadn’t been joking about how obvious what was going on behind the scenes was in the candy episode. He wasn’t the only one who was handsy, and there was that body language between them, the sort of motions she’d seen so many times from other cast and crew members, signs she always thought she was immune to because she was never going to sleep with anyone at the Bake-Off.
Candace took the deepest breath, dug her toes into her patent leather Mary Janes, held back the need to fuss with her crayon-unfriendly ponytail, and turned. She carefully focused her eyes beyond Laurin to blur his face, not that it mattered.Next time she looked at her phone, there’d be that text from him, which meant that picture Manon had taken and she’d stupidly set as his image for her to obsess about. Manon hadn’t been wrong about that photo. He looked like a dang model in it. It could have gone into a sexy baker calendar, if there were such a thing. She could only see a blur of his tanned skin and dark hair and blue shirt now, but what she was really seeing was him shirtless and sleepy-eyed with a silly grin on his face that might have been coffee-happy but, in another timeline, could have been because Candace was just out of frame and equally mussed and shirtless.
Deep breath.
And he was so cool and collected, marching straight toward Candace, his generational entourage in tow, everyone waving and smiling and laughing. They didn’t know how devastating this was — except Manon. The woman could and did speak volumes in a single expression. Just a nod and her own deep breath, a twitch at the corner of her lips, a pronounced space between her and Laurin. Manon understood that Candace was a wreck on the inside, but the show had to go on. Big breaths, big smiles, deal with the fallout later.
“Candace!” Vivvy squealed, practically launching herself into the air before Laurin snagged her by the back of her dress and reined her in.
“Hey, hey, you don’t want to mess up the cookies for Santa, right?” Laurin warned her, the flash in his eyes no more devious than the White Lie of Santa.
Vivvy shook her dark pigtails vigorously. “No, papa. But I want to give Candace a hug!”
“So do I,ma petite. The biggest hug. But we’re about to do a show, and we don’t want to rumple her clothes, right?”
Vivvy studied Candace very seriously, as though she wasn’t sure about that, and for good reason. Candace wasn’t wearing anything that risked being wrinkled by anything as benign as a hug.
But Laurin studied Candace like a man eyeing up a steak dinner after skipping lunch. Many lunches. He’d managed to put himself in a position where no one could see his smirk as he said, “Why don’t you go hug her now, but gently, and I’ll hug her after the show. Maybe eat a bonbon with her.”
Candace was going to lose this competition. His existence was going to ruin her.
Episode 6:
Gingerbread
Chapter 24
Laurin’s feelings forCandace had changed throughout the month of December — for the better. Every episode was a piece of her, every distant glance and absent smile, every gnaw on her bottom lip and tap of her nail. Every time he had to get close to the screen to make sure he was right and her whole body was vibrating, no doubt a foot shaking behind her work station. Every little thing made him feel surer that he was making the right decision with her, and what he wanted from her extended far beyond the bedroom. So heading to the campground on Christmas Eve, he was filled with an anticipation that was entirely pure and without any of the nuances that led to swole arms. When he saw her, he was sure that everything he felt would be in his heart.
He was wrong, of course. Her sweater was snug. Not unflatteringly so; everything she’d worn in November had been slightly loose on her, but this was fitted. A dark forest green sweater that looked soft and dense over a plaid skirt that was just barely long enough to meet her stockings. It showed off her profile as she talked to Jannie and, yep, Laurin’s thoughts zoomed far away from pure with a quickness.
