She was a small-town baker. A sweet small-town baker who wore pink sundresses and was attached to an old house in her hometown that was very far from Chicago. She was not his type. It was cruel of him to want her thinking of him all the time after he left.
But even as he moved to the sink to deal with the condom and clean up, he couldn’t deny that seeing his handprints on her, knowing that she trusted him, thinking that chocolate cake might always make her think of him, definitely made a surge of something go through him.
Something that was probably best labeled I was right to not eat her cupcakes.
5
Somehow Josie managed to push herself up from the table.
She didn’t want to move. She’d never felt this good in her entire life. She never wanted these blissful waves of thank-God-bodies-could-do-that-to-each-other to fade. She never wanted to use this tabletop for anything but what she and Grant had just done.
And that was saying a lot because she loved all the things she did with flour, sugar, and butter.
But now that she’d had sex with Grant Lorre, she was never going to love anything more.
And that had been sex. Hot, dirty, take-over-every-sense sex. The kind she’d always hoped was possible. It hadn’t been, so far, in her love-slash-sex life. But she’d held out hope. She was, after all, an eternal optimist. That didn’t have to just apply to the state of world politics and her ability to save even the worst cake fails.
She hadn’t officially named her side business where she baked for overworked moms who’d forgotten they had to provide dessert for the next day’s office potluck or kid’s class party. Or those who didn’t have time to bake four-dozen anything. Or those who were just not good at baking, period. She was unofficially known in the circles she helped as Bakery 9-1-1. She loved that.
She’d met women in the gazebo at the park to give them their goodies.
On Tuesday, she’d met Travis, a divorced dad, on the seventh hole on the golf course—the one with the most trees—with three-dozen caramel-stuffed Rice Krispie treats. She’d helped him take them from the box and put them into his own plastic containers and even brought extra caramel to put on his shirt so that he could be his son’s hero at the birthday party at his ex’s house.
She’d met Nancy, a fifty-something corporate executive, behind the nursing home last Saturday. Josie had handed off a strawberry shortcake made with Nancy’s mother’s recipe for her mother’s eightieth birthday. Nancy had needed that cake to be perfect. She just hadn’t had the time to make it.
Josie was happy to help.
All of those people had the best intentions of doing it themselves. They wanted to take the time and put the effort into making something special for people they cared about. But time worked against them. Or their lack of experience. Or their lack of the right equipment—like a big enough mixer to handle the job or the right ruffle decorating tip. Or their realization at midnight that they didn’t have enough eggs.
So Josie’s personal cell number had gotten passed around. She liked being able to help those people have the special goodies they needed without the stress and hassle that sometimes came with making it themselves. She didn’t mind if they passed her treats off as their own.
Besides, word was getting around. She’d actually had to hold back on those Iron Man cupcakes to make it at least a little believable that Travis had made them. That had been difficult for her. She’d had some really cute ideas for them. But a simple vanilla cupcake spread with red icing and a yellow mask—that she’d had to redraw twice to make it worse—in the middle had had to suffice.
As she forced herself upright and smoothed her hair back, she heard the water running in the sink behind her. Grant was cleaning up, and she should do the same, she supposed.
She looked down. And giggled.
Her front was covered with chocolate and flour and sugar. She knew her back was similarly messy. Her body tingled as she thought about how all of that had gotten on all of those places.
She’d suspected things would be hot between her and Grant the second he’d kissed her. Hell, she’d been the one thinking about his naked body and cheesy potatoes and marshmallow fluff—not together—so combining food with sex had seemed inevitable. But this cleanup was going to require