They all laughed and shook their heads.
Ollie finally said, “Cam might have his hands full.”
Whitney nodded. “Seriously.”
“That’s awesome,” Dax said with a huge grin.
“Is it?” she asked. She wasn’t so sure. Not if she wanted him to stick around.
Then again, if she wanted him to leave her alone, this was maybe the perfect solution.
It did not feel like a good solution. Because she didn’t want him to leave her alone.
“Yeah, it’s awesome,” Ollie agreed. “Cam is pretty used to getting his way with beautiful women. I think having a couple he has to work a little harder with is perfect.”
A couple. Ollie had said a couple. That meant someone other than Didi.
Whitney did not ask him who else he meant.
12
The doorbell rang and Cam jogged to the front door. His mom was bringing some of her homemade cleaning solutions over. He needed something to get the upstairs tubs clean and he hadn’t been able to find anything good in the closets and cupboards at Whitney’s. He suspected she had a cleaning service come in or that Katherine had done the cleaning and had taken the supplies with her.
He hoped Maggie included some furniture polish too.
He pulled the door open with a big smile.
But it wasn’t Maggie.
He sighed.
Dax, Aiden, and Grant were on the front step. Grinning like dumbasses.
Aiden held up a plastic grocery bag. “Special delivery from Maggie.”
“She asked you to bring it over?” Cam asked.
“No. We totally volunteered when we heard where she was going,” Dax said. He took in Cam’s appearance from head to toe, including the yellow Buttered Up apron Maggie had dropped off to him yesterday and the rubber spatula he held in his left hand. “You have a little something…” Dax pointed at his right cheek.
Cam wiped at his cheek, his hand coming away with powdered sugar. He sighed.
Dax grinned. He turned to Grant. “Yes. This was definitely a good idea.”
Grant nodded. “Oh, yeah, this makes me very happy.”
“You’re all jerks,” Cam told them, turning on his heel and heading back into the house. “Come on. I’ve got cookies in the oven. I don’t want them to burn.”
His friends followed with laughter.
“Hey, Henry!” Aiden called as they all stepped into the kitchen.
Henry waved absently over his shoulder. He and Didi were on the couch in the family room playing Warriors of Easton.
“Maggie said to bring him home if he’s bored or driving you nuts,” Aiden said.
“He’s fine.” Cam grinned at the back of his little brother’s head. “He’s been kicking her ass, of course, for two hours, but he’s telling her she’s winning and she’s delighted.”
Aiden grinned as he set the plastic bag of bottles and jars on the counter. “Henry would probably let her win but I’m not sure he knows how to lose at Warriors.”
Cam chuckled. “Exactly.”
He pulled on an oven mitt and crossed to the oven, taking a dozen perfectly browned lemon cookies from the rack. He set them to the side and slid another pan in, setting the timer, then pulling the mitt off and tossing it to the side.
He turned to find his friends watching him, clearly amused.
“This is very… domestic,” Dax said.
Cam lifted an eyebrow and planted his hands on his hips. “And?”
Dax nodded. “I would never have guessed you’d be house-husband material.”
Cam shrugged. That didn’t bother him at all. “I’m good at everything I do.”
Dax laughed. “Touché.”
“I asked Maggie if we should bring some food over. Or dessert,” Grant said. “But she said you and Didi have been over for dinner every night and that you leave before dessert because you’ve been making stuff here.”
“I have.” Cam gave him a challenging look. “My stuff is better than my mom’s.”
Dax’s eyes grew wide. “That better not be true, McCaffery.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because that means you’ve been depriving me of your goods for ten years? I might never forgive you.”
“I’ve been giving you plenty of my goods,” Cam told him. “Just not the baked kind.”
“You’re a bastard,” Dax said.
Cam grinned. “Wow, news flash.”
“I don’t know.” Aiden had come around the breakfast bar and was now lifting a cookie from the cooling rack. “Zoe thinks all of this”—he gestured, encompassing the kitchen and Didi and Henry and everything—“is really sweet.” He lifted the cookie to his mouth.
Cam plucked it from his fingers before he could bite into it. “It is really sweet,” he said, putting the cookie back with the rest.
“Hey.”
“What? You don’t need those cookies. You’re living with and practically married to someone who owns a bakery. Those are for Didi and Henry.”
“And Whitney?” Dax asked, wiggling his eyebrows.
Cam grinned. Whitney never ate the desserts he made in front of him, but there were always at least a couple missing by the time he checked on them the next day. He already knew that she especially liked anything with chocolate and caramel. But he’d bet there would be some lemon cookies missing tomorrow too.
“Whitney too,” he said with a nod.
“And is the toilet bowl cleaner and dusting solution for Didi or Whitney?” Aiden asked. He swiped another cookie and quickly got it to his mouth before Cam could grab it back.
“Both,” Cam said. But then he shrugged. “Mostly Whit, I guess. I mean, she’d be the one doing it, or paying to have it done, if I didn’t.”
Aiden chewed and swallowed. “Damn, man, you are good at that.”
Cam smirked. Then tossed cookies to Dax and Grant too.
“So you’re seducing a woman by cleaning toilets,” Dax said. “I can totally relate to that.”
“I’m helping a friend out with some things,” Cam said.
But damn, he wanted to seduce this woman. Not with toilets. Or furniture polish for that matter.
But, yeah, maybe with cookies.
“About that,” Aiden said.
“It’s great,” Cam told him. “We’ve got a routine. Didi and I start our day after Whitney’s already left for work. We hang out. We go to Mom’s for dinner. I bring leftovers home for Whit. She works late, so we’re already upstairs by the time she gets home. She’s in bed by the time Didi is up to watch Magnum, P.I. We stay up with cookies and reruns until two or three and then sleep in. It’s working.”
For now.
He hated not seeing Whitney more. That part wasn’t really going according to plan. But he was fine keeping things running at home and, it was clearly allowing Whitney to do some pretty awesome things at Hot Cakes.
And he couldn’t get over the look on her face during that meeting.
She’d looked worried. Almost scared. As if she was suddenly realizing she was in over her head and was panicking a little.
It was true the guys were giving her full lead on… well, everything. And, from what he’d gleaned from both Whitney and Didi, she hadn’t had that before.
So he was doing what he could to make work all she needed to focus on.
Even if that meant there was no time or attention for him, either.
“Oh, hot damn!” Didi crowed from the room off the kitchen.
“You’re really good at this,” Henry said.
The men all laughed, assuming he was just trying to make her feel good.
“I was always a fast runner,” Didi said. “Way faster than your grandma. But she was a better climber.”
“He has to keep pausing it,” Cam told the others. “She wants to keep telling him stories about when she and Letty were kids. I just overheard about the first time they baked cookies for a tea party and burned them but were determined to make them seem delicio
us so their mothers wouldn’t tell them they couldn’t bake anymore so they ate them all anyway.”
Cam had felt a strange urge to yell into the living room to wait for him. He wanted to hear stories about his grandmother as a little girl.
“Like the other night at dinner,” Aiden said with a grin.
“I couldn’t believe when Jane and Josie and Zoe followed Didi and Henry into the living room after dinner instead of heading out to the patio,” Dax said, his smile affectionate.
Usually the girls went out to the back patio with spiked lemonade or wine while the guys cleaned up after dinner. Instead, Zoe, Josie, and Jane had followed Didi and Henry into the family room where they were going to resume the Warriors of Easton game they’d started before dinner.
Didi had talked almost nonstop through dinner, telling stories about her and Letty, stories about the early days in the bakery, and even stories about the origins of Hot Cakes. She’d laughed and smiled through it all, seeming lost in her memories and very nostalgic about Letty. Even the chicken had reminded her of her old friend.
It had instantly endeared her to all of the McCafferys and their friends, and within minutes any awkwardness was gone. And having the woman they’d all spent years believing was their family’s nemesis passing the chicken and potatoes around Maggie’s dining room table seemed completely normal.
“She reminds me so much of my grandma,” Cam agreed. He looked at Aiden. “Her sense of humor is almost identical. And she is a handful.”
Aiden nodded. Letty had been his adopted grandma just as Maggie and Steve had been fill-in parents after his mom had died and his dad had disappeared into his work and his bottle of liquor. He grinned. “She kept you on your toes today?”
She most certainly had. “The crash you heard on the phone earlier wasn’t her dropping anything,” Cam said. “It was her throwing stuff. She was trying to find something in the cupboards. She nearly gave me a heart attack when I walked into the kitchen and found her standing on the counter and rummaging through the cupboards. She was just tossing the pots and pans out of her way.” Cam paused in his dish rinsing. “Ask me what she was looking for.”
Aiden lifted both eyebrows. “What was she looking for?”
“Tequila.”
Aiden, Grant, and Dax all snorted.
“It was nine thirty a.m.,” Aiden said.
Cam nodded. He was aware. “She said it was time for margaritas.”
“What did you do?” Dax asked.
“Made her margaritas.”
They all looked surprised.
“Orange margaritas. With no tequila in them,” Cam clarified. He’d blended orange juice with ice and a bit of lime juice and poured it into a margarita glass and served it to her by the pool. “She said it was the most delicious margarita she’d ever had.”
“You lied to her,” Grant said.
“Yes, I did.” Cam didn’t feel even a flicker of guilt over that. “It made her happy and kept her safe.”
They all nodded. He hadn’t really expected any of them to give him a hard time.
“Were you able to get any work done today?” Dax asked, seeming amused.
Cam lifted a shoulder. “A bit.” He reached for a towel and dried his hands. “I took the laptop out to the patio while she sunbathed with her margarita and answered some emails on my phone while she was watching her Spanish soap opera.”
“Didi speaks Spanish?” Dax asked.
“No. She said that makes it better because she can pretend they’re saying whatever she wants them to.”
Dax laughed. “Well, if you need to come into the office, bring her with you. Some of the girls watch soap operas in the break room and there’s a couple of Spanish ones. Didi could hang out with them.”
Cam grinned. “I might do that. I took her to yoga yesterday.”
“No way,” Aiden chuckled. “How’d that go?”
“It was perfect. She laid down to do the deep breathing, a kitten crawled up onto her chest and started purring, and within two minutes they were both asleep.”
“She just took a nap during yoga?”
“Yep.” Cam shook his head. “So I went through a few of the moves and… two hours later, Paige woke me up because her pregnant mom’s class was coming in and they were a little louder and she didn’t think I’d be able to sleep through it.”
The guys all paused a beat and then started laughing. “You napped at Paige’s?”
Cam grinned. “Yeah. There was no class after ours, and then there was one for older gals and they all decided I must need the sleep.” He pushed a hand through his hair. “Which I did. Didi had me up watching Magnum, P.I. ’til the wee hours.”
Aiden pushed away from the counter. “This is going to be interesting.”
Cam glanced toward the family room. “But good, I think. It’s kind of nice already.”
Aiden nodded. “Henry misses Letty.”
“We all miss her,” Cam said. His chest felt a little tight.
He’d come home fairly often for a guy who lived in another city and had a demanding job, but Letty had passed away quickly. He had regrets about not being there more and only barely getting home before she died. Having Letty in his life was something he’d always taken for granted and he was sorry about that now. Henry wasn’t the only one who was enjoying having someone around who reminded him so much of his grandmother.
Aiden clapped him on the shoulder. “Yes, we do,” he agreed. “And it seems that Didi is really enjoying this.”
Cam nodded. “Maybe Whitney isn’t the only one that the Lancasters didn’t pay a lot of attention to.”
Grant’s and Dax’s eyebrows rose but Aiden actually nodded. “And speaking of Whitney…”
“We already talked about Whitney.”
“We need to talk about her some more.”
Cam had known this was coming. “Whitney and I are fine.”
“Are you?”
This actually came from Grant rather than Aiden.
All three of his friends faced him fully. Grant folded his arms, Dax put his hands on his hips and Aiden braced a hand on the counter beside him, which blocked Cam’s escape from the kitchen.
Cam sighed. They were feeling protective of Whitney. He’d been expecting his. His friends were all protective types, in one way or another. Dax the lesser of the three, but he was still not about to let one of his friends mess with a woman that he liked and respected. Well, any woman really, but it was clear they all liked Whitney and that meant Cam wasn’t going to get away with so much as looking at Whitney wrong.
Good thing he didn’t want to look at Whitney wrong at all.
“We need her,” Aiden said firmly. “We knew it before, but she has absolutely confirmed it now. She has to lead us in… most of the things we have coming up.”
Cam knew that. It had been obvious during the meeting, even over his computer screen. “Of course we do.”
He wanted Hot Cakes to be successful, of course. But not because of his own bank account, and less and less because of wanting to throw it back in the faces of the Lancasters. It was about his friends. This was important to Aiden. And Grant now that he was staying in Appleby with Josie. It was also important to Whitney.
That was the ultimate reason Cam wanted this to all go forward and be huge. Aiden and Grant could make it work, somehow. They’d probably have to hire some more people. Consultants and shit. But they’d figure it out. Eventually. Possibly not on the timeline they’d laid out that morning though.
But they were both already millionaires, for fuck’s sake. And they were also entrepreneurs who had previously built a business from the ground up. They’d find something else if Hot Cakes flopped.
This was a lot bigger deal to Whitney. It was all she had.
So yeah, he was going to be her friend. So that she would feel she could confide in him so he could help her. But also because she’d made it clear that was what she wanted. She hadn’t bullshitted him or taken her panties off
to try to get her way—which definitely would have worked. She’d been clear about what she wanted.
Now, she needed help. And he and his friends were, obviously, the best ones to give it to her.
“So don’t piss her off,” Aiden said. “Or turn her off about working for us.”
Cam frowned. “Which is why she and I are going to be just friends.”
“And boss-employee with no extra shit,” Grant said, almost as if he hadn’t heard Cam. “You can’t be making her uncomfortable or to feel like she has to worry about—”
“I know,” Cam said. “I think we should offer her a partnership.”
All the other men were quiet, clearly surprised.
“She’s doing more to move things forward than the rest of us,” Cam said. “She deserves it. That will help her feel like she’s truly an equal part. That we trust her. And that she doesn’t have to prove anything to us.”
“So you can sleep with her then without it being weird?” Dax asked. He’d given up his share in the company so he could date Jane, an employee.
“No.” Cam sighed. “I’m trying to be mature here.”
“Sorry,” Dax said with a grin. “Mature isn’t really something I’m used to. Hard to recognize it.”
Cam nodded. “Fair enough. Especially with me. When it pertains to Whitney.”
They were good enough friends to not confirm they agreed with that. At least out loud.
“I’m trying to be a good guy,” Cam said.
“This is a one-eighty in five days,” Aiden commented.
“It is,” Cam agreed.
Aiden shook his head. “I really expected fireworks from you two.”
Cam nodded. “Me too.”
“But you’re not at each other’s throats?” Aiden asked. “It’s not tense or awkward?”
He hardly saw her, really, so no it wasn’t either of those things. But honestly, it wasn’t tense or awkward anyway. He’d expected them to fight. Or at least bicker. But… it didn’t feel right. She made him feel protective and hell, proud. Yeah, proud over the things she was doing at Hot Cakes. Of all the crazy things.
Laughter from the family room made him smile and he said, “Whitney and I have bigger things going on than a breakup from ten years ago.”
Semi-Sweet On You: Hot Cakes Series Page 17