by Jennie Marts
“I’m impressed.” She grinned at him. “With your mom. She sounds great.”
“She is. She’s got a huge heart and a sarcastic mouth. She needed it to control us boys. But she loves us all to death, and she’ll get a huge kick out of hearing about me spending my morning making two hundred cupcakes.”
Gabby liked the way he spoke about his mom. No bitterness or disrespect. Only love and admiration. She liked that. She was starting to like him. Really like him.
A bad boy that loved his mom? Yes, please. She was a sucker for just that type.
But that was exactly the type that she needed to stay away from. That got her into trouble and took her focus away from what was important to her. Getting her business going, turning a substantial profit and getting out of this neighborhood. Getting out from under the scrutiny of her family and the thumb of her dad.
She’d fallen into the bad boy trap before. Fallen hard. Hook, line, and sinker. And she wouldn’t make that mistake again.
Time to concentrate on that business right now.
She pointed at the wall behind the mixers where she’d posted the recipes for the cupcake batter. “We need one bowl of vanilla and one of chocolate. You work on the dry ingredients, and I’ll work on the wet.”
Geez, why did it feel like everything she said this morning sounded dirty? Did she really ask him earlier if he wanted to get busy?
No wonder. Everything about the guy screamed ‘Jump me now.” Working together in the tight space, her hip and arm brushing his as they dumped ingredients and bustled around the small kitchen.
She needed to start him on another task. On the other side of the kitchen.
She grabbed eight metal trays and a package of cupcake liners then lined them up on the center island. “These trays hold twenty-four cupcakes each, and we need them all lined. If you drop a liner in each cup, then I’ll finish the batter and start filling them.”
He took the package, peeled a liner free, dropped it into the pan, then offered her a sarcastic grin. “You’re really taking advantage of my intelligence now. Giving me the real thinking task.”
She shrugged. “I told you. Cupcake-making isn’t for sissies.”
“I believe you.” He moved quickly, filling the pans with liners and passing them across the counter to her.
“We’re already behind schedule.” She finished mixing the last of the ingredients into the chocolate batter and carried the bowl to the table. Using an ice cream scoop, she dumped a dollop of batter into each liner.
She gestured to the bowl of vanilla and passed him a fresh scoop. “We need three trays filled with vanilla batter and five with chocolate. The special order I got at last night’s party isn’t complicated. She wants six dozen chocolate with cream cheese frosting.”
“You got an order last night for six dozen cupcakes. That’s cool.”
It had been cool. She’d been thrilled. Especially after the hit to her savings account. It was a little inconvenient to rush to make seventy-two cupcakes this morning, but she didn’t care. The order couldn’t have come at a better time.
“A woman approached me last night at the party. She said she loved the cupcakes and asked if she could special order six dozen for a football party she was throwing tonight for the Bronco game. I told her that I could not only make them, I’d also personally deliver them to her house wearing a Manning jersey.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I thought you said you didn’t follow sports.”
“I don’t. Well, except the Broncos, of course.”
“Of course. So I suppose if Peyton Manning would have stumbled into the bathroom last night, you would have recognized him?”
She laughed, enjoying teasing him. “Oh yeah. Peyton’s adorable.”
“He’s a pretty good guy.”
“You know him?” It would make sense that he would, since they were both big names in the sports industry.
“A little. I’ve been to a couple of parties at his house and done some fundraising events with him. He’s actually a really nice guy and pretty humble. He doesn’t have a big head like a lot of those guys do.”
“Those famous sports guy types, you mean?”
He laughed and switched to the next tray. “Yeah, those types.”
She loaded the filled trays into the preheated ovens, taking the last one from him as he finished filling the cups. “Now they bake for eighteen minutes and cool for fifteen. We need to fold carryout boxes for the truck and prepare the frostings and the garnish. We’re making a chocolate, a sour-cream white, and a cookies and cream. Plus we need to wash some blueberries and slice strawberries for the fruit-topped ones.”
They worked quietly together. She occasionally gave him instructions, but he hadn’t been kidding when he’d said his mom taught him to bake. He knew his way around the kitchen and found things to do to help. He washed dishes, mixed ingredients, and folded and lined a tower of different sized cupcake boxes.
She filled a pastry bag with chocolate frostings and folded over the top. Setting the cooled pans of cupcakes on the counter, she pointed to a can of sprinkles and box of plastic football picks. “Okay, I’ll frost and I need you to be the chaser. Follow along behind me and after I frost the cupcake, give it a quick sprinkle of sugar, stick a football pick in it, then put it in the box.”
“I can do that. I’ve been told I’m a fairly good chaser.” He smirked as she tossed an empty box at him. “What? It’s just a rumor.”
She laughed as she spread a perfect swirl of frosting onto the first cupcake.
He groaned as the aroma of chocolate filled the air. “This frosting reminds me of the way you smelled last night. I didn’t realize I preferred the scent of chocolate over perfume.”
Did he really want to talk about last night? What if he brought up the kiss? She was both glad and a little disappointed that he hadn’t tried to kiss her again today. The magic spell of last night must have worn off. Or now he was just sober.
He was still flirty, and she noticed he liked to bump her or touch her arm as they worked, but he hadn’t mentioned the kiss or tried to do it again. But he was working hard, and she appreciated that. He worked quickly, his movements competent and efficient, and they were getting their tasks accomplished in good time.
She nodded at the box of cupcakes he’d just filled. “You do good work. I may have to hire you if this whole hockey thing doesn’t work out.” She’d been going for light and funny, but her comment must have hit a nerve, because his light-hearted mood suddenly darkened, and a scowl took over his face.
“We’ll see what happens at this meeting this afternoon. This whole hockey-thing may be over sooner than you think. I may end up back at your door looking for work as a frosting maker.”
“Sorry. Do you want to talk about it? I’m a pretty good listener.”
He shrugged and stabbed a plastic football pick into a mound of frosting. “There’s not much to tell. I screwed up, and now my brother is going to take the fall for my mistake.”
“What happened?” She focused on filling a new pastry bag with vanilla frosting, giving him room to speak if he wanted to talk.
“Bane and I both play defense, and the coach usually puts us on the same line. We’ve sort of earned this reputation as fighters, and the fans have dubbed as the Bannister Brawlers.”
“Right. I heard that on the news story this morning.”
“Well, thanks to me and my hot temper, I’ve had a few times when I’ve gotten into fights outside of the rink, which is not good for my public persona—or the team’s.” He blew out his breath. “I hate being in the public eye. I mean, I love the fans. But that’s because they love the game. I’m just a regular guy who loves hockey and happens to be good at it. And I’m lucky enough to get paid to do what I love.”
And get paid plenty. “There may have been some luck involved,” she said. “But you have to be a good player, too. Otherwise you wouldn’t have made the team. Weren’t you telling me earlier about you
r mad skills?”
He laughed. “Yeah, I guess. But hockey is an emotional sport. And it encourages fighting. There’s a code to it and we try not to kill each other, but sometimes in the heat of the moment, it’s easy to get carried away. This big guy just dissed you and the fans are screaming for blood, and you just get caught up in this haze of red.” He glanced over at her. “It’s probably hard for you to understand wanting to punch someone in the face.”
“Oh, believe me. There’s been plenty of times when I’ve wanted to punch someone.” Her hands stilled, caught in a memory of her childhood, a memory of violence and terror, a memory of seeing her dad throw a punch at her mother. But he didn’t usually hit her in the face. He knew where to leave his bruises—in places that could be easily hidden by her clothes or long sleeves.
“Well, typically a few fights are good for the game,” Owen continued. “But we haven’t been playing as well this season, and the team managers told us to cool it a little with the fighting. Evidently between my public stunts and the team not doing so great, the Bannister Brawlers were starting to get a bad rep. And the press is always looking for dirt. And if they can’t find it, they manufacture it. My brother had this thing going with a pop star which ended badly, and he was crucified by the press. And they love to portray me as this bad boy that doesn’t care about anything except parties and women.”
She grinned over at him. “Do you care about anything else?”
A smile tugged at the corner of his lips. “Apparently I care about cupcakes and chocolate frosting.”
She laughed. “Okay, so continue with your story.”
His smile fell. “It isn’t much of a story. And it’s not one I’m proud of. The last game we played, we were getting killed. It was the third period, and we were down a goal. Bane and I were off our rhythm, and we’d wasted a power play where we should have been able to pick up a goal. The opposing team was one our biggest rivals, and we’d been taking jabs at each other the whole game.
“One guy in particular was making my blood boil. And he went after Bane—checked him in the back—which is totally against the rules. So I kind of went after him, and the gloves hit the ice and we got into a pretty heated fight. We both got penalties and spent the entire time ribbing each other from the boxes. And not light-hearted ribbing, like some serious slanderous smack talk. His penalty was longer, but it didn’t matter, I was so keyed up from the fight and I was playing like shit, and we’d just let another power play go by without a shot anywhere near the net.”
She nodded, trying to keep up with hockey terms. She was getting the gist of the story, even without knowing what a power play was.
“So, this guy comes out of the box and heads straight for me. Like he had murder in his eyes. Didn’t even try to act like he was in the game, just came at me swinging. It was my fault. I may have mentioned something rude about Canada and possibly his wife when we were slinging trash talk, and this guy was beyond pissed. He hauled off and got a cheap shot at my head.”
“Oh no. At least you didn’t say anything about his mom.”
He shrugged. “There may have been talk about his mother. I don’t know. The whole thing is kind of a blur. It all happened so fast. I wasn’t prepared for the punch, and I went down. And hard. Then the guy was on top of me, fists flying, cussing and swearing. All I could do was cover my head and kick my skates at him. And then he was gone. Like his weight was just lifted off of me, and I pulled my arm away and Bane was just whaling on the guy. And Bane hadn’t even been on the ice. I watched the replay later and saw him come flying off the bench and light into the guy.”
Gabby had seen the closeness between the brothers even in the short time she’d spent with them the night before, and she could imagine Bane wanting to protect his little brother.
“Most of the time, a fight is just a few punches thrown. The fans eat it up, and it isn’t that big of a deal. Yeah, you’re sore or bruised the next day, but after a game, you’re always sore and bruised anyway. But this was different. Bane popped him in the nose and broke it, and blood started gushing everywhere—which the fans loved, but our coaches didn’t. They pulled all three of us from the game. Long story short, we lost the game, the guy ended up going to the hospital, and the coach was so pissed at the both of us—especially Bane—that he’s kicking him off the team.”
“Kicking him off the team? That seems a little rash.”
“Yeah. It’s crazy. We expected a slap on the wrist, maybe a one-game suspension, but neither of us expected this.”
“So Bane won’t be able to play hockey anymore?”
“He’ll still get to play. Just not with the Colorado Summit. The coach is looking at trading him. He’s sending him to St. Louis to play with the Blueshirts. And it’s all my fault. I should have just kept my cool and did what the coach asked me to and none of this would have happened.”
She stacked up the last box of finished cupcakes. “You can’t blame yourself for that. It was Bane’s choice for jumping into the fight.”
The look he gave her told her she was skating on thin ice with that comment. “I think you know what it’s like to not think when you’re reacting to someone hurting your brother. You go into your protective instinct mode and don’t think. But I’m the idiot that did something stupid and sent him into that protective mode. If I hadn’t been a bonehead and caused the trouble in the first place, then Bane wouldn’t have been the one to be punished for my actions. Kind of like your brother doing something stupid to land himself in jail last night and cause you to spend your entire advertising budget to bail him out.”
“You have a good memory.” She’d hoped he wouldn’t recall all of the details of their conversation from the night before. And she didn’t like all of the correlations he was drawing between himself and her brother. She had already been thinking a few of those things, but didn’t like having them brought out and inspected under the light.
“Good memory. Bad judgement.”
She hated seeing him in pain. Hated the look of hurt in his eyes. Wanting to do something, offer some kind of comfort, she took a step closer and laid her hand on his arm. Her hip brushed against his, and she looked up into his eyes. “I’m sure Bane doesn’t blame you.”
He dipped his head, his words soft, almost a whisper. “But I blame myself.”
His eyes were so blue. And so full of pain. Her heart broke for him.
Despite her head’s earlier practical objections to not getting involved with this man, her body was in full disagreement. Everything in her was responding to him, like she was metal and he was a magnet—pulling her in and drawing her closer. Her heart was beating in triple time, her mouth was dry, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath.
Her skin warmed, and she felt a dizzying rush in her head as the look in his eyes changed. The expression of pain shifted to one of hunger. And not for cupcakes. For her.
His gaze dipped to her lips, and her body stilled. Immobile in anticipation.
He leaned closer—just a fraction of an inch—just enough. Enough for her to smell his aftershave and the scent of laundry detergent on his shirt.
A smudge of flour dusted his cheek, and she yearned to brush it off. To touch his cheek. To touch him.
To kiss him.
A little closer. His lips grazed hers. Just a touch.
Just a taste.
A soft sigh escaped her lips.
His fingers skimmed her cheek in the lightest touch, and she melted against his body.
Closer still—his lips pressed against hers—and the timer went off. An insistent beep from the stove that she couldn’t ignore.
She pulled back. “I better get that.”
He cleared his throat and shook his head as if waking from a dream. “Yeah, of course. Don’t want the cupcakes to burn.”
Something in this kitchen was already burning. Burning hot. And it wasn’t the cupcakes.
She grabbed a hotpad and pulled the last few trays from the oven. The scent o
f vanilla filled the room as steam rose from the warm cupcakes. “We only have these two trays left, and we’ll be finished.”
“We’d better hurry if we want to catch the lunch time crowd. I’ll wash up these last few things while you mix up the next batch of frosting. Then we’d better get these cupcakes on the truck and make you some money.” He turned his back to her, crossing to the sink and filling it with soapy water.
With his back to her, she couldn’t read his reaction. Was he glad they were interrupted? Disappointed? What would have happened if the timer hadn’t gone off?
She imagined him sweeping the mixing bowls and cupcakes onto the floor and taking her right there on the counter. Her cheeks warmed at the thought—at the idea of being so spontaneous, so reckless—of being so in the moment that she didn’t think, didn’t worry about getting frosting in her hair or wasted ingredients falling to the floor.
It didn’t matter now. The moment had passed.
She let out a sigh as she regained her practical side. Having frosting-covered sex with Owen Bannister would be fun—oh, yeah, like seriously fun—but wouldn’t mean anything to him and would only serve as a distraction to her plans. She needed to focus on her business, her goals.
With her brother, she already had one messed-up man in her life to take care of. She didn’t need another.
She dumped a teaspoon of vanilla into the mixing bowl. This was just being smart. Focus on work. Focus on her business.
And try to ignore the cute butt of the guy washing dishes in her kitchen.
The kiss was just an impulsive moment. And impulsive was not in her vocabulary right now. Driven, purposeful, and focused—yes. Impulsive—no.
And she had a feeling that ‘impulsive’ might just be Owen Bannister’s middle name.
Chapter Four
Owen grabbed for the dashboard as the cupcake truck bumped up against the curb and the engine ground to a halt.
“I’m never completely sure it will start again,” Gabby said as unclicked her seat belt. “But so far it’s always gotten me to where I need to go.”