Cupcake Queens

by Darlene Everly

  Cupcake Queens

  A Comfort Food Romance

  Darlene Everly

  Copyright © 2021 by Darlene Everly

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  This is a work of fiction, any similarities to people living or dead, places, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 Darlene Everly

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any way without the prior written consent of the copyright holder, besides brief quotations for a review.

  To request use of the copyrighted material, please contact the author at darleneeverly.com

  Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-954719-14-9

  Paperback: ISBN 978-1-954719-13-2

  Ebook: ISBN 978-1-954719-12-5

  First paperback edition August 2021.

  Edited by Jupiter Alley.

  Cover art by Jupiter Alley.

  Layout by Wishing Well Books.

  WA, US

  Created with Vellum

  For the Queens

  Personal Pan was just the beginning of the Comfort Food romances, now here’s Cupcake Queens! If you would like to be the first to hear about the next book in the series titled Brewed Anew, get a free book and an exclusive short story in this series, as well as see what else the author has written, please go to darleneeverly.com and sign up for her newsletter.

  * * *

  Happily Ever Baking!

  Contents

  1. Theresa

  2. Ceecee

  3. Theresa

  4. Ceecee

  5. Theresa

  6. Ceecee

  7. Theresa

  8. Ceecee

  9. Theresa

  10. Ceecee

  11. Theresa

  12. Ceecee

  13. Theresa

  14. Ceecee

  15. Theresa

  16. Ceecee

  17. Theresa

  18. Ceecee

  19. Theresa

  20. Ceecee

  21. Theresa

  22. Ceecee

  23. Theresa

  24. Ceecee

  25. Theresa

  26. Ceecee

  27. Theresa

  28. Ceecee

  29. Theresa

  30. Ceecee

  31. Theresa

  32. Ceecee

  33. Theresa

  34. Ceecee

  35. Theresa

  36. Ceecee

  37. Theresa

  38. Ceecee

  39. Theresa

  40. Ceecee

  Also by Darlene Everly

  Acknowledgments

  Theresa

  “Alright,” I said, hitching up my toolbox, leaning it against my hip, and grabbing the bag full of garbage parts I was going to take back to the shop with me to dispose of. “I’m all done here, Ruth. I’ll have the bill sent over to you, okay?”

  The tiny elderly lady pushed herself up from the chair next to the ornate, antique fireplace. Her living room was wallpapered in a pattern that must have been as old as the building—which meant it was probably older than Ruth. It was soft and dusty rose like everything else.

  A weird little part of me wondered what came first, the color scheme of the rest of the place, or the wallpaper.

  It was so damn hot in there that I had a hard time stopping myself from wiping the sweat from my brow. My hands were probably dusted with fiberglass shards from the bit of batting insulation I had to deal with, and the last thing I wanted was an itchy forehead for an entire night. How Ruth withstood the proximity to the blaze crackling away in the fireplace I would never know.

  “Oh, Theresa,” Ruth said, smiling at me and coming to my side. She reached up and patted a hand on my shoulder. It barely registered it was so insubstantial. “Thank you so much for fixing it for me. Tell your mother to come see me soon, okay?”

  “Yes, of course I will.” I smiled back at her and made my way out to the narrow hallway in her building.

  Good thing there were only two other tenants in the two-story home converted to apartments, otherwise it might have been impossible to navigate around someone I ran into on my way out the door. I had no idea why Ruth lived in a two story and didn’t find a place without stairs, or at least an elevator.

  My knee yelled at me as I walked down the steps. I gritted my teeth, my grip on the toolbox and the garbage bag tightening. It would have been better if I could have held onto the railing like I did on the way up, but there was too much in my hands.

  All I could do was make my way down and grumble about it inside my head.

  Hopefully, next week I would only have first floor places to go to. Icing it usually helped, but I still didn’t want to overwork it and injure it further. The damn brace on it sure seemed more useless than helpful.

  My mother would have been admiring the woodwork on the staircase and the stained-glass transom over the front door, but all I admired was the flat ground when I got down to the first floor.

  Once at the truck outside, I put my overly heavy toolbox on the floor of the jump seat area and grabbed a wet wipe to scrub my hands on. In a perfect world, it would snag all the pokey shards of fiberglass off my hands. But it never worked that way because the world was a lot of things, and none of them were perfect.

  My phone chimed in my pocket, and I pulled it out before using my good leg to jump into the front seat.

  Sitting in the truck again, I sighed. Taking the weight off my knee allowed muscles nowhere near my leg to relax too.

  My phone chimed again.

  Olivia and Campbell have the night off. See you at Best.

  I leaned my head against the seat.

  Why did my friends feel the need to get together tonight? Why couldn’t they just let me go home, ice my knee, and sit in a hot bath until tomorrow?

  Doesn’t everyone have to work in the morning?

  Texting that back to Katie was a risk, she wasn’t likely to take no for an answer regardless of what excuse I tried. It exhausted me just thinking about it.

  Hello ding dong. Tomorrow is Saturday. Do you have to work on a Saturday? Do I need to call your mother?

  Crap. Well, there went that excuse.

  I have to shower first.

  Because no one wanted me around without getting all the bits and pieces of work off of me, and I didn’t want to be around anyone until I did that either.

  Putting the bag with the garbage in it on the floor in the passenger seat wheel well, I set down my phone, and checked for a break in the traffic to pull the not-practical-at-all-for-the-city truck out onto the road.

  A little red car had a huge space behind it, and I was about to pull into it when my phone chimed again.

  I glanced down at my phone for only a second, but by the time I looked up again the space was full of other cars.

  Of course it was.

  Maybe I should have just leaned back and taken a nap. Maybe I wasn’t meant to get out of this parking spot. I really shouldn’t have been able to get this parking spot in the first place. Maybe this was my penance for that good fortune.

  It made sense. Nothing good came without something negative riding within it.

  Like a scholarship to your first-choice school for cheerleading, and then blowing out your knee at your first game.

  The phone chimed again, and I swear it sounded like Katie scolding me.

  It’s your turn to pick up dessert.

  Deacon says The Bake Place.

  Gluten free, too.

  Deacon s
ays give him all the gluten.

  I smiled. Deacon and I thought alike.

  Maybe it was petty to laugh and type out a snarky text. But I deleted it, so I gave myself a pass on my moment as Mayor of Petty Land. Instead, I just texted back, “k.”

  The Bake Place though…I couldn’t quite remember where it was. Pike Place?

  While I could have texted Katie back, or Olivia, or any of my friends, if I had to drive around a little bit before I found it, the less direct route might give me more time to rest my knee before I had to walk on it again.

  Once I found it, I remembered why I didn’t come here.

  It wasn’t near Pike Place. It was in Pike Place Market.

  Crap.

  Driving the truck meant I had to park way too far away. The streets of Seattle ran up and down steep hills, and right around Pike Place was no different than other areas in that regard.

  The last thing I needed was to the hike through the neighborhood on my bad knee.

  “Nope. Not taking orders today,” I said to the empty truck.

  I turned the truck back toward home, a cleanup, an order to have desert delivered to me, and an awaiting call to someone to pick me up.

  Done for the day, to me, meant not driving the behemoth anymore either.

  But part of me was sad I wouldn’t get to try the famous desserts from The Bake Place. One day, one day I would have the time and the right car.

  A pothole sent a jarring bump through the truck that made my knee scream and forced me to suck in a hissing breath through my teeth.

  Maybe I would have to wait for the imaginary day when my knee felt better to go to the bakery.

  Ceecee

  I was never going to be able to get out of the bakery.

  Marcus wasn’t there to cover me, and I had to pee.

  Doing the potty dance discreetly while trying to help people with their baked goods was not how I thought the day was going to go.

  But I couldn’t afford to turn the sign in the window and lose the last sales of the day. Not on a normal day, and definitely not when the fridge was broken.

  “Ceecee I was so sorry to hear about your mom,” Mrs. Williams said, her dark brown eyes growing misty.

  I smiled, although it was brittle, and I knew it. There was no way to force my face to allow room for a full, robust smile when someone brought up my mom. It didn’t matter that it happened four months ago. I wasn’t sure I would ever be able to be shiny and truly happy when her death was mentioned. And especially not right now.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Williams,” I said, wrapping up her usual order.

  She reached across the counter to pat my hand with her heavily lined one.

  Mrs. Williams didn’t show her advanced age in her face. Her dark skin was still flawless, and she kept a head wrap on at all times so no gray hair showed to place her age either. But her years of life and experience were written all over her hands.

  “You know, I came as soon as we got back to Seattle. This is my first stop after my house.” Her smile was so kind it was easy to let go of the flare of frustration inside telling me to yell at her to please stop talking about it.

  “Allison was a wonderful woman, and I’m so glad you’ve taken over the bakery. This city wouldn’t be the same without The Bake Place and your famous cinnamon rolls.” She handed me a wad of cash and picked up her boxes of treats.

  “Mrs. Williams, I appreciate you saying that. This bakery means a lot to me.” With my lip between my teeth, I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, fighting off the pressure of the tears that waited at the backs of my eyes while attempting not to pee my pants.

  I tried to hand her the change, but she folded my fingers around the money and winked at me.

  “If I was here instead of in Arizona, I would have given this to you then to help with the funeral expenses.” She smiled and turned to go.

  “No, Mrs. Williams,” I said, rushing to the half door that led from behind the counter to the front of the shop.

  “Listen, Ceecee, when George passed, your mom helped me.” She smiled and looked down at the wedding ring she still wore five years after his death, before lifting her face to mine. Her smile changed to one that said tears were waiting in her eyes too. “Your mother was a good one, and I am honored I got to call her friend.”

  She nodded and I nodded back, my vision swimming in the tears I kept back by sheer force of will.

  The chime over the door sounded and I moved back behind the glass cases filled with the last of the day’s treats and a couple loaves of bread. Once there, I leaned against the wall next to the short swinging door.

  “Hey, Ceecee,” Olivia said, the chime sounding as Mrs. Williams made her way out. Olivia’s voice was bright, and the smell of her family’s pizza restaurant wafted in with her.

  “Olivia,” I said, truly happy to see her as I got the waiting tears under control and a smile back on my face that I hoped wasn’t melancholy anymore. I shoved the cash into the pocket of my apron. “No Campbell today?”

  “Campbell is in the car. He’s doing the circle instead of finding parking,” she said, her face shining the minute his name was mentioned. Campbell and Olivia were relationship goals.

  “So, what’s on for tonight then? I only have one cinnamon roll left.” I shouldn’t have had any left. On normal days they were gone by ten in the morning, but business had been slow since the road work caused everyone to avoid the market.

  “Well, I’m for sure taking that.” She grinned at me and then bent to peer in the glass cases, her brown eyes sparkling. “I also think I’m going to clean you out of everything else in here.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said with a chuckle and a good-natured roll of my eyes. She had a plethora of free food she could have had from her own restaurant, or Campbell’s aunt if she wanted something different.

  “Yes,” she said, nodding with her eyebrows high, “I am. I’m heading to karaoke with Deacon and some others. He’ll eat all of this if we let him. Hey, you should come.”

  She looked serious, but I just shook my head.

  “Thanks, Olivia, but I’m beat. And Marcus doesn’t come in tomorrow until the afternoon.” All of that was true, but I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t have any money to chip in for something like that. And I really didn’t want to take up all the space in the room. An intrusion from me was a little more substantial than an intrusion from someone Olivia’s size.

  While trying to ignore the assessing look on her face, I started packaging up her purchases.

  “Can you turn the sign on the window?” I asked, looking past her and pointing.

  “No problem. And I understand tired, but Ceecee, you really should get out a little more. You know half my friends haven’t even met you and they would love you.” She took out her phone and tapped away at it before looking back at me with a discerning gaze I really didn’t like at that moment.

  “Did my mom ask you to tell me that before she left?” I asked, trying for lighthearted but ending up somewhere just this side of sad.

  She cocked her head to the side and narrowed her eyes at me, her lips pursing just a bit. Which, if I was being honest, made her really hot and left me blinking before I could focus again on what I was doing.

  Campbell was a lucky guy.

  If I had known she was pansexual before we saw each other at Pride, then I would have asked her out. She started dating Campbell before that, though. But we didn’t know each other as well back then and the story of her dating history never came up until we were marching side-by-side in our ostentatious best. By then she already had the only boyfriend I thought was good enough for her.

  “You know, if you came with us, you would be doing me a favor,” she said, her face glued to her phone as if she wasn’t stooping to dirty tricks by appealing to my sense of curiosity.

  “Haha. Okay, why would I be doing you a favor?” I shook my head and smiled.

  “Because,” she looked up at me, her face alight li
ke a cat about to snatch a mouse, “My ex, Theresa, will be there and she is not only tone deaf, but she’s had a rough couple months. So, if you come along, she would have to get out of her funk and be her old self for a new person, and I would get the added bonus of not having to listen to her sing.”

  I laughed.

  Bent over to lean on the counter, I laughed until I almost peed my pants and had to stop abruptly.

  “Olivia, I have to go to the bathroom, can you wait just a sec?” I was moving to the restroom in the hall before she even waved her hand at me to go.

  The relief was divine. It was silly of me to wait so long, but it turned out worth it to sell everything from the cases.

  Getting up and pulling up my pants, I leaned over to flush and nothing happened.

  “What the hell?” I muttered, taking off the lid on the back of the tank. There was no water in the tank in the back.

  “How the hell did that happen?” I bent down to look at the pipe connecting the toilet to the wall. There was a crack in it.

  Looking behind me at the grate in the middle of the painted concrete floor of the bathroom, I reached my hand to the spot under the pipe, it was wet.

  Fantastic. No water at all.

  Not only was I not going to get to go with Olivia and have at least one night of a life, but I was going to have to learn how to do plumbing. I couldn’t be without water for very long. Perfect.