All’s Fair In Love and Cupcakes

by Betsy St. Amant

  Now she had nothing but a head full of gourmet—weird—recipes and a lease on a house that required regular income.

  What was she going to do?

  On the field, the game started, the players bursting through their painted school banner and running out on the turf to the cheers from the stands. She and Rachel stood and cheered with the rest of the crowd, then settled back on their seats. Kat adjusted the scarf around her neck, chilled despite the higher than average temperatures of the evening. She couldn’t remember being warm since returning from Los Angeles. She sort of missed those nights on the beach with the ocean wind and the balmy LA, palm-tree-dotted air.

  “You know, at least you can hold onto the fact that you won the show on merit. You proved yourself.” Rachel finished her candy bar and wiped her fingers down the legs of her skinny jeans, evidently a mom thing. “That’s significant.”

  Kat shrugged. “Not as significant as a contract in New York.”

  “Working for that sleazeball of a judge? That’s hardly a prize. More like a sentence.”

  True. After the drama Thad had created, could Kat really ever consider making him her boss or respect him—or even tolerate him, for that matter—for an entire year? On the one hand, it’d be worth it because of the reputation she’d earn working at Bloom under its prestigious chefs.

  On the other hand, that bordered on ethically unwise.

  She bit back a groan. Why was nothing clear-cut anymore?

  On the field, the boys moved into formation, then earned a first down. Lucas clapped and barked orders from the sidelines, intense instructions she couldn’t quite make out. The other team, a school from an hour south whose mascot was a crawfish, rallied with an interception.

  “Lucas must be freaking out.” Rachel laughed as she snagged a scoop of Kat’s popcorn. “He gets so stressed during these games.”

  “For sure.” Kat loved watching him in that stress, too, trying to decipher the meaning behind the lines in his expression, attempting to read his lips as he talked to the other coaches. Half the time she knew exactly what play he was going to call before he actually called it.

  And the best part was, even when he was at his wit’s end and the game was tied or his team fumbled the ball, his eyes stayed aglow—the glow that only comes from a man living out his passion.

  To think she’d tried to jeopardize that for her own desires. That wasn’t love, just selfishness on her part. If she truly loved Lucas, she’d back off and let him live out the life God had clearly called him to.

  Even if that meant living her dreams solo.

  Not that God was trying to tell her anything about those lately. Her future remained a giant question mark, and the more she thought about it, the more panicked she became.

  Halftime.

  The majority of the crowd stood and filed down the stairs to the concession stands, laughing and chanting the school’s cheer. All of them having a great time, probably because they weren’t attempting to evaluate their life’s value and progress at a high school football game. What was wrong with her? It was as if she only knew one mode these days—hardcore.

  Rachel and Kat remained on the bleachers, unmoving rocks against a flowing sea of people. “Why not start over anyway, Kat, if you’re so disappointed about New York?” Rachel turned to face her, as if they were having a private, quiet conversation in Starbucks rather than nearly shouting to be heard over the sound of the cheerleaders revving up the fans still around them.

  “Because money doesn’t grow on cupcakes?”

  “No, seriously. Why not go to Dallas and open up a shop there? Get a business loan. You could do it.”

  “No, seriously. I’ve looked into that.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t qualify. My credit isn’t established enough for the amount I would need. I’d have to have a cosigner at best.” She sure wasn’t going to get that from either of her parents, not with their opinions on her future and her capabilities. They wanted her to stay in Bayou Bend for all eternity; they’d hardly be willing to sign a paper supporting her spreading her wings, especially over something like baking.

  “Face it, Rach. This was my chance.” Kat moved her legs off the bench in front of them as a young boy scrambled back into his seat, cone of cotton candy held high like a trophy. “Now I’m just as stuck as ever. It’s like I’ve come full circle.” As productive as a hamster on a wheel. And she’d actually lost more in LA than she’d had when she left home. A negative score.

  “I refuse to believe that.” Rachel shook her head so hard her hair swung across her face. “There’s always a way. You have the will, so there’s a way.”

  “That’s a cliché.”

  “Aren’t clichés stemmed from truth?” Rachel nudged her in the side, and Kat allowed a small smile in response. “Cheer up, gloomy. This isn’t the end of the world.” She smirked. “If you’d seen the diaper situation I had to clean up before escaping long enough to come here and support you, you would know what the end of the world looks like.” She wrinkled her nose. “And smells like.”

  Kat snorted as the players filed back onto the sidelines, gearing up for the third quarter. “I’m not trying to be negative, really. Just realistic. I had a chance, and it didn’t pan out. Maybe that’s a sign.”

  Rachel’s trimmed eyebrows arched in suspicion. “A sign of what?”

  That part she was still trying to figure out for herself. A sign that God was changing her path? Narrowing her options? Convincing her to stay in Bayou Bend and forget her dreams?

  Maybe forgetting was the best bet. With everything that had transpired between her and Lucas last week, she wasn’t just afraid to dream again—she was downright terrified. Because she’d seen up close and personal how dreams could morph into nightmares all too fast. How quickly cracked hearts could shatter.

  “We got the ball back!” Rachel put two fingers in her mouth and whistled loud enough to rival the one hanging around Coach Kent’s neck. “Go team!”

  The glee on the boys’ faces as they jumped up and slapped high fives was almost childlike in its purity. Kat was almost envious. They were living out their dreams, right there on the field, in real color.

  She frowned slightly, her gaze raking across each player as they huddled around Lucas. How many of those guys dreamed about playing ball in college or even going pro one day? What were the odds of many of them, if any, actually succeeding?

  And should knowing the odds change that dream?

  They filed back onto the field, and as the clock clicked over to the fourth quarter, the opposing team took the lead.

  Rachel deflated next to her. “Are you kidding me? We totally had them. Man, what a game.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, staring intently at the scoreboard. “I can’t believe they pulled that field goal out of nowhere.”

  Kat could. She had seen it coming, actually, and figured Lucas had too. He was rarely caught off guard on the field.

  A whistle blew, and Lucas called for a time-out. Kat wished she was an eavesdropping jersey number in that huddle. She’d love to hear what play he was calling, to hear him talk through the specifics of why he chose that particular one. He always had a reason, usually an in-depth one that she only grasped about half the mechanics of, but she enjoyed hearing him flesh it out. It always made sense—even to a non-sports addict like herself.

  Suddenly, chaos erupted on the turf as the play took a wrong turn. The other team intercepted the ball, and Lucas whipped off his cap and threw it on the ground, shoving his hands in his hair in frustration. She could see the vein in his neck from the stands. Uh-oh. That wasn’t like Lucas at all. Something else was wrong, more than just the interception.

  “Wait, what just happened?” Rachel sat up straight, straining to see around the people in the stadium who stood and called out an overwhelming mixture of boos and critical instruction.

  Kat squinted, tuning out the crowd and focusing on Lucas’s lips as he called in the quarterback, B
en. He clamped his hand on the boy’s padded shoulder and talked firmly, directly in his face. He wasn’t yelling; she could tell that much. But the vein had yet to disappear. He was holding back his temper, yet she knew without a doubt the boy knew exactly what his coach thought.

  “I think the quarterback called a different play than what Lucas told them in the huddle.” The longer Kat watched and caught key words via lipreading, the more certain she became. “Yeah, that’s what happened. Wow.”

  “Direct disobedience? That’s crazy. Those guys love Coach.” Rachel fished in her purse and came up with a pack of gum. “Drama, drama, drama. What a game, though!”

  Drama, for sure. How could Ben make a decision like that last-minute, one that was so against the coach’s wishes?

  The comparison hit her then, square in the face like a banana cream pie from a black-and-white sitcom.

  Hadn’t she been doing the same thing? Trying to make her dreams happen on her own rather than listening to and heeding the voice of her heavenly coach? When had she actually sought God’s will and asked him to guide her to his plans, in his timing? All she remembered doing lately was complaining. Whining. Throwing pity parties big enough to rival New Year’s Eve celebrations.

  Like Ben, she’d tried to call her own plays, and they’d blown up in her face. She thought she knew best when, really, she only knew the Astroturf under her feet for that particular moment. God saw the entire game plan—and made his calls for good reasons.

  On the sidelines, Lucas pulled Ben into a quick hug, then slapped his back and sent him running back onto the field. Tears pricked the back of Kat’s eyes. God was giving her a sign, all right, right there in vivid Technicolor. And it was about so much more than her dreams; it went so much deeper.

  Because as Lucas and Ben demonstrated, it only took one more chance to get it right. One wake-up call could be enough to refocus and win the game.

  She wasn’t disqualified at all.

  It was just that perhaps God had a different dream in mind for her. And for the first time in her entire life, Kat breathed in the hope that perhaps that new dream would come with a victory she couldn’t accomplish on her own.

  And that was more than worth playing for.

  twenty-eight

  Lucas jogged after Kat across the nearly deserted school parking lot, streaks of light from the poles above breaking up the shadows between cars. But not enough for his liking. He hated that she hadn’t waited on him like she usually did after his games and was walking by herself out in the dark. Did she really think that much had changed between them?

  Had it?

  It was like they were going to have to reset all their defaults.

  “Kat, wait up.” He didn’t holler, didn’t want to scare her. But she jumped a little anyway, turning and flipping the edge of her scarf over her shoulder. Even from this short distance, the color of the scarf brought out her eyes.

  She waited beside a dented Ford that had rusted out. “Good game.”

  He caught up to her quickly, then stopped a few feet away, suddenly not sure what to do with his hands. He wanted to hold her. So he held on to the strap of his coach’s duffel bag instead. “What do you mean? We lost.”

  She shrugged. “Was still good. Rachel nearly made me go deaf, screaming in my ear.” A grin flickered across her face, then mellowed into something more serious. “I saw what happened on the field with Ben.”

  Lucas hitched the bag higher on his shoulder. “You mean, you saw him call his own play.” He still couldn’t believe the boy’s nerve. But he knew the motivation behind it, recognized that panicked desperation Ben had felt. The teen had to decide between going with his gut and going with his instructions. It wasn’t wrong to question authority sometimes.

  But in this instance, Ben had chosen wrong, and it had cost them dearly.

  “I saw how you handled it too.” A passing car’s headlights briefly shone across Kat’s face, highlighting those features he’d come to love, the ones he used to be able to read like the pages of his favorite sports magazine. Lately, though, trying to read her was like trying to decipher a code.

  And rarely did she let him linger long enough to study properly.

  She twisted the edges of her scarf around her fingers, looking everywhere but directly at him. “You didn’t lose it with him. I’m proud of you.”

  That soft comment went straight to his core. Lucas struggled to focus on the real topic of their conversation, when all he wanted to do was wrap her in a hug and demand that everything go back to normal. But normal wouldn’t be enough, not after all they’d experienced together.

  Not after those kisses.

  He took a deep breath in an effort to redirect his thoughts. “Ben’s a good kid. Just needs to know when to obey and when to challenge.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Kat raised her eyebrow at him, and he had to agree.

  “We’re not so different. I told him that, too, after the game.” Ben had taken his discipline well, and felt so lousy he even bargained for a harsher sentence. But Lucas knew better. It wasn’t needed.

  It was pretty hard to punish him in the first place when every word out of Lucas’s mouth during his lecture had pierced straight into his own heart.

  You’ve got a lot of people counting on your decisions.

  What you do affects those around you and can either hurt or help.

  What kind of man are you going be?

  “I waited for you, for a little while.” Kat stepped a foot closer, and his heart hitched. “But you seemed preoccupied with the guys, and well . . .” Everything she didn’t say sounded even louder than the words she’d just spoken.

  She’d waited.

  But she’d left.

  Which meant more?

  Didn’t matter. She was here now, and he needed to make the suggestion he’d been debating ever since Darren had pinned him down with the truth last week.

  She let out a long sigh, staring somewhere over his shoulder at the stadium. “It was a really good game. An eye-opener.”

  For her too?

  But first things first.

  “Kat, we need to talk.” Just not at either of their places. Not after that night last week, and not with Lucas’s own raw emotions boiling under the surface. He wasn’t entirely sure how the impending conversation was going to go, but it needed to happen somewhere safe. For both of them.

  Because he might not even be able to get through it without choking up.

  She nibbled on her bottom lip, then finally nodded. To her credit, she didn’t immediately start quizzing him on the topic. Probably just assumed the worse, like he’d have done if the situation had been reversed. “Sure. Let’s just go sit in my car.”

  Maybe they were still on the same page to a degree after all. Did she not trust herself completely with him anymore either?

  And was it bad that the thought made him just a little happy?

  They walked to her car, where she unlocked the doors before he slid into the passenger side, dumping his bag at his feet. He scooted the seat back to make more room for his legs. “I had an idea.”

  Her slightly pinched features settled into a relaxed, neutral state at those words, and she reached to turn down the radio that blared when she’d started the ignition. “What’s that?”

  “I’ve been thinking about the show, and the way all that went down, and—well, it’s not right. Not fair. And I know you don’t feel led to do anything about it, and maybe our options aren’t really great in that regard anyway, but . . .”

  She shot him a look, turning the dial to blow the heater at their feet. “Lucas. Just spit it out.”

  Yeah, really. Since when did he babble? Probably since he was dreading the words he needed to speak. But despite the fear of them, he knew deep down in his core that Darren had been right, and this had to happen. For Kat. And for himself, in a sense. He needed to test his own heart for her. He’d been so caught up in his own selfish ventures that he hadn’t treated her nearly
in the way she deserved.

  If he could really do this, could really let her go—then he’d know that she truly had his heart.

  Of course, at that point, it’d be too late, but the guilt and the regret would be gone, at least. He would be free of those.

  Miserable and depressed, but free. More important, Kat would be doing what she wanted to do, and she would be happy. That was all that mattered.

  He held his breath. “I want to be your first investor.”

  “Investor? In what?” She angled to face him, a parking lot lamp cutting a shadow diagonally across her face, hiding her eyes.

  “You should start your own business. You have what it takes; you just need the boost financially.” He swallowed hard, hoping his face hid what was happening in his heart. “So, you pick wherever you want to go. New York. Los Angeles. Dallas. Just name it, and I’ll get you started. Interest free.”

  He wouldn’t even accept loan payments from her, not at first. Not until her business became somewhat steady and was making a profit. That lump of money was sitting there now, waiting on his land. He hadn’t needed it for anything else, so it wouldn’t hurt him to give her more time to get going.

  He wasn’t going to need it once she left, anyway. Not for a long time.

  Because buying his own dream meant nothing without Kat in the middle of it.

  “Interest? Lucas. What are you even talking about? You can’t give me a business loan.” She laughed, short and hollow, like she thought he might be teasing her. “That’s crazy.”

  “I’m serious, Kat.” He leveled his gaze at her until she finally looked back, confusion and hope and wariness filling her blue eyes. “I believe in you. I want you to do this.”

  She opened her mouth, then shut it, looking away. Looked at him again, and shook her head. Tried to speak again, but no words escaped. Suddenly she leaned over and pressed her forehead against the steering wheel.