A suit entered his line of sight, and remained in it. The dancer gone, Dillon blinked the smartly dressed table attendant into view.
‘Will there be anything else, sir?’ The man glanced around at the small group. ‘Or sirs and madams?’
A brunette wearing a blue and gold sequinned dress yanked an empty bottle from the table and thrust it into the air. ‘Another!’ she cried.
The table attendant glanced at Dillon. ‘Another Dom Perignon, sir?’
Dillon squinted at the woman who’d spoken, then read the label on the bottle she’d so classlessly waved overhead. ‘What? No.’ He looked back at the man and shook his head. ‘No more.’
His ‘friends’ groaned and giggled. One uncrossed her legs and prepared to leave. Another tested the empty bottle for stubborn drops that she could shake loose into her glass. He didn’t know the names of any of these people. Four of them hadn’t bothered to introduce themselves to him, and yet he’d been picking up the tab for their top-shelf thirsts. The two men who he recognised faintly from a wild night last year were eyeing him with confusion. Because rumour had it that the well never ran dry with Dillsmills.
Which might have been true. When Dillsmills was in attendance.
But tonight, Dillon was just a drunk, broken-hearted nobody pining for an ex-girlfriend, and a second chance at happiness. His alter-ego hadn’t got past the club’s security.
‘Of course,’ the table attendant said, bowing slightly. ‘I’ll close your account.’
‘No.’ Dillon slid forward in his seat. ‘Keep it open. But just for my orders.’
Dillon’s ‘guests’ glanced at one another.
‘Of course. And would you like anything? On your account?’
‘Vodka,’ Dillon said. ‘And I’ll take it at the bar.’
‘Very good.’
They walked up to the bar together, and as the man rounded the counter to step behind it and prepare Dillon’s drink, Dillon asked, ‘What’s the name of this place?’
The man hesitated. ‘The Raffles Chelsea, sir.’
‘Huh.’
Apparently Dillon had fallen off the wagon into one of the most exclusive members-only nightclubs in London.
The man watched him, his smile a little less smiley now. ‘Perhaps just the one more, sir.’
‘Fair call.’
Until the next venue. And then the next. Until he ran out of venues willing to serve him, and off-licences willing to sell to him. Because this might be a nice place, but it wasn’t going to get him to where he needed to be if it was going to cut him off after a low-ball glass of vodka.
Where Dillon wanted to be—more than anything—was with Abigail. But because that wasn’t possible, he’d settle for oblivion.
Chapter 18
The Beaucake
Abigail began making Isobelle and Mal’s engagement cake on Thursday afternoon. Isobelle had requested a chocolate mud cake sponge. Sealed within a thick skin of icing, it would remain moist for days. Abigail loosened the sponge cakes from the cooled tins, cut them to size and stacked them, all under the watchful lens of her self-imposed surveillance. She kept the camera shot tight and her face clear of it, and found that the scrutiny improved her accuracy. The rolled icing curled flawlessly over the five-layer sponge. She smoothed it without trouble then wrapped it meticulously with cling film to keep the air from it.
When it was time to set it aside, Brittany followed her into the cool room with the camera.
One uninterrupted video. The first of many that would exonerate the business from poisonous tongues.
That job done, Brittany set the camera down and returned to her custom order. On the bench behind her workstation were six boxes, all holding the same product: cakes and lips.
The Beaucake had been an unquestionable success.
Yesterday, the morning after they’d updated the website and launched their social media promotion, they’d been dazed by the likes and shares, and flattered by the popular hashtag. By that afternoon, however, they’d stopped following the hype and started worrying about their output. They’d received forty-two orders through the website in a single day.
They’d had lunch in the kitchen, and eaten over schedules and strategies.
Now it felt like all they did. Lip after lip after lip.
Between serving customers and restocking the display counter, Brittany only made Beaucakes. Abigail’s days were full of prep for the Lamborghini launch, baking and decorating alternate cakes for the display, and filling custom orders by order of priority. People were still ordering regular boucakes and still coming in for customised consultations. The Beaucake hadn’t replaced the regular busy, it had merely compounded it.
Abigail’s days were getting longer. She stayed long after Brittany went home so she could prep for the next day—sometimes even making and refrigerating batter to give herself a head-start in the morning. She was coming in early, which was standard, but those quiet hours without customers or interruptions were beginning to feel less productive.
The business was becoming reactive, and Abigail didn’t like it.
She baked what felt like infinite numbers of miniature cakes, piped and glazed lips, and frequently ran out of stock. She shopped more frequently. She ordered things online and paid the extra for express delivery. Even her morning routine of exchanging cupcakes for coffees at Beatha Bakery had suffered. Gregor came to them now, and whilst he loved the new lips cakes, he wasn’t fond of the new wild look in their eyes.
To make life easier for herself and Brittany, who was looking increasingly on edge, Abigail changed the Beaucake design from cake stand to cake box. The bouquet boxes were more stable and the cut-to-size foam insert made arranging the cakes faster.
Brittany had closed her eyes for a long time when Abigail had made this change. Then she’d drawn a deep breath and continued working, more happy than she’d been a moment ago.
It was controlled chaos. Now. But momentum was building.
Boucake was a snowball on a mountainside. If Abigail let the moment keep carrying it, it was going to grow in size and be all the more devastating if it lost control. She needed to control the speed. Somehow. Maybe no new products until the current products were in hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, filling a piping bag with a measure of the bulk icing she’d made that morning. ‘I shouldn’t have launched this when we already had so much going on.’ She pulled half a dozen bald cupcakes towards her and pushed out a series of puckers.
Brittany glanced up at her and smiled. ‘You don’t have to apologise. Neither of us expected it to be so popular. Not that it shouldn’t be. But, you know, wow.’ She set her piping bag down and sprayed high-shine glaze over the red. She set the can down and stretched. ‘So now’s not a good time to tell you about an idea I had?’ She glanced at Abigail then bent over the cupcakes again. She began piercing the bottoms with miniature stakes, then arranging them within the little white box.
Abigail stopped what she was doing to watch her. Piping nozzle an inch from the last cupcake, she said, ‘I want to say no …’
Brittany smiled down at her work. ‘But you’re not going to.’
‘It doesn’t seem right to say no to creative thinking. That’s not the kind of culture I want here.’
Brittany pushed her last cupcake into the box then stood back to regard it from a distance. She said, ‘I’ll put you out of your misery and just say this: it’s a small idea. A flavour, not a design.’
Abigail nodded. ‘I’m listening.’
‘But first a confession.’ Brittany met her eye. ‘I cheated on you.’
Something in Abigail’s chest, something sick and weak, raised its head and made a feeble sound. Her fingers tightened and a worm of icing sugar dropped from the nozzle onto the countertop. ‘What?’
‘I cheated. On you, on Boucake.’ Brittany shrugged then looked away. ‘There’s a bakery opposite my tube station. I had a cupcake there.’
The sick, weak thing disappeared. Abigail f
eigned outrage, then laughed shakily. ‘Oh my goodness, you can eat cupcakes wherever you want. I thought you were about to tell me you’ve been moonlighting and they’d poached you.’ She might have been sick, right here on the counter if Brittany had resigned.
Brittany smiled tightly. ‘I’m not leaving you.’
‘I’d frost you to the wall if you tried.’ Abigail swiped at the escaped icing sugar and finished her last set of lips. ‘Tell me about this flavour,’ she said as she worked.
‘Marshmallow. I know,’ she said before Abigail could respond, ‘it sounds common as dirt, but teamed with a really strong cake flavour, it’s divine. I’m not sure how it is to pipe—they had theirs in a big ol’ blob—but I was thinking we could try a trumpet flower: keep it thin, curl it over the edges.’
Abigail reached for another half dozen bald cupcakes. ‘It sounds great,’ she said, and twisted the top of her piping bag. ‘Tell you what. When things calm down around here and you have a bit more time, mock it up. Work out the recipe, design the flower, put it in a bunch—and pitch it to me.’
Brittany’s fingers touched the sides of the Beaucake box in front of her so lightly, Abigail wondered if Brittany could even feel it.
‘Really? From start to finish?’
‘Of course.’
Brittany hardly spoke for the rest of the day.
Abigail would have liked some conversation to break up the monotony of creating one identical Beaucake after the next, but she recognised creative distraction when she saw it. Brittany was already planning, and Abigail didn’t underestimate how important it was to her to potentially stock a product she had devised and created. It would bring things full circle in a way: Brittany would teach Abigail the techniques the same way Abigail had taught her how to make the very lips they were now slaving over. The master and the apprentice would switch places. And that would be okay. That would be great, even. Abigail had only been a master of this stuff for a few months longer than Brittany anyway.
Customers came in and out throughout the day, collecting their orders or discovering the lips for the first time in the display cabinet. Between them, Abigail and Brittany made twenty-eight of the forty-two custom orders, and they had time for the others—those orders had been requested for the weekend, or for the following week. The urgent ones had been attended to, and a stiff drink had been earned.
At close of business, they shuffled over to the Crown pub and complained about their straining calves over a pint. An hour later when they parted on the street, Brittany hauled her bulging bag and tired body in the direction of the tube, and Abigail went back to the shop.
She laid out all the utensils and most of the ingredients that she would need for the morning, then sat down and wrote a list of her priorities. Tomorrow, Friday, was the big Lamborghini reveal. There were hundreds of cakes to be made and decorated. There was transport and traffic to consider, and assembly on site to contend with. She wouldn’t make a single lip tomorrow—there wouldn’t be time.
She glanced around the kitchen, wished there was more she could do ahead of the morning, then eventually packed up and made her way home.
If life continued this way, she’d have to start reacquainting herself with her cat.
Chapter 19
Man of the hour
Abigail turned the ovens on at five am on Friday morning, and had a dozen cupcake tins full of vanilla and chocolate batters on the racks by five-thirty. As she waited for them to cook she prepared the various icing colours and filled the piping bags. As she waited for them to cool, she arranged enormous plastic containers for transport. She set divider sheets into the bottom of each, and tried not to think of the moment she would drive onto the lot of Wheels in a van loaned to her by the owner of the business, who she was no longer speaking to personally, but was bound to through business.
But the countdown to the launch was, of course, also a countdown to Dillon.
She’d dreamed of being dignified and graceful upon seeing him again, and in her dreams he’d been equally well-behaved. He’d shaken her hand as a business partner, praised her product and promoted her store. Then he’d ripped her clothes off in front of everyone and devoured her as a starving man might descend on a cupcake.
Needless to say, she hadn’t yet completely resolved how she felt about Dillon Wheeler.
She did miss him. Errant memories made her smile as she worked, and made her lose focus whilst trying to plan her day in the small hours of the morning as she rode the bus into work. She kept thinking of things they could do together, then remembering he wasn’t that person for her anymore. And she had to remind herself time and again why she’d stepped away. He was big news, he was bad news, and she wanted a whole lot of no news in this new little life of hers.
Abigail also had way too much going on to be welcoming another person’s problems into her life. And that was a definite drinking problem that he had on his hands. As far as she was concerned, that was not something she was willing to carry for any amount of time. Her demons were north—far north. Except when they were in her shop placing custom orders. Her demons kept her busy enough.
Even so. Something inside of her was counting down until the moment their eyes would meet again.
Brittany came in at seven and began transferring their new business cards from the sticker sheets to the bottom of the cupcake wrappers. She moved deliberately at first, but was soon moving quickly as her fingers got used to the sequence.
Abigail began on the white roses. She piped icing for an hour straight, and didn’t stretch her spine until she’d filled two of the four plastic tubs. After a short walk around the shop to ease out the kinks, she started filling the third. Brittany made another batch for the storefront, decorated them and set them out, and left Abigail to her zone. She fielded all the calls and served all the customers.
Everything was ready at nine-thirty. Abigail loaded the containers onto a trolley, strapped them down, then carefully eased the trolley outside, through the Yard, and up to the parking bay Dillon had rented for her. She was counting in her head. Measuring her life in minutes, the way she always did before a big event. Two minutes to get to the van. Fifteen minutes to load everything into the cargo bay. Four minutes to secure it. On the road before ten o’clock.
But when the loan van came into sight, Abigail’s stride faltered and she came to a slow stop. Ten seconds passed.
The van was marked. Sprawled across the side panel was a sticker logo, identical to the style and placement of the logo once on the side of her van before it had been destroyed. It was eye-catching, and fanciful, and she loved it as much now as she had when she’d designed it. He’d spared no expense, but knowing what she knew now about Dill’s mills, that was hardly surprising.
Except she would have sworn on her life that she’d left the tube Dillon had tried to gift her on the table the night she’d ended things between them.
Abigail rounded the back of the van. There was a logo on the back. A logo on the other side. Even a logo on the bonnet. She had half a mind to check if there was one on the roof.
Removing her phone from her pocket, she dialled Brittany’s number.
Brittany answered with a smile in her voice. ‘What do you think?’
‘How did this happen?’
‘It …’ Brittany’s delight wavered. ‘This big tube got delivered to the store yesterday. I wanted to surprise you, so I put it up after we went to the pub.’ Her confusion was clear, and understandable. She’d put the stickers on herself, and she’d done a great job of it. This couldn’t be a quality control issue. ‘I … Did I overstep? I wanted to surprise you and you’re so busy, I had more time. Should I have—?’
‘You’re wonderful,’ Abigail said quickly. ‘I’m not mad. I’m very, very pleased. Thank you.’
Brittany sighed. ‘Then what’s the problem?’
‘I just didn’t know how you got them.’
‘Courier.’ A pause. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes.�
�
Neither spoke for a moment. They hadn’t discussed Dillon since the Instagram incident, so Brittany couldn’t possibly know the non-state of her boss’s relationship with the man who’d arranged these stickers. She’d thought she’d been helping.
‘Thank you,’ Abigail said again. ‘Anyway, I’ve got to go.’
‘O-cake. Good luck, A.’
‘Thanks.’ Abigail ended the call, stared at the logo for a moment more, then leapt back into action. She had to make up this time, and rein in the whirring, clicking, buzzing thoughts she was having about the broken man in the Indian restaurant. After everything, he’d still wanted her to have the gift that he’d made for her.
A ghostly sense of connection and admiration seemed to gather around her like mist.
Despite the heavy mid-morning traffic and the looming deadline, Abigail made good time. As she pulled into the service entrance of the business she’d once thought Dillon simply worked at, she could see that she’d beaten the crowds. The media was yet to arrive and the public was being sent away, presumably to come back closer to the event time, as it was too long a time to hang around just yet. She parked, careful to position the van in the best position to unload her bounty, then leapt out of the driver’s seat and threw the cargo door wide.
Men and women in red collared shirts were upon her within moments, all of them with arms out, prepared to help. Her instinct was to dismiss them—she had no illusions of being anything other than a Type A control freak—but after the briefest of hesitations, she lowered a large container into the nearest set of arms. The woman turned and strode away, holding the container away from her body so it wasn’t jolted as she moved. The second man went in the same direction, as did the third and fourth, so when it was just Abigail and one more man left carrying the bases, she had a fair idea of where to go. She closed the van door and reflected sun winked off the new logo. Arms full, she moved away from Dillon’s gesture. Straight into Dillon’s domain.
With effort, Abigail kept her gaze on the temporary podium set up in the middle of the yard. Luxury cars, sports cars and off-road cars had been cleverly positioned to create a void for the crowd that would come, but they were also, all of them, in perfect positions to be seen. Gleaming hoods faced the podium, a wide circle of every colour and high polish, looking to her imagination like early onlookers, measuring her performance with wide tinted windshields that could have been eyes.
Have Your Cake Page 19