Frosting Her Christmas Cookies - Alina Jacobs Page 0,116

after, because we’ll get a better deal on inheritance taxes.”

I groaned. Then I trudged across the street to my office building.

Blade and Weston were waiting in my office when I arrived and set down my bags. “How bad a person is Greg, really?” I asked them.

“Our brother Greg?” Blade asked. “The man who, when Weston lost his watch in the Hudson River, forced everyone to swim out in the cold and the ice chunks to retrieve it?”

“The man who, when a famous restaurateur seated one of the Holbrooks before him, even though he was there first, mailed him a single used shoe every week for the next year?” Weston added. “The restaurateur was posting about it online because he couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.

Blade snorted. “Those are just the times people annoyed him. Are you going to aggravate him or try and ruin him? Because there was this one time this guy tried to cut him out of a real estate deal. Greg had me dig up some dirt on this guy and turned him over to the feds. He’s been in jail for years,” Blade said flatly.

“But if I don’t have dirt—I mean if a hypothetical person didn’t have dirt, then nothing would happen? Hypothetically?” I asked.

“Everyone has dirt,” Blade stated. “And if they don’t, you can gather enough dust and dead skin cells to make it look like they have dirt.”

“Fuck.”

“But it’s not like you’re going to do anything crazy, right?” Weston asked me. “I mean, come on, man, you should see the numbers on this company! Your valuation is through the roof. Your net worth is officially out of the danger zone. You’re halfway to ten figures. TechBiz magazine had us run the latest numbers for their January issue of the list of billionaires to watch out for in the New Year.”

“It’s five billion?” I perked up as Blade pulled up the charts on the screen.

“It’s five point eight,” Blade told me. “You’re running with, well, not the big dogs, but you’re in the top two hundred. With the Hamilton Yards development next year, I bet you’re in the top one hundred fifty, maybe even top hundred.”

“Top one hundred list, here I come!” I crowed.

I also realized that I needed to find some other way of dealing with the Hamilton Yards development. I could not get on Greg’s bad side. I would have to work something out with Morticia. Maybe if I came clean? What if I bribed her? I couldn’t lose her, but I also couldn’t lose that development.

63

Morticia

You cannot lose, I told myself.

It would be bad enough to not be with Jonathan while I was in California completing my internship. But to have him living with Keeley, sharing a house with her, even if it was supposed to be fake? I knew how Keeley was. She had slept with Sarah’s fiancé on the night before their wedding. If Keeley had her way, she would sink her claws into Jonathan and never let go.

More to the point, what if Jonathan broke up with me? What if he was angry that I had lied to him and said he didn’t want anything to do with me? I chewed on my lip as I sketched out my idea for a cake.

His declaration that a song from The Nightmare Before Christmas was ours gave me the inspiration for the cake. I was going to make a towering Tim Burton Christmas cake. The confection was going to feel a little surreal and off-balance, and the top of the cake would have the Tim Burton signature curl.

I set about making the layers of the cake. The largest bottom layer would be mocha chocolate cake with chocolate rum cream filling. Then came a triple-layer white cake with orange curd filling, a cinnamon sponge cake with mascarpone filling, and mixed berry filling. The top layer was going to be more chocolate cake with salted caramel chocolate ganache and heavy whipped cream as filling between the layers.

Sketch done, I began mixing the cakes. We had a fair amount of time. Mixing the cake batter was usually meditative, but I was fretting about coming clean to Jonathan about the internship. I also hadn’t yet received a message from the Getty Museum confirming the internship, though today was supposed to be the day they notified the winners.

Maybe you weren’t chosen after all.

But Dorothy had promised I would be. Though I was excited about the internship, I