Josh didn’t know how he managed to make it through the rest of Sunday dinner. But Marilyn finally declared she needed to return to Bliss and her Knot Festival duties. Mom asked to borrow Kimmie for half an hour—questions about the wedding and that delicious chocolate frosting on the peanut butter cupcakes, she said—thus foiling Marilyn’s attempts to take Kimmie with her.
Mom smiled all the way through seeing Marilyn out and shutting the door behind her.
“I always did want to be the likeable mother-in-law,” she murmured to Josh. “Now, where did Kimmie disappear to?”
Dad leaned against the door frame, blocking Josh from following Mom. “That woman figured out we’re working on a new line,” he said quietly. “She’s a suspicious one, isn’t she?”
“She’s the devil.”
“Watch your back, son. Watch Kimmie’s back too.”
He intended to.
* * *
Kimmie didn’t always say the right thing, but rarely was she at a loss for something to say.
The drive to Josh’s condo was the exception.
He was tense and quiet. A local country station played on the radio, pretty city scenery flew past, and the sun shone down out of a bright blue sky, but Kimmie’s mind was swirling in dark places.
Where an eleven-year-old boy picked pockets to survive and a grown man she liked more than coconut was keeping secrets about the real reason he wanted her cupcake recipes.
She rubbed at some dried chocolate frosting that she hadn’t noticed clinging to her fingernail. “Your mom is really smart,” she finally said.
Josh turned the car onto his street, and his mouth hitched in a small grin. “Don’t tell her that.”
“She resisted all of my mom’s attempts at mind control and everything. That’s commendable.” Esme Kincaid was also a good liar. Too good. Kimmie had almost believed she’d gotten her bruise at Kroger, and she knew better. “I think she knows we’re not getting married. Or else she’s really talented at accidentally laying on the guilt.”
Josh’s grin turned to a scowl. “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll handle that when the time comes. And speaking of time, you need to tell your mother that you want to buy her out.”
Kimmie squirmed. General Mom would never pass the bakery down to her.
She’d made that perfectly clear, whether she meant to or not. And Josh had made it perfectly clear he wouldn’t marry her, despite planning a wedding, which meant Kimmie had to find a solution within the next eleven days.
Or else she’d be explaining why she wasn’t showing up for her own wedding, to a man she hadn’t dumped. “After I deliver the last cupcake recipes to you.”
“If you need the cash now—”
“Is Sweet Dreams really in trouble?”
She immediately wished she hadn’t asked. Because Josh’s scowl turned to a patronizing, I-want-to-smear-chocolate-frosting-on-your-chest-and-lick-it-off Snack Cake Romeo smile. “Sweet Dreams is just fine.”
He was lying.
For all that they’d been through together the last few weeks, he was still lying. She reached for the door handle. “You can drop me here. My car’s across the street.”
The car screeched to a halt at the curb, and Josh gripped her arm. “Kimmie—”
“Are we friends? Or not? Because my friends don’t lie to me, and I don’t lie to them, and we—” she pointed between them “—we’re one big lie, and I’m tired of it. I dreamed I was doing laundry the other day. Laundry. I don’t dream boring dreams about doing laundry. I want to be a ninja dragon again, but everyone around me wants to lie to someone else about something else even though we all know it’s a lie, and I can’t do it anymore.”
“Okay, okay.” He slammed the car into park, then scrubbed a hand over his face. “Give me one more week. There are a few things I need to take care of, and I don’t want your mother—”
“My mother. Speaking of her, quit provoking her.”
“That woman’s provoked by my existence.”
“I don’t care.” Frustration wasn’t an unfamiliar emotion. But this helpless uselessness was something entirely different. Today, he’d been a German chocolate cheesecake with a full-strength, no-consequences Kimmie colada chaser.
Until now.
She could love him. She probably already did. She probably always had. And she was trying desperately not to give in to the hope that he could love her too.
He couldn’t love her. He couldn’t even tell her the truth. “Tell me something honest,” she said.
Ordered, really. She sounded like her mother.
Something flickered in his deep blue eyes. “I don’t like your mother.”
Kimmie snorted.
“Because when I look at you around her, I see me when I was a homeless, helpless, weak kid who had nothing but a bleak future dodging bullies and predators and hunger and life. And you—you can be so much more. You are so much more. But not when she’s around. I want to crush her for dimming your light.”
He jerked forward. His knuckles were white around the steering wheel, and his breathing was heavy and fast.
Something warm and fuzzy and scared swelled up in Kimmie’s chest. “I’m not weak.”
“There’s a difference between surviving and living. You have a gift, Kimmie. You’re special. You’re unbelievably special and talented and amazing. You deserve to be somewhere you’re appreciated. Not taken for granted.”
“She doesn’t—”
“We’re staying fake engaged until you tell her to get the hell out of your way and let you run Heaven’s Bakery the right way.”
“She runs the bakery—”
“Like a fucking drill sergeant.”
“The cakes get done and the brides are happy and—”
He cut her off with a searing glare. “At what cost? At what cost to you?”
“I’m fine. I’ve been handling her all my life. I can handle her until Knot Fest is over. And you make her worse.”
“Why didn’t you go to college?”
She felt her eyes bug out. “What does that have to do with—”
“Why, Kimmie?”
“I had a well-paid job when I graduated high school, and—”
“And your mother said you didn’t need it,” Josh finished.
“She said I could go if I wanted to.”
“Did she?”
Kimmie swallowed. He knew why she didn’t go. She could see it in the pity in his gaze and hear it in the disappointment in his tone. And he thought she didn’t want to talk to her mother about buying the bakery for the same reason. “I was scared,” she whispered.
Terrified that she’d be the freak on campus. That without her mother around to make people be nice to her, she’d fade into nothingness. That her dreams would overtake her. That she’d run home a bigger failure than she’d left.
General Mom had told her she could go to college.
But she hadn’t argued when Kimmie declined.
“You don’t ever, ever have to be afraid, Kimmie.”
“You don’t have to protect me from her.”
“Try to stop me.”
She touched shaky fingers to his rough cheek. She didn’t know how to do this—how to touch a man, how to appreciate a man, how to love a man—but she wanted to touch him.
She wanted to kiss him.
She wanted to stay. Here. With him.
His dark gaze dipped to her lips. She leaned over, reaching with her mouth, until her lips brushed his. The simple contact set her nerves to tingling across her skin and all the way to her most secret places.
He anchored her head and sucked her lower lip between his. Strong but gentle. Hot. Sweet. Electrifying.
He pulled out of the kiss and rested his forehead against hers. “I was scared too,” he said. “Going to college terrified me.”
“But you went.”
“You still could. Never too late.”
She sighed. For all that her single friends complained
men talked about themselves too much, Josh had a way of turning conversations away from him.
“You terrify me,” he whispered.
“Me?” Her heart ka-thumped. “I’m a cupcake.”
He shifted away and squeezed his eyes shut. “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.”
Her belly quivered at the tremor in his voice, and her pulse shot up to sugar-high levels. This wasn’t Joshanova.
This was someone more. And she didn’t have much experience guarding secrets, but she’d grown up with plenty of experience with being on the fringe of the cool group. Josh seemed to fit in wherever he went, but did he really?
Or was it as much an act as their engagement?
She leaned into him again and brushed her lips against his rough cheek. He palmed her neck, his arms iron beams around her. “Sweet Dreams is in trouble.”
His voice was barely audible, but she heard each word as though it had come from inside her. Everything cupcakey inside her trembled even as those hidden steel parts of her went rigid in surprise. “Josh—”
“Don’t—even Aiden doesn’t know. I can’t tell him. I can’t tell anyone. I’m not supposed to know, but I need—Kimmie, I swear to you, this isn’t about your cupcakes. You’re too—” He cut himself off with a huffed out breath. “A month ago, I thought your cupcakes were your best feature. I was wrong. You’re your best feature. All of you. And you deserve—”
“Stop.” She put a finger to his lips, because you deserve was never followed by anything good. Not in books, not in movies, not in this car.
Josh dropped his head to her shoulder. “They saved me, Kimmie. If Sweet Dreams went under—it would kill them. I have to save them.”
It would kill them.
He’d lost two mothers already, and Birdie. Kimmie had seen a business or two go broke in Bliss, and she’d seen what it had done to the owners.
They’d never been the same. And picturing Esme and Clayton Kincaid, penniless and broken, made her heart heavy. “Have you talked to them?” she asked.
His snort was warm against her shirt. “Fake it till you make it. It’s our family motto.”
“Josh—”
“Come upstairs,” he whispered.
Everything south of her belly warmed and squeezed.
Upstairs. With Josh. Naked. Exposed. Vulnerable.
But safe.
With a man who was stealing her heart, one nibble at a time. With a man who would ease that ache growing between her thighs.
With a man who wanted her for more than her cupcakes, but still couldn’t put the frosting on her life.
He had responsibilities to his family. And she deserved—something she didn’t want to hear him say. Because it was most likely not him.
Kimmie pulled away and fumbled for her bag.
She wanted to go upstairs. She wanted to go upstairs and bake him eighteen new cupcake recipes and save his family’s business and convince him that he deserved her.
But if she went upstairs, and she baked him cupcakes, and she gave him her body, what would be left?
Would he still want her?
Or would he pretend he hadn’t bared his soul in this car?
“Kimmie?”
“Lindsey’s wedding is Tuesday afternoon. I’m decorating her cake, and I need to make sure it’s ready for me tomorrow, and—” And you should come with me.
Could he be the man she wanted him to be? Could he be the Josh from last night, the Josh from this morning, the Josh from right now, if they were in Bliss?
Could he be her hero?
“Come with me,” she said.
His fingers tangled in her hair, and a pull of longing pulsed from her heart to her core.
“What time?” he asked.
“F-four.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Don’t come if you’re bringing Joshanova. I want—I want you. This you.”
His lips quirked in a killer smile that he tilted against her lips. “Asking a lot, Kimmie.”
She pushed him away. “I’m not asking for me. I’m asking for you.”
“For me,” he repeated, but he was squinting at her as though she were an orange juice cupcake with toothpaste frosting.
It went against every desire she had to not go upstairs with him, to not hold him and love him and tell him she’d save his family, but she had to leave. Self-preservation demanded it. “You’re worthy of friends, Josh. You’re worthy of friends and love and happiness. But you have to be a friend to make friends. Come as you. Trust me.”
A flash of raw fear disappeared into a Joshanova smile. “Of the two of us, you are the more trustworthy.”
She sighed and reached for the door again.
This was a terrible idea.
“Kimmie.”
“What?”
He snagged her hand and pressed it to his lips. “I’ll be there.”
And even though he didn’t specify which Josh, Kimmie’s pulse zinged and hope blossomed in her cupcake heart.
Maybe, just maybe, Josh could be her hero.
22
Tweeted @WindyCitySociety: “He’s Crazy About Her,” Says Close Family Friend. #Joshmie #ItMightReallyBeLove
Josh knocked on Kimmie’s apartment door at eight Monday night, daisies in one hand and an overnight bag on his shoulder.
He could’ve driven down for the wedding tomorrow afternoon, but he wanted to be here now. He wanted to watch her deliver the wedding cake. He wanted to help her get dressed. He wanted to help her get undressed.
He had another week or so of having a fake fiancée. One who believed in him. And he’d had a raging hard-on since she left him on the street yesterday afternoon.
She swung the door open, and her sleepy eyes went wide. “What time is it? What day is it? Where are my pants?”
Josh pushed the daisy bouquet away to look down at her legs. Firm, smooth skin stuck out from her pink cupcake pajama bottoms. His groin twitched.
“Oh, pumplegunker. Did I miss the wedding? My mom’s gonna roast my carrots. And then she’s gonna smash them until—wait. I didn’t sleep that long, did I?”
Josh let himself into the apartment, wary eyes scanning the room for crazy cats. “It’s Monday night. Did I wake you?”
She stuck her elbows in the air and stretched, and her bright green Suckers shirt rode up to show off her belly button.
She had an outie. And Josh hadn’t gotten to spend nearly enough time getting acquainted with it.
“You’re early.” She blinked at him, then at the flowers. Her lips parted. “Are those for me?”
“Tried to get coconuts, but my florist has no vision.” And he had no willpower to stay away.
He missed Kimmie. He wanted Kimmie. Because with Kimmie, he didn’t have to pretend. And after a long day of pretending at the office, he wanted to be here.
With her.
Her cheeks split in that pretty Kimmie smile that lit her eyes, and Josh couldn’t help smiling back. She made him believe in a world full of puppy dogs and rainbows and cupcakes, where homelessness and hunger didn’t exist, where his family’s business wasn’t in trouble, where he didn’t have to fight so damn hard to make his life as perfect on the inside as it appeared on the outside.
He dropped his bag on the floor, then snagged her at the waist, and pulled those lips in for a kiss.
Smile kisses tasted best, he’d discovered.
“You’re crazy,” Kimmie said against his mouth.
“I forgot to tell you yesterday. I have crazy dreams too. All the time. Not just after having mind-blowing sex with curly-haired cupcake goddesses.”
He felt her cheeks flush against his skin. “You’ve been having sex with other cupcake goddesses?” she whispered.
“Hush. Kiss me.”
She sighed a happy little sigh that tasted like sunshine and peppermint, and Josh pulled her closer and kissed her as though he had all the time in the world.
He’d screwed up her first time. Hell if he’d
screw up her second time too.
Her fingers threaded through his hair, her hips pressed into his pulsing erection, and she parted her lips for him. He took his time licking her, tasting her, loving her. He danced her through the apartment to her bedroom, one step, one kiss, one caress at a time, dodging the nutty cat, who was chasing pixies again, and he made it his mission to satisfy every need Kimmie couldn’t possibly know she had.
He might not have been the man she needed, but he’d stay with her for as long as he was the man she wanted.
* * *
Tuesday, Kimmie was as focused as a pineapple cream cheese cupcake. Not that she knew for sure that pineapple cream cheese cupcakes were unfocused, but they did strike her as a conflicted mess of cream and crumbs.
Which was Kimmie to a T.
After loving the stuffing out of her Monday night, Josh treated her to a glorious bubble bath Tuesday morning that ended with Kimmie’s first trip to the magical land of the double orgasm.
That was better than any coconut cream pie.
But then he’d insisted on going with her to the bakery.
Knot Fest didn’t kick off until Saturday—never mind their supposed wedding the following Thursday—but things were almost as hectic as if the week were already here. Josh wandered about the kitchen, meeting the rest of the staff, charming them with his Joshanova charm, and touching Kimmie anytime he got within arms’ reach of her.
General Mom was in and out all day, managing last-minute Knot Fest preparations and the increased media attention because of Billy Brenton’s wedding while Rosita oversaw the kitchen in her absence. General Mom wouldn’t do anything so plebian as to argue or bicker with Josh in front of the girls, but the silent battle between them hung a tension in the room that was thicker than the scent of cake.
So did the disapproving, you have disobeyed me for the last time, and I will have your head for dessert glare General Mom graced Kimmie with as soon as she came in. General Mom disliked being defied, and Kimmie hadn’t followed orders to break up with Josh.
Sugared (Misfit Brides #4) Page 26