Page 28 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
This would be her ruin.
This wasn’t her cake; this was her entire reputation. Whatever was left of it, anyway. This was her last-ditch effort, falling and crashing on non-slip kitchen mats, never to be put back together again.
Only, it never fell. It started to tip, only to get caught—
—By Laurin.
A breathless squeak, the culmination of the sweat and palpitations and adrenaline making a pitiful sound. That was all she had in her.
“I’ve got the middle tiers,” he said. “Your board is stable. So carefully pull your hand out of the—carefully!”
Candace went completely still again. Her arms had seized up. She wasn’t sure she could do anything carefully right now. Panichad her heart pounding so hard she couldn’t believe the cake wasn’t falling from that alone.
“Take a deep breath, Candy. Look at my eyes, and take a deep breath.”
She hated being called Candy, but in that voice? With those eyes boring into her? She might be willing to change her mind. She could drink in those soft green eyes all night.
The moment was static as their eyes locked. For a heartbeat, she forgot about the cake or the competition or the disaster that was her life. She forgot why she needed help, only that Laurin was the one who came. He was here for her. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone she truly cared about actually being there for her.
“I’m going to hold your cake while you get another support, okay? But don’t rush yourself. Get steady first.”
“Where did you come from?” she whispered, scared her voice would break.
He nodded to her right, and she risked glancing that way. On the concrete was an explosion of what looked like clear glass.
“You broke your . . . is that blown sugar?”
“I can make it again,” he assured her. “Won’t take a minute. Think you’re steady enough now?”
She took another breath and eased her hand out of the cake, refusing to look at the damage while she cut two new pieces of dowel and propped them up under the second tier. When Laurin released it and stepped back, he scowled as deeply as she did.
He’d saved the cake, but not without a price. His hands had left broad divots in the fondant. Nothing as bad as the massive hole Candace had punched into it, though.
“You can fix this,” he said confidently.
Candace puffed out a frustrated breath as her sinuses began to burn and her vision blurred. “I couldn’t even get it to work when it did look right.”
“Nah, you’ve got this. Use your buttercream to make the rock candy stick. And holler if you need me again, I just gotta make another bird.”
With that, he trotted back over to the sugar-blowing station, like making sugar birds was just another Saturday for him.
Chapter 12
There was amoment there, while Candace stood on one side of that cake and Laurin stood on the other, that their eyes met. It couldn’t have been more than a second, but everything stood still — including the cake, thank goodness — except for Candace’s blood rising to her cheeks, making them glow through the camera makeup, her pupils blowing out, nearly engulfing the sapphire of her irises, and her lips parting on a heavy breath.
It was a terror response, adrenaline rushing into her system. But it looked a lot like arousal and, shamed as Laurin was to admit it, his body responded in a way that had him needing to keep his lower half behind his work bench for several minutes after.
When he heard a quiet sob, he felt even worse about dwelling on how closely the expression on her face matched the fantasy his sleeping brain had concocted of her the night before. He prided himself on not being the type to objectify women, but Candace was driving him crazy.
He couldn’t let himself look at her. He had his own cake to worry about, and it would probably upset her more to know Laurin could hear her crying. He couldn’t imagine her rage if she knew he had an erectionwhileshe was crying.
It wasn’t anything continuous or obvious — the crying, not the erection, which was irritatingly continuous and painfully obvious for a good five minutes. He doubted a tear ever slippeddown Candace’s cheek. There was a camera on her the entire time, and all her crying amounted to was an occasional sniffle, a ragged sigh, the faintest whimper.
Twice, she went to the side pantry where the cameras wouldn’t follow, reappearing a minute later with bloodshot eyes and nothing in her hands.
Laurin got that. He’d kicked the life out of locker doors enough times to understand the need to step away and regroup, even when it was a bad time to do so. She wouldn’t be so destructive, though, not after the tree incident. He imagined she went back there, had a quick, ugly cry, cleaned herself up, and got back to work.
Laurin didn’t stop working until Kate called time. He didn’t regret helping Candace, but it had set him back. Thankfully, the sugar blowing station hadn’t been cleaned up while he was helping Candace, so there was still some clear cane left, but it took time to get it back to the right temperature.
