Page 43 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
Candace wasn’t disappointed.She was practical, and her days with Laurin were coming to an end.
On-set affairs happened all the time here. From Jannie’s stories, it sounded like the crew was forever hooking up. It was more toned down with the contestants, but anyone single and interested could easily find a new bed to sleep in. Perfect Patty and Glitter Greg both had some reputation. No one judged them for it — in fact, they were more liked for it, probably — and even the most promiscuous of contestants was just having fun. The new environment, the short filming cycle, the adrenaline of the challenges? Of course sex happened.
That didn’t make Candace less annoyed, though, that she was the one with the bad rep. She had never fooled around with anyone at the Bake-Off. In the early days, the separation from her husband had still been new and in the potential reconciliation phase. Looking back on it, she knew now she had never wanted to reconcile with a man who didn’t love anything about her except the money she didn’t have, but she’d been dumb and optimistic then. Later, when things had gotten rough with the upcoming divorce, Candace had barely been able to get out of all his fallacious accusations. Giving him additional ammo with an extramarital affair? Allowing his mad-dog lawyer even a whiff of something like that? No way.
When the divorce had been finalized, she told herself she could sleep with whomever she wanted, except she couldn’t.She’d had two sexual partners her whole life: her high school boyfriend and her husband. She didn’t know how to have an affair, how to go from casual drinks to naked in bed.
So she wasn’t disappointed that she hadn’t driven Laurin to distraction. No, she was mad at herself for being so bad at this that she hadn’t taken the opportunity when it was presented to her. There was no way they were all staying at the cabins past the weekend; the contracts had stated December first as the max. They’d be back the morning of Christmas Eve, but the producer had promised they’d be home in time to have Christmas dinner with their families.
She wouldn’t let the conversation bring her down. Laurin insisted they get their cooking done together, setting himself up at the kitchen table when Candace protested that there wasn’t enough counter space. He performed all those minor acts of chivalry — getting spices down from high shelves, carrying heavy pots, opening doors before Candace had the chance to shuffle her burdens around to free up her hand — but the way he absently did so and gave her confused looks when she thanked him too many times made her think he wasn’t doing anything to impress her. He was just doing it out of habit.
He asked her questions, too, wanting to know about everything she was making. “It’s just a soup,” she laughed.
“Okay, but how much time did we waste trying to find shallots? You nearly had a meltdown when I suggested we get onions instead.”
“They don’t taste the same!” Candace yelped, only afterward realizing how crazy that sounded.
Laurin only chuckled, though. “Exactly. Most people would find it a reasonable substitute. I’m curious what makes this soup so amazing that it’s not okay to use onions.”
Candace conceded the point and rattled off the list of ingredients, except that by the third item, she was going into the preparation as well. She rattled on for what felt like an hour before she caught herself and apologized.
“Sorry for what?”
Her cheeks warmed up. “Rambling on like that.”
“Don’t apologize for being passionate. I wish you talked more passionately on the show. Every time you get excited about something, you cut yourself off like that. I always wondered if they were editing it out to fit your persona, but then at Summer Bakes, Jannie asked you what you were making, and you went off on this whole origin tale of your traditional Belgian cake. The whole time I thought, gosh, I wish she explained everything like that.”
Candace frowned. “Right. And the way I let men reach up my skirt, a nice bonus.”
“I won’t have you deciding why I’m interested in you.”
The bite in his tone had Candace looking up at him. He had gone still in the middle of rolling croissants. He had the pin in his hand, and he was bent over the table, but he was looking back at her. There was enough anger in his expression that Candace pushed herself away from him, skittering off to the fridge to retrieve the sour cream.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled into the fridge.
He started rolling again, working the laminated pastry into a fine sheet quickly and folding it into a tidy, clean-edgedrectangle. “I don’t like how much you apologize, either. They wouldn’t keep inviting you back if you weren’t really good at what you do, and you know that. You also know what Lucas did to you wasn’t your fault.”
“I never said it was,” Candace countered, but that tasted an awful lot like a lie. Lucas himself had pointed out all the things she’d done to show she was interested in him, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that his defense, that she had wanted it and was only upset because they’d gotten caught?
Laurin reached her in two strides, and she instinctively recoiled, only to realize he had the croissant dough in his hand and she was blocking his path to the fridge. He wasn’t stepping up to her; he was doing his job.
He sighed, his chest rising and then sinking roughly. “Did he hit you, too? Is that why you’re flinching now?”
Candace shook her head. How had something that should have felt nice, a man taking an interest in her without pushing himself on her, turned so awful? “No, of course not. I get that you think I’m weak for not reporting what—”
“Stop deciding what I am!” Laurin barked out. She got the impression that he might punch something more than the air with his words, but he tempered it to a slamming of the fridge door.
“Whatever you think, then. I’m just trying to say if that happened, if that ass had raised a hand to me like that, I wouldn’t have needed to report it. They would have heard his screaming when I stabbed him in the eye.”
A smile teased at the corner of Laurin’s mouth, but he wasn’t pacified. He braced himself on the edge of the counter, letting his head hang as he took heavy breaths. “You’re going to yellabout this because I’m not going to say it right, so please take this at its face value. Why does it make any difference where his hand was? If it was on your cheek or on your leg, why does it matter?”
“It just does. We should be working.”
“We’re taking a break. I don’t accept that answer.”
Candace wanted to fight back, point out that the way he dominated her time like this was no different from a man who dominated her body with his hands. But she needed to settle this for them to move on. Quick conversation, brief answers that didn’t hold back, and she’d be back to her soup.
She crossed her arms, keeping herself compact and held together. “Fine. It’s different because I say it is. It’s different because I was taught that physical violence should not be condoned but sexual harassment has some . . . flexibility, and I’m a product of what I’ve been taught.” She frowned as the words poured out in one direction but her mind went another. “I guess it doesn’t make any sense, but you spank a child and it’s . . . not okay, but not terrible, but you mustn’t hit a woman. And you mustn’t touch a child, but a woman? Maybe not the worst thing you can do. I don’t know, you live in the same world I do. I shouldn’t have to explain this.”
