I held up my hand to stop her. “I know, that’s why I’m—”
“No,” she said with a head shake. “I’m first.” I sighed internally but motioned for her to go ahead. “I made a mistake.”
“I don’t think so—” Her withering look had me stopping midsentence.
“As I was saying. I made a mistake when I offered you the position doing inventory for the bakery.”
Was she fucking kidding me with this? I kiss her once, and she starts backtracking on all the progress we’ve made over the last seven years?
“I offered you the position because I was scared.”
“Color me confused, Haylee. I thought you offered me the position because you trusted me to have your back in the bakery. I thought I’d finally proven myself as a team player in your business.”
She refilled her glass, tossed it all back, and set the glass down, leaning forward to give me a shot down her shirt that only served to make my dick even harder. Forget a cold shower tonight. I was going to have to immerse myself in ice to forget about those creamy breasts that would overflow in my hands if I ever got the chance to hold them.
“You have proven yourself in the bakery, Brady. There’s no question that you’re a team player or that you have my back. If you weren’t there every day doing what you do, I couldn’t do what I do. I know that, so do you.”
“What’s the problem then?” I asked so confusedly I had to shake my head to clear it. Was the wine playing tricks on me here?
“The problem is the position I offered to you.”
“The one you offered me because you were scared.”
She leaned back and pointed at me, which took away the fantastic view of her tight nipples that were just waiting for my lips.
“Okay, so what do you want to do about it? You want to take over the ordering again?”
“No, we’re going to do the ordering together, but Taylor will do the rest of the kitchen manager duties. She wants more hours, and Amber said she’d be fine with splitting her between the front and the back of the bakery.”
I waved my hand around. “Wait, you’re going to give me less responsibility because you’re scared? That’s kind of screwed up, Haylee.”
She bit her lip, but I was the one who had to bite back a groan at the motion. She had no idea how sexy she was all the time. I wouldn’t mind teaching her, but per the discussion we were currently having, that wasn’t going to happen.
“I’m making a mess of this,” she sighed, leaning forward to pour more wine, but I stopped her hand.
“Please, tell me what I’m supposed to do. I’m lost.”
“I want you to work the bench with me full-time,” she said in a rush, her breath warm on my arm.
I sat back in surprise, my brows up in the air. “You don’t want me to be the kitchen manager at all?”
She swung her head wildly, and her curls bounced around her head. “You’ll help me with the ordering of what you’ll need as the master baker of breads and buns. I’ll be the master baker of cakes and pastries. Taylor will take care of all the other kitchen manager duties.”
“Master baker of breads and buns?” I repeated, and her head nodded hesitantly.
“If you want, that is. If you’re happy doing what you’re doing, I’ll figure something else out.”
“If I want to be promoted to a position that I’ve been working toward for years?” I asked slowly, and she nodded again. “I’m not a master baker, though.”
“Yet,” she answered. “I sent in the paperwork to prove your experience, and I know you’ve taken the written test. I assume you’ve passed it?”
“With flying colors,” I agreed. “I took the practical test, too. I haven’t heard if I passed yet.”
“You did. I don’t even have to think about it. You’re a talented baker, Brady. Without you, The Fluffy Cupcake would still be making cupcakes and nothing else. It’s because you were determined to expand the product line that we have as many standing orders for buns and bread as we do. A good portion of our income comes from those orders, too. I might be scared, but I’m also a businesswoman who can see that I need to use my talent wisely. I’ve been wasting it instead. That’s over now.”
I rubbed my forehead and peeked at her under my hand. “I’m still confused about the scared part. Were you scared I’d say no, or what?”
“No,” she said, pouring another glass of wine and drinking it all before finishing her answer. “I was nervous about changing the dynamics in the bakery and how we get things done day-to-day.”
“I’m there every day, cupcake. The only difference is, now I’ll be at the bench and not in the back.”
She tipped her wine glass at me and grimaced. “Exactly.”
“That’s what scared you,” I said, not as a question but as a statement. “Working with me every day.”
Her head bobbed in agreement. “That would be the reason. If you’re at the bench all the time, I might,” she paused and then just shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do. Tell me what you were going to say, Haylee.”
She stared at me stubbornly, her eyes hooded and not meeting mine. “I was going to say that working with you at the bench all the time will make it hard to keep you at arm’s length. You know how closely we’ll be working together if we’re both baking full-time. It’s hard enough for me when you’re in the back half the time.”
“What’s hard enough?” I asked, standing and moving over to sit by her. I had no sooner sat than she stood, walking to the opposite wall and leaning against it. Her damn tiny shorts were going to be the reason my shorts got wet in another few seconds.
Dammit. She was fucking exquisite.
I swallowed at the thought of running my hands down those hips and grabbing her ass. I wanted to hoist her legs around my waist so I could bury my hardness in her. I was aching to relieve the pressure that had been building inside me for years. Pressure I wasn’t sure I would be able to contain working beside her day after day. I’d have to, though. The only thing I wanted as much as I wanted Haylee Davis was a full-time baking gig.
“Staying away from you,” she finally answered. “Not touching you. Not wanting more from you than your talent with the dough. That will be hard and scary, but you deserve this. I can’t pretend you don’t. I know you could have gotten a job as a full-time baker anywhere else by now.”
I stood and stalked toward her, stopping just short of plastering myself against her softness. My dick was hard, and I couldn’t hide it. I didn’t want to. Maybe seeing the proof of what she did to me would help her to believe my words. “I absolutely could have.”
“Why did you stay at The Fluffy Cupcake all these years then?” she whispered, the question hesitant.
“Because of you, cupcake. There is no other bakery in the world that has anyone as gorgeous as you are working for them. I would mop the floor of The Fluffy Cupcake with a damn toothbrush if it meant I could keep seeing your sweetness every day. Career aspirations are one thing, but life goals are another. My life goal is to make Haylee Davis my cupcake. Full stop.”
Thirteen
The air around me was electrified, and he was closing in on my space. Did he just say his life goal is to make me his cupcake? Um? My eyes traveled the length of him and paused at the outline in his pants that told me one part of him was dead serious.
“You—you don’t mean that,” I stuttered, my words slurring slightly from all the wine. “You just want to get in my pants. It’s like a challenge for every guy to fuck the thick chick and then walk away, right?”
With his left hand on the wall next to my head, he rubbed the front of his shorts with the right. “Oh, I want to get in your pants, but I have no intention of walking away. I should have said I want Haylee Davis to be my cupcake for eternity.”
“Eternity,” I whispered.
He nodded that Adonis head at me.
“I originally came over here tonight to apologize for kissing you.�
�
And there we have it. He already had regrets, and he hadn’t even gotten in my pants. Thank God for that. “See, already wish you hadn’t.”
“Wrong,” he said, leaning in closer now, both hands braced on the wall. “Wish I hadn’t done it in the middle of the bakery? Yes. Wish I had waited until you didn’t have to worry about me claiming sexual harassment? Yes. Wish I hadn’t kissed you? Absofuckinglutely not. That was the hottest kiss I’ve ever shared with anyone, and we were in the middle of a damn cooler.”
I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “You talked to Amber.”
“I did, but I didn’t need to do that to know I’d made a mistake. That’s why I was back at the bakery after I showered. I wanted to tell you it wouldn’t happen again—in the bakery, at least. I was going to kiss you when we were at the lake, and then the other night when we were here alone, but I chickened out.”
“You chickened out?”
“Why do you keep repeating everything I say?” he asked teasingly.
“Because I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around the idea that you wanted to kiss me, regardless of the place.”
“Kiss every part of you until I can bury this deep inside you, you mean?” he asked, taking my hand and holding it against the front of his pants. “This is what your little shorts do to me. We aren’t even going to talk about how much I want to pull one of those beautiful nipples between my lips and swirl my tongue around it.” His hips thrust against my hand, and the air snapped and crackled like a summer storm over the lake.
“I—I don’t know what to say,” I stuttered without dropping my hand. He was hard, huge, and his dick jumped every time I caressed it. Brady didn’t have an average I want to get lucky hard-on, either. This was the hard-on of a guy who had spent a lot of frustrating nights alone. He just wanted the woman he’d been dreaming about to finally open up to him, both her mind and her legs.
“Say you’ll accept my apology so I can kiss you again. Here, where no one can misconstrue what is going on as anything but what it is.”
“What is it?” I asked breathlessly while his lips traveled down the length of my neck to my collarbone.
“A man tired of waiting for a woman to realize she’s the only one he’s wanted for six long years, but respects that her place of business is not the place to show her that.”
“I accept your apology,” I moaned when he nipped at the skin near the edge of my tank top.
He growled somewhere low in his throat before he pinned me up against the wall with his hard body and buried both hands in my hair. When he tipped my head to the right, his hungry eyes filled with a fogged passion that could no longer be denied. His lips stole the breath from mine in a fierce pounce. Before I could suck in another breath, he pried my lips open and pushed his tongue inside to swirl through my mouth with the ferocity of a summer tornado. He was lit up with desire, and all I could do was hang on or risk getting sucked into the eye of the storm.
His hand slid from my hair and down to rest at my waist. The tremble of desire rocking his body told me how hard it was to hold back and keep his hand there. He wanted more, I could tell, and when I wrapped my arm around his neck, his hand slid down to cup my hip. His fingers kneaded it while his tongue kept my mind tied up in the sensation of velvet. When I moaned, his competing moan filled the room again, as though he was waiting for me to go first before he voiced his opinion.
He pressed me up against the wall with his body, his hardness twitching against my stomach, and both hands holding my ass like a prized possession. I swear he wanted to lift me up to wrap my legs around his waist, but I knew he wouldn’t be able to hold me up for very long.
“Fuck, Haylee,” he hissed, taking his lips off mine for a second to breathe. “How can you even question how incredible you are? A few more minutes of this and I’m going to come like a teenage boy. I almost welcome it if I’m honest. It’s physically painful to be this hard and never get any relief.”
“There are ways,” I said, my brow up in the air as he held his forehead to mine. “There are things you can do to relieve the pain.”
His hips thrust against my stomach again, and he moaned in a way that made me seriously worry he was going to come like a teenage boy. “I know the ways. I use the ways frequently after spending eight hours a day with you wearing those tight bakery pants over this sweet ass,” he said, his hands caressing it again. “But the pain remains. Making myself come relieves the physical pressure, but it doesn’t relieve the emotional need to be with the person you desire the most.” His sharp intake of breath made my nipples go hard under my shirt. “I can’t believe I’m holding you up against the wall telling you how much I’d rather fuck you than masturbate.”
I couldn’t decide if the moan that filled my head was mine or his. I wasn’t sure it mattered. We both wanted the same thing. I had to decide if I was willing. I had no doubt he was. His lips were back on mine in a hungry dance of lust, longing, and six years of pent up sexual frustration. A girl can have her cake and eat it, too, right?
“Would it help if I told you that when I come alone, your name is on my lips?” I asked.
His dick jumped against my hand again at my words, and his growling moan filled my head when he nipped at my collarbone like a starved man. Before I could react, his tongue trailed along the edge of my breast to dip into my cleavage.
“That doesn’t help. Now I’m just picturing that in my mind. Please don’t tell me about all the other guys you’ve been with lately. I will get possessive.”
Laughter lifted my chest until his nose was buried between my breasts. “I haven’t been with a guy in years, Brady. I don’t sleep around, and as I learned this past year, it’s challenging to find a guy who’s interested in these hips and this ass.”
His teeth nipped my breast and drew a sharp hiss from my lips. “It wasn’t that challenging, baby. I was standing right there, but you were too blind to see it. Do you finally see it?” he asked, tugging me toward him by my ass.
“I feel this,” I said, caressing his dick with my knuckles. “I don’t understand it, but I feel it.”
He pressed his full weight into me until I was up against the wall again. His nose was buried in my neck, and his breathing was ragged. “What’s to understand? Everything about you is a fucking turn on, cupcake. From your brain to your beauty, to your—”
“Brawn?” I asked sarcastically, seeing where it was going.
“No, to your baking skills and business acumen. I can bake, but you create. I have learned so much working for you, and that’s the only reason I passed the master baker test. We both know it. All of you, every part from your inability to see how fucking sexy you are, to the self-conscious way you try to hide this ass under a chef coat that is way too big, to the way you pretend like you don’t want to fuck me, is a turn on.”
“Maybe I don’t want to fuck you,” I said haughtily.
His lips were on mine before I finished the words, and his tongue thrust in and out of my mouth, giving me an ample idea of what he wanted to do with his steel hard-on.
“Your lips tell me otherwise,” he said, lifting his off mine to speak. “Your lips, and these gorgeous nipples,” he said, strumming one with his thumb, “tell me you want me to take you down to your bedroom, spread you out on that bed, grab this ass and bury myself inside you until we both find the completion we didn’t have until we found each other.”
“Your self-confidence is astounding,” I teased, bracing my hand on his chest, so I didn’t grasp ahold of his dick and start caressing him again. That was something I could get used to, and I most definitely should not get used to caressing him.
“And yours is absent,” he whispered, his brow raised for a moment until he dipped his head down for a kiss to my lips. “I’m going to find it and bring it back.”
“Self-confidence has to come from within, Brady,” I reminded him, even if my voice was breathy.
“You will be coming from within, Haylee.
And when you’re done, and those muscles relax, you'll notice your self-confidence has fought its way back to the surface.”
“You really think taking a ride on your pole is going to do all that?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, his hand caressing my cheek. “The way I make love to you will do that. The slow, torturous way I’ll strip your clothes off. The way your nipple will beg for me to keep suckling it, even as your thighs part for my fingers. The slickness I’ll discover there will make me moan at the thought of how good it will feel to sink inside you and finally rest for the first time in six years. When I come with your name on my lips, without another thought other than how good it feels to have you come around me, you’ll start to understand how I will never be full of your cupcake. That’s what will bring that self-confidence out for the first time since I’ve met you.”
I rested my forehead on his chest and took a shuddering breath. “If we do that, Brady, everything changes. How do we work together again? How do I manage you as your boss when you’ve tasted my cupcake in that way?”
He wrapped his arms around me and massaged my ass with his magic fingers. “The same way you did today and all the days before that. I can fuck you at night, and still take direction from you during the day. I’m not a twenty-year-old kid who can’t separate the two. The Fluffy Cupcake is your business, and I’m just grateful that I get to keep working there with you. My manhood does not ride on the idea that I can’t or won’t take direction from a woman. Never has, never will. My manhood rides on the idea that I can take direction from a woman during the day and fuck her senseless every night without conflict ruining that arrangement. I’d rather that was what represented my manhood than beating my chest like an animal while claiming I had the biggest dick in the room.”
“In this case, you do,” I said, taking a full tour of him again. He was long, so very long, hard, and pulsing. There was a small spot of wetness on his shorts that left no doubt as to his desires.
Cupcake (The Fluffy Cupcake Book 1) Page 10