Semi-Sweet On You: Hot Cakes Series

by Nicholas, Erin

  Cam looked over at Ollie. He was watching Piper with an expression that was impossible to read.

  Dax was clearly hiding a smile. He looked at the other woman. “You want to go higher than three thousand?”

  The woman was clearly appalled by the whole thing. “No. Of course not. I don’t have that kind of money!”

  Dax shrugged. “Then it’s going, going, gone.” He pointed at Piper. “Lemon bars with Oliver Caprinelli to the lady in yellow.”

  Piper looked incredibly smug. She looked down at Henry. “You have a dollar?”

  He nodded and held one up. She plucked it from his fingers. “And now you’ve bought the lemon bars with Ollie from me.” She looked up at Dax and then glanced at Ollie, then back down to Henry. “Have fun.”

  Cam covered his mic and leaned toward Ollie. “You paying her back that three thousand for savin’ you?”

  Ollie shook his head, still watching Piper. “We didn’t plan that.”

  “She’s digging into her savings for you?”

  Ollie finally looked over and gave Cam a little smile. “Well, I did offer her three thousand dollars to make me some of her sweet and sour meatballs yesterday.”

  Cam laughed. “Did you get the meatballs yet?”

  “Guessing I’ll have them tomorrow.”

  Cam shook his head, grinning.

  “And last but not least, Camden McCaffery,” Dax announced, pulling Cam’s attention back to the center of the stage.

  Cam straightened and gave the crowd a big grin, even as he stupidly wished Whitney was over here.

  Wouldn’t it be a nice twist if she came walking over and bid a couple thousand on him to take everyone immediately out of the running the way Piper had for Ollie?

  Better yet, Whitney could bid a cool five grand and make him the big winner, while she was at it.

  “Five thousand dollars!” a voice called out.

  But it was not Whitney’s.

  Everyone, including Dax and, of course, Cam, turned toward the voice.

  It was Didi Lancaster. Whitney’s grandmother. The ex-owner of Hot Cakes. The founder. Cam’s grandmother’s ex-best friend and nemesis for the past half century.

  She was being helped up the steps that led to the chair they’d designated for her as the final judge. A place of honor, really.

  “Didi?” Dax asked, casting a glance in Cam’s direction. “Are you… what did you say?”

  She got to the top of the steps and let go of the young man who’d helped her up. She straightened the hat on her head that reminded Cam of the hats the Queen of England wore. It was a carnation pink that was the exact color of the lighter pink in the Hot Cakes logo and it matched the skirt and jacket she wore over a buttoned-up white blouse.

  Cam had a flash of this is where Whitney gets it but he shook it off. Kind of. Whitney looked very much like her grandmother and he couldn’t help but think he was looking at Whitney at age seventy-two. Put together. Classy. Beautiful. Mildly intimidating.

  “I said,” Didi said, “that I’m bidding five thousand dollars.”

  The crowd was completely silent.

  Dax gave Cam a what the hell? look.

  Yeah, Cam had no fucking idea.

  “You’re bidding five thousand dollars for what?” Dax asked.

  “To have dessert with Camden, of course,” Didi said, giving Dax a look that clearly said she thought he was a cupcake short of a dozen.

  “Ooookay,” Dax said.

  Cam looked out over the crowd. But there was no one who had more than five thousand dollars. For one thing. For another, no one was going to tangle with Didi Lancaster.

  “Looks like I just brought in the highest bid,” Cam said. What the hell was he supposed to say? He wasn’t going to decline time with the woman in front of the entire town. And she was feisty, but she wasn’t exactly scary.

  He was a little curious about what she had in mind here, honestly.

  He’d spoken to Didi maybe twice in his entire life. But she’d grown up as his grandmother’s best friend. She’d helped start the bakery where he’d grown up and where his mom had worked and that his sister now owned.

  And she was Whitney’s grandmother.

  He wasn’t going to disrespect her, and having a conversation—and some chocolate coconut bars—with her for an hour or so could be interesting.

  “Looks like you have,” Dax agreed, following Cam’s lead. “So… going… going… gone!” he said. He pointed at Didi. “You’re the winner.”

  She smoothed the front of her jacket. “I’m ready to go. I certainly hope you’re going to drive the Roadster.”

  The 1960 MGA Roadster was actually Dax’s car but Cam looked at his friend and Dax nodded.

  It was a helluva nice car and Cam wouldn’t turn down the chance to drive it. He was surprised Didi knew the car even existed, but hey, she’d just agreed to pay five thousand dollars to eat cookies with him. He’d drive her in whatever she wanted.

  “I guess I’m ready too,” Cam said, pulling the apron off over his head. He wasn’t sure how this part was supposed to go.

  “Well, hang on there,” Dax said quickly. “We need Didi to pick the winning recipe first.”

  Piper was suddenly up on the stage next to Didi.

  So she hadn’t gone far. Cam grinned. He should have known she wouldn’t let them too far out of her sight.

  Piper handed Didi a pink plastic fork. “Let’s get you a taste of each,” she said.

  She led Didi to Ollie’s station first. Ollie slid his pan of lemon bars closer to the two women. With Piper’s hand on Didi’s elbow, Didi took a forkful from one corner. She lifted the bite to her mouth. After a moment, she frowned. Then her nose wrinkled. Then she shook her head. “Too much lemon,” she announced, setting her fork down.

  Ollie’s eyes went wide. “But they don’t suck?”

  Didi gave him a reproachful look. “You seem like an intelligent young man.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Isn’t there another word you could use to express what you mean?”

  Ollie thought about that for a moment, not looking even the tiniest bit ashamed. “Probably,” he finally told her. “But suck communicates clearly so I don’t see a reason to find another word.”

  Didi studied him for another moment. “It’s a little crude.”

  “So was the taste of my first batch,” Ollie told her.

  Ollie wasn’t being impolite. He said what he meant. Often without a filter, but with pure honesty. It was one of Cam’s favorite things about him.

  Didi finally nodded. “All right, then. No, they don’t suck. But you can do better.”

  “Don’t know that I’m cut out for baking,” Ollie said.

  “What are you cut out for?” Didi asked.

  Cam glanced at Max and then at Dax. They hadn’t expected Didi to have a conversation with each of them.

  “I’m the lead of our creative team,” Ollie told her.

  “And what’s that mean?” Didi asked.

  That seemed to stump Ollie for a moment.

  “It means I come up with the ideas.”

  “What kind of ideas?”

  “Ideas for our video game,” Ollie said. “I write the stories, create the characters. Then Dax designs them.”

  Didi nodded, considering this. “What about Hot Cakes?”

  “I helped with ideas for this event,” Ollie said.

  “Like what?” Didi wanted to know.

  Ollie glanced toward the alpacas. “The petting zoo.”

  Didi looked in that direction as well. “Well, what do alpacas have to do with cake?”

  Ollie just blinked at her.

  “So you don’t do anything?” Didi asked him. “You don’t get your hands on the things you do? You don’t make anything?”

  “I, um… surround myself with people who have talents far beyond mine for those things,” Ollie said.

  Didi didn’t roll her eyes. That seemed like it might have been beneath
her. But she gave every impression that she was rolling her eyes internally.

  “You might be pleasantly surprised by how rewarding it is to be directly responsible for something that makes someone else happy,” Didi told him.

  Then she turned and headed for Cam.

  She actually left Piper a few steps behind.

  Everyone on stage was stunned.

  The only person who challenged Ollie, really, was Piper, but she didn’t really question him. She pointed out when he was being a pain in the ass or when one of his ideas was just way too crazy to work out, but she didn’t really make him explain himself. None of them told him to do something himself rather than making them do it. They all just accepted that Ollie would say and do some big, crazy things and that their jobs were to mitigate it. They didn’t really ask him why.

  Speaking of stunned, Cam noticed Whitney had finally joined the crowd. She was at the back, on the very edge, closest to the alpacas, but clearly her grandmother’s voice had drawn her over.

  She looked like she wasn’t sure if she should come intervene with Didi. Or disappear entirely.

  He wondered if Whitney had caught the detail about Didi bidding on him. Well, she would find out soon enough.

  “Camden,” Didi greeted him as she came to stand directly in front of his cooking station.

  “Hello, Mrs. Lancaster,” he said.

  A faint smile curled the side of her mouth. “I already know that your bars will be good.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Your grandmother was the best baker I’ve ever known.”

  It was a fact that Letty Lancaster had been the best in the eastern part of Iowa if not the entire state. But hearing her ex-best friend, the woman she’d feuded with for most of her life, say so struck him as particularly complimentary.

  “Is baking talent genetic?” he asked with his own smile.

  “Fabulous baking is fifty percent about practice,” Didi said. “And I know you’ve been in the kitchen since you were a little boy.”

  He nodded. Buttered Up had been a second home to his whole family. He knew every inch of the bakery.

  “The other fifty percent is about love,” Didi said. “And I know that you were taught to put love into the things you make.”

  That also hit him hard. Directly in the chest. Letty had been proud of her bakery. Stubbornly so, in fact. She’d never changed her menu in all the years she’d owned the place. All of the recipes were original and were as familiar to the people who bought them as the goods that came from their own grandmother’s kitchens. There were families in Appleby that had never had a pie or a cake that hadn’t come from Buttered Up.

  But a lot of Letty’s emotion about the bakery after she and Didi had parted ways had been about proving that she was better than Didi and didn’t need Didi to be successful. He’d always had the impression that there was as much resentment there as there was love. It had always made him sad for his grandmother, actually, and he’d hated that she’d passed it on to his sister.

  Thankfully, Zoe had changed her mind and was looking at it differently now that the guys had taken Hot Cakes over. Aiden had had his work cut out for him though. It had definitely helped that Zoe was in love with him before the guys had bought the business. Even if she hadn’t realized it.

  “I was taught to do everything I do with an eye toward being the best,” he finally said.

  That wasn’t saying that it wasn’t about love. He did love the company and product that he and the guys had created together, but he knew that it was more that he loved having created it with the four men who were like brothers to him. He wasn’t sure he was quite in love with Hot Cakes or those products. Yet. Maybe it would come.

  His gaze found Whitney over Didi’s shoulder.

  She loved the company.

  That made him want to at least like it.

  And he should probably examine that more closely later.

  “You undoubtedly got that from your grandmother too,” Didi said. “She always wanted to be the best.”

  He nodded. He was aware that a portion of the town that was here was witnessing this conversation. That could be important. Listening to Didi Lancaster, founder of Hot Cakes, say nice things about his family could show that things were good between their families and would make everyone feel more secure about him being one of the new owners.

  He and Aiden felt strongly about keeping Hot Cakes open and solid because it did matter to their hometown. It was important the factory stay here.

  But, yes, Cam wanted it to be even better than it had been under the Lancasters. Not just a bigger operation but a better place to work and with better products.

  “It’s too bad she was a stubborn ass,” Didi finally said. “We could have made something great together.”

  Cam huffed out a surprised laugh. It wasn’t often you heard women referring to other women as asses, and certainly not older women wearing pearls.

  “She was a bit hard-headed,” he finally had to agree.

  Didi nodded. “The Hot Cakes cakes could have been better with her on my team.”

  He lifted a brow. It was probably not a great marketing move to have the original baker and founder of the company saying that their products weren’t the best they could have been. But he couldn’t help but love that she was complimenting his grandmother in front of the town they’d split with their feud.

  “You think so?” he asked.

  “No question. She was always the better baker of the two of us,” she said. “But Dean had the big business ideas.” She glanced at Ollie as she referred to her late husband, the man who had made Hot Cakes the huge multistate company that it was today. “It’s wonderful to have ideas. You just need to have the goods to back it up. Otherwise it’s just a lot of hot air, and sooner or later, people catch on.”

  Cam looked over at Ollie. Didi seemed intent on teaching his friend some lesson. He wondered why, exactly, but if Didi saw something in Ollie that she wanted to nurture then…what the hell?

  Ollie hadn’t had a lot of nurturing. He was an only child and his parents were similarly brilliant people who were pretty detached. It had taken years for him to get truly comfortable joking around with the guys. But he was still puzzled by things like family dinners at Cam’s mom’s house once a week that also included Zoe’s two best friends and now, their significant others. The idea of big family gatherings and friends-that-turned-into-family seemed foreign to Oliver, even after a decade of being close to the four men who were his business partners.

  “I’ve got the goods,” Cam said, pulling Didi’s attention back to him.

  She smiled. “You sound like a typical McCaffrey.”

  Fair enough. He tipped his head in acknowledgment.

  “The problem there is that you’re not as open to being taught or changing,” she said.

  That was also fair. The McCaffreys were well-known for being stubborn as hell. But he wondered if Didi had an underlying meaning or lesson for him as well. It wasn’t as if the McCaffreys were the only ones in the family feud. The Lancasters had been just as stubborn. Hell, it had been Didi who had taken the recipe for Butter Sticks from Letty and turned them into her own business.

  “If you think there’s a way to improve this, you let me know,” he told her.

  She dipped her fork into the edge of his pan of chocolate coconut bars. Her nose was already wrinkled by the time she lifted the fork. “Well, the first way to improve them is to take the coconut out.”

  He laughed. “They’re chocolate coconut bars.”

  “Yeah. So they already”—she looked at Ollie—“suck.”

  Ollie grinned. Cam laughed.

  “You’re not a fan of coconut?” he asked.

  “You didn’t wonder why none of the Hot Cakes have coconut in them already?” she asked.

  He sighed, pretending to be hurt. “So I’ve lost before you even taste it?”

  “Yes,” she said simply. “But you still get to have dessert with
me,” she added. “So that’s a win. We’re just going to have to go to your sister’s bakery for something good to eat.”

  Cam was again pleasantly surprised by Didi’s public compliment of something to do with his family. “I can arrange that,” he told her.

  Didi handed her fork to Piper. “But I also want to be fair. Here. What do you think?”

  Piper tasted the chocolate coconut bar. She nodded. “Delicious actually.”

  “Do you want to taste the lemon too?” Didi asked her.

  Piper glanced at Ollie. “No. Oliver never adds enough sweetness to anything.”

  Cam coughed to cover his laugh. She was annoyed with Ollie today, clearly. He looked at Ollie. He had his arms crossed and was watching Piper as if he was equally annoyed, but also confused as to what he’d done wrong.

  “So I guess that means I win,” Max said from the end of the stage.

  Didi looked at him. “Well, it is possible that I won’t choose any of these.”

  Piper frowned. “I don’t know. We do need to have a new product to launch.” She glanced toward the crowd, probably looking for Whitney.

  Cam looked for her as well. She was still standing at the back, chewing on her right thumbnail. That was the sure sign she was nervous about this. Well, she needed to get her sweet ass down to the front, or better yet, up here on stage, and take control.

  He lifted a brow as she caught his eye.

  She didn’t move.

  “I’m not going to choose a subpar product for Hot Cakes,” Didi said, lifting her chin slightly.

  The move was so familiar to Cam that he had to shake his head. Whitney’s stubborn, don’t-mess-with-me expression was an exact replica of her grandmother’s.

  “The town helped choose these,” Piper said. “We had nearly a hundred entries. I promise these are not subpar.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” Didi said, moving toward Max.

  Piper handed her another fork.

  Max held his pan out.

  Didi lifted a forkful of caramel crunch bar to her mouth and tasted it. She chewed. She swallowed. She thought for a moment. But there was no nose wrinkling.

  “These are delightful,” she finally said.

  Max’s mouth spread into a huge grin. “Thank you.”