Irritation, completely irrational but red-hot, geysered through her. “Fine. Don’t believe me. I don’t know why I bothered trying to explain anything. Forget it. Think whatever you want.”
A hand, long-fingered and strong, came to rest on hers where it lay fisted on the tabletop. He squeezed her fingers, causing her to look up and meet his gaze. To her astonishment, he smiled at her, with warmth and humor. His hand felt warm and comforting enclosing her own.
“Here’s the part where I get to give you a little lecture, for your own good, and you get to listen.”
If it was anything about safe sex she was going to hit him over the head with her coffee mug, she decided, tensing.
“Maybe nine out of ten men would see a man with really bad bed-head leaving your house at seven-thirty in the morning and figure you’d spent the night doing more than watch Craig Ferguson—”
“Jimmy Fallon.”
“Whoever. The point is, you told me you didn’t sleep with him, and I believe you.”
She glanced sharply up at him, having a hard time accepting that he was telling the truth. Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Here’s the really good part, so listen carefully.” He leaned closer, and she saw that he’d shaved extra close this morning, and that his eyes were direct and honest. “I trust you.”
“But—”
“That’s it. I trust you. If you tell me you were annotating some obscure line in your taxes, or calculating your 401K contributions all night, I’ll believe that, too.”
She yanked her hand out from under his, no longer feeling comforted but smothered. “Oh, no. I’m not going to let you do this. You’re trying to compare Ron leaving my house fully dressed to finding that woman half-naked and wound all over you? The two aren’t even remotely similar.”
He leaned back in his chair and raised his mug in a mock toast. “They are so similar that poetic justice is written all over this scenario.” He slugged back another jolt of coffee. With a well-pleased expression on his too-handsome face, he rose. “Well, I’ve got a meeting at nine. I’d better get going. I’ll see you around.”
He walked out and she jumped to her feet to follow him.
“Don’t you dare try and suggest that you’re a better person than I am because the cases aren’t remotely similar. You can say whatever you like but you knew from the first second that I hadn’t had sex with Ron.”
He’d reached the front door but he turned, laughter sparking in his eyes.
“Karma may be a bitch, but today she’s my bitch.”
WITH A DEFT TWIST of her wrist that she’d perfected over the years, Laurel created the pink icing petal of a rosebud just bursting into bloom. Sure, she could create any kind of cake she was asked for, but it was always reassuring to come back to tradition.
No one would believe her, so she never bothered to voice the thought, but she loved creating the traditional wedding cakes. This one was a perfect delight of white icing over three separate layers of traditional fruit cake, which she made herself from her Irish grandmother’s recipe. The only color was provided by the pink roses which exactly matched the color of the bride’s bouquet. She’d sourced a few extra roses from the florist and matched the color perfectly, adding darker shadings with a paintbrush.
Laurel loved her job. She’d always enjoyed baking and art growing up and had never realized she could put the two together in the perfect career until she landed a part-time job working in a bakery one summer.
She’d been hired to fry donuts, but when the donuts were done she was free to help whoever needed her. Sometimes she greased the bread pans, sometimes she washed gunked cooking pots in a deep stainless steel sink, but her favorite task was helping the cake decorators. An apt and eager pupil, she was soon learning everything she could about the art and science of cake making and decorating and before long she had certainly outstripped her mentor in originality if not technique.
Her cakes might have remained nothing more than a fun summer job if she hadn’t been asked to make a wedding cake for a young couple who begged for something different. After asking them about their interests and discovering they were avid skateboarders, she created a skateboard park out of cake and icing, assuming at worst that she’d be fired and at best that she’d give the two getting married what they actually wanted.
She didn’t get fired. She started getting orders of her own and, luckily, the senior cake decorator didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she helped Laurel turn some of her crazier ideas into reality, teaching her how to perfect her fondant and how to add tensile strength to her icings.
At the end of high school, she’d gone to a baker’s college and after working in New York for what was basically a wedding cake factory, she’d come home to Philly and started out on her own.
Meeting Karen the wedding planner and then Chelsea Hammond, the caterer, had been amazing. She didn’t like selling herself, she loved to create cakes. By joining up with Karen and Chelsea, they did the selling and she did the baking and icing of fantasy to traditional cakes and everyone was happy.
In the big industrial kitchen where Chelsea’s catering business was located, she had her own section. Originally, the idea had been for the two to share the kitchen but the truth was that Chelsea’s business had grown so fast that she could well afford the space all to herself.
And Laurel was doing so well with her cakes, frankly shocked at the prices Karen and Chelsea charged for her creations, that she could have moved to a new place.
But she liked working here and Chelsea claimed that she was the kitchen muse so they’d worked out a deal where she paid much less than half the rent and enjoyed working in the busy kitchen. If the noise got too much, she could always slip the Panda earbuds into her ears and turn on her iPod, but she rarely did. She found that she worked best with the bustle of a busy kitchen surrounding her, the good-natured back and forth of the catering staff and the occasional rushes.
Today, however, there were no rush orders, it was midmorning and she was alone in the kitchen but for Anton who was brewing up a batch of leek-and-potato soup for the front takeout crowd.
The kitchen door swung open and she heard Karen’s voice. She turned, surprised, for Karen didn’t spend a lot of time in the kitchen being, as she’d admitted to Laurel, too much of a food junkie to trust herself.
“You’d be amazed how much food comes out of this kitchen in a busy week,” she was saying in a tour guide tone. Laurel noticed the man at her side was nodding, looking around him with interest.
He was the most nondescript person she’d ever seen. Average height, average weight, average build, his hair so indeterminate a color you couldn’t call it dark or light. On a woman it would be termed mousy, she supposed.
He wore the dullest gray suit she’d ever seen with a burgundy tie like the kind her dad wore. His face was pleasant without being in any way remarkable. He had no distinguishing marks. His glasses probably came from a big distributor. If someone had asked her to describe him, she couldn’t have made him sound any different than half the male population.
“This is Laurel, our genius cake decorator. Laurel, Ron.”
“Hello, Laurel.” Even his voice was average, neither high or low-pitched, not loud or soft.
“You’d make a perfect spy,” she said, not realizing she’d voiced the thought until she heard her own words.
Behind his glasses his gaze sharpened on hers and it was the first thing about him that was noticeable. He had beautiful gray eyes. But still, gray. “Pardon?”
She