Sugared (Misfit Brides #4) Read online

  * * *

  Kimmie should’ve asked to see the kitchen first. She’d wanted to see the kitchen—Josh was right, she loved kitchens and everything that went into them—but she hadn’t wanted him to suspect she was curious.

  The factory tour had done exactly what it was supposed to. Kimmie had bridged her six degrees of separation with depression and was now trailing along beside Josh, silently mourning all that flour and sugar that had sacrificed itself for mass-produced snack cakes.

  He’d taken her hand for the tour, and she’d gotten the usual tingle—she wasn’t so far into embracing her gloom that her hormones had completely shut down—but then he’d used words like “chocolate-flavored” and “imitation vanilla” and “non-dairy whip,” and that had squashed the majority of her lingering, otherwise-possibly-getting-bigger crush.

  Then she’d stood there and watched robots and machines take all the art, all the life, all the joy out of baking and decorating cake.

  She’d had a moment of imagining her cupcakes created on such a large scale, of leaving Bliss, leaving her mother, starting fresh somewhere else, but that moment had dissolved faster than salt in boiling water.

  It didn’t matter what General Mom thought of the idea of Kimmie giving Josh cupcake recipes, or what General Mom would do if Kimmie suggested leaving Heaven’s Bakery to come work here.

  Because Kimmie couldn’t stomach the idea of having her creations mass-produced with soulless computers and metal equipment while white-cloaked figures observed from the side.

  She couldn’t do it.

  Which took her back to wondering about Josh’s intention of incorporating Heaven’s Bakery into Sweet Dreams somehow, which left her even sadder.

  He didn’t get Bliss, or he wouldn’t have asked her here today.

  Josh stopped and entered a code on a keypad. A door swung open, and he ushered her into a small anteroom with hairnets and footie covers in organized bins on a shelf. Chef coats hung on hooks on the opposite wall. “Suit up, sugar,” he said with another of those devilishly handsome smiles. “We’re getting to the best part now.”

  Kimmie faked a smile and donned a hairnet, coat, and footie covers. Josh tweaked her hairnet, then shrugged into a coat himself.

  With the suit beneath the white chef’s coat, he could’ve had his own Food Network show. Cooking with the Snack Cake Romeo. Low lights, seductive music, Josh in a suit and apron, talking about flour and sugar and butter and vanilla… Kimmie shivered. His pineapple upside-down cake had been remarkably edible, if on the flat side.

  And his overly competitive nature about Killer Bunnies had been almost cute, which was even better than his normal devilish handsomeness. If he’d wanted her for anything other than as a business asset, if he’d taken her anywhere but here, she could’ve easily given in to his charm.

  But he didn’t care about her charm. He only cared about her skill with cake and his bottom line. And cleanliness, apparently. He insisted she wash her hands before they went into the kitchen.

  As if germs were a bigger problem than the horrible things they did in the name of cake.

  Josh put his hand at the small of Kimmie’s back and guided her into the room. “Welcome to paradise, sugar.”

  Paradise was a large room with white walls, buzzing fluorescents, the usual worktables, cabinets, and drawers, plus a miniature stainless steel production line. Where Heaven’s Bakery would’ve been bustling with seven bakers, decorators, and dishwashers on a normal Wednesday, Kimmie only saw two other people: a skinny, nervous-looking older man whose hairnet didn’t hide the shine on his forehead, and a vaguely familiar, solid brute of a guy about Kimmie’s age and a few inches taller.

  The older man gave Kimmie a watered-down version of General Mom’s who dares to enter my sugar lair? glare. “Mr. Kincaid,” he said in a squeaky voice.

  The poor man. He’d probably flunked out of Keebler Elf school.

  He stepped away from the stainless table, and Kimmie’s stomach shrieked in terror.

  Green cake bits were laid out in sample cups.

  She suppressed a shudder. At Heaven’s Bakery, she could handle green cake. Here?

  No. Just no.

  “Ralph,” Josh said.

  “Me too,” Kimmie said. She would definitely ralph if she had to try those things.

  Josh squinted at her. “Ralph Shemansky, meet Kimberly Elias.”

  Oh, pumplegunker. Kimmie’s cheeks burned. “Hi,” she said.

  Ralph’s long, straight nose and small, dark eyes reminded Kimmie of a crow. “You’re that fancy-schmancy baker from… what’s it called? Joy? Peace?”

  “Bliss,” Kimmie said.

  “Hmm,” Ralph said.

  Josh shifted between them. “Ralph is head of product development,” he said.

  “Oh, dear,” Kimmie said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Josh frowned at her. Kimmie sucked her lips into her mouth.

  She hadn’t meant to say that out loud.

  The other guy in the room stepped up, sweeping a cool green gaze over Kimmie. His lips were twitching, but she couldn’t tell if he was trying to suppress a grin or a grimace. “Aiden Murphy. Quality assurance and product development assistant.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Kimmie said again.

  Josh sighed. She clapped a hand over her mouth. She needed to shut up. Not everyone had Kimmie’s standards for sugar. These people believed in snacks that tasted like undercooked sawdust. And that was their right.

  Even if it was super, super sad.

  “Aiden,” Josh said, “Kimmie would love to see the mixer. And the measuring cups. She’s particularly fond of those.”

  “Mr. Kincaid, we have a very busy day planned,” Ralph said.

  Pointedly. As if he wanted Kimmie out of his kitchen as much as she wanted to escape.

  “It’s okay,” Kimmie said. “I’ve seen mixers. And measuring cups. We don’t have to keep you. From—”

  “A small demo of the oven won’t take long,” Josh interrupted. “You don’t have one of those in Bliss.”

  The metal monstrosity loomed like an evil cyborg monster from one of her dreams.

  He was correct. They didn’t have one in Bliss. If Kimmie had her way, they never would. “It looks very… clean.”

  Aiden hooked a hand through Kimmie’s other elbow and nudged her toward the replica of the ovens out on the factory floor. “It has a temperature range that beats most commercial ovens too. Bet you love it more than your Joshie-poo.”

  A memory snapped into focus. Aiden was Josh’s friend from the bar last week.

  Did he know this was a game?

  Or did he know what Josh’s full plans for her—and Heaven’s Bakery—actually were?

  “I can’t wait,” she said weakly.

  Aiden winked at her, then patted the silver monstrosity that was a shorter version of the ovens with the moving belts on the production line. “Winifred here’s our secret weapon.”

  “I’m sure she’s… a lovely oven.”

  “Mr. Kincaid, I have to get these samples up to your father right now,” Ralph said.

  Josh gestured to the door. “Aiden can hold down the kitchen for a few minutes.”

  Ralph’s lip curled, clearly telegraphing get that cake-bunny out of my lab.

  Josh had said he brought all of his girlfriends here.

  Kimmie turned around. She didn’t want to see Winifred. She didn’t want beady-eyed Ralph judging her. She wanted to go home.

  And that was when she saw it.

  The big bulletin board with a huge sign proclaiming Ralph’s Laboratory across the top.

  “Laboratory?” she whispered.

  Josh’s cheeks went pink. “Food science is—”

  “Cake isn’t supposed to be made in a laboratory,” Kimmie hissed at him. She shook her head, then squeezed her hands over her ears. “I want to go home.”

  Josh reached for her arm. “How about a cup of coffee?”

  She snatched her elbow
away from him again, then marched out, ignoring the satisfied glare coming from Ralph while he shoved the green cake bits in a box.

  “Is it real coffee, or is it the tears of the ghosts of bakers past?” she muttered.

  “These creative insults are oddly sexy,” Josh murmured.

  She socked him in the gut, then stomped into the anteroom.

  “Enjoy the rest of your tour,” Ralph called.

  Kimmie swung around, but she found herself nose-first in Josh’s shoulder.

  “Some days I’d like to toss him in a mud pit with your mother and watch them wrestle to the death,” he said. “They’re equally annoying in their own ways.” Despite his words, his voice was doing funny things to Kimmie’s secret parts.

  She shoved him again. He wasn’t real. This wasn’t real. And she didn’t want it to be.

  Not here in snack cake hell. Especially when he didn’t mean it.

  He took her chin and lifted it until he was staring down at her with those brilliant, focused sapphires. “You could change things here, Kimmie. You have a gift. You could be bigger than your mother. Bigger than Bliss. You could be a baking legend.”

  “But where’s the love?” She pushed him away again, and this time, she turned and pulled off her hairnet. She flung off the coat and fought out of her footies. She wanted a piece of coconut cream pie and a full-strength Kimmie colada. “I’m done. Done.”

  “Kimmie—”

  “No.” Her heart hammered almost as hard as her stomach was twisted. “You don’t care about me. You don’t care about Bliss. You don’t care about Heaven’s Bakery. What do you care about? Money? Power? Your ego? That’s not where I come from. It’s not what I believe in. I won’t help you. And I’m done pretending to like you. Because I don’t. I don’t like you. And I don’t like to not like people, and I don’t want to not like you, but you’re making it very, very easy.”

  As if he cared.

  And that was the part that stung the most.

  Josh Kincaid was incapable of caring how much it hurt Kimmie to not like him. After their fake date Friday night, she’d honestly thought the plan to Kimmie him to death was working. That he was warming up to her enough to care about her. To like her the same way everyone else did in Bliss, even if she knew better than to dream he might find her attractive as a woman.

  To consider selling them back Heaven’s Bakery because it was the right thing to do.

  Apparently she’d been wrong.

  She banged out into the hallway. “I’ll see myself out.”

  “Kimmie—”

  The door slammed behind her.

  Fugglemuffins.

  This would be fun to explain to General Mom. Well, Mom, I tried to seduce him, but instead I stormed out because I was offended by cakes being made in a laboratory.

  But there had to be another way. A better way. A straightforward way.

  “Oh, Kimmie, there you are.”

  And there went Kimmie’s heart skydiving to her toes. “Mrs. Kincaid,” she stammered. Heat exploded in her cheeks and she wished she had a breath mint. Or a way of ducking out of this tennis date. But she wasn’t familiar with the exit routes here. “I-I had a dream we were playing tennis on the moon, but we were using hammers for tennis rackets and every time I hit a tennis ball—which was actually a bottle of corn syrup—it created shower curtains between us that were impervious to the lack of gravity.”

  Josh’s slender mother smiled indulgently at her, the way Nat and Lindsey’s mom used to before she passed away, and a deep, undeniable longing for a normal mother hit Kimmie in her cupcake of a heart.

  “Please, call me Esme,” Josh’s mom said. “I see I’ve missed the laboratory tour. Always my favorite part. Aiden is such a dear, and Ralph has worked for our family for years.”

  The door clicked behind Kimmie. Her face went the temperature of boiled oil.

  Mrs. Kincaid’s perfectly plucked brows lifted. “Oh, sweetheart, you’re working too hard again, aren’t you? Come play tennis with us. It’ll do your constitution wonders.”

  Not if Kimmie beat him with a tennis racket.

  She needed to make her excuses and leave. There was no reason to play nice with Josh’s mom.

  Except for the part where she was so nice, Kimmie couldn’t contemplate disappointing her.

  Josh stepped to Esme’s side and kissed her cheek. “I’d love nothing more, but I’m due for a meeting.”

  Esme’s nose wrinkled. “Hmm. You couldn’t reschedule?”

  “Unfortunately not.”

  “Then make it quick, and join us for lunch. I insist.”

  “Sure.”

  He turned to Kimmie, and there was a wariness she’d never seen in him before. Not when he faced down General Mom, not when they’d been alone in her apartment Friday night and she’d launched a miniature black hole at his bunnies in the game, not when she’d insulted Sweet Dreams in front of his parents before that. He shifted from his mother to squeeze Kimmie’s arm. “Have fun,” he said softly in her ear. Her spine went rigid. He pecked her cheek with a light brush that made her skin tingle and her nipples tighten. “Save me a seat at lunch.”

  The man didn’t give up.

  But Kimmie wouldn’t either. She had to prove to her mother—and to herself—that she was strong enough to run Heaven’s Bakery. That if something happened to General Mom, Kimmie could handle Josh.

  “Shall we?” Esme said brightly. If she’d noticed the tension, she hadn’t let on.

  And even though Kimmie wanted to plead a stomach ache, she nodded. “I can’t wait.”

  If Josh’s mom were like the normal moms in Bliss, she’d probably have a lot to say about her pride and joy.

  And until he was gone from Heaven’s Bakery, Kimmie needed to listen. If nothing else, she couldn’t afford to miss this opportunity to learn more about the enemy.

  * * *

  “Josh, got a minute?”

  Josh was due upstairs in three minutes, but he stepped into Aiden’s small office behind the lab. “What’s up?”

  “You heard of that Sweeting Beauty food blogger?”

  Josh shook his head.

  “I tried a couple of her recipes last night. They’re good. I want to talk to her. This gourmet line—I want to do it, and I get the feeling your girl’s not interested in helping us.”

  “Email and find out if she’ll sign a nondisclosure. I’ll get one from legal and send it to you this afternoon.” Whatever it took to save Sweet Dreams. Josh wanted Kimmie’s recipes, but even second best would be a vast improvement.

  Based on the way she’d run out of here, second best was looking like his only option.

  And he had to talk to his dad.

  Today.

  But more, he needed to get a grip.

  Been a long time since he wanted to simply hug a woman. Since he felt the need to say sorry. Since swallowing his pride was a better proposition than winning.

  Kimmie wasn’t her mother. Josh wasn’t sure exactly what—or who—she was, but she wasn’t a mini-Marilyn.

  “Sure,” Aiden said. “Oh, and about Kimmie—I like her. She’s funny.”

  “Leave her the hell alone,” he growled.

  Growled.

  For Kimmie Elias.

  Aiden snickered.

  Josh jammed a hand in his pocket and turned around. “If this blogger won’t sign the NDA, get someone who will. Understood?”

  “Sure, Joshie-poo.”

  “Shove it, Murphy, or you’ll find out what unemployment tastes like.”

  Josh wasn’t protecting Kimmie from Aiden. He wasn’t staking his claim to the girl.

  He was protecting a girl who, he’d begun to suspect, had little life experience outside of her little bubble of Bliss.

  There was a difference.

  And he’d kick anybody’s ass who dared suggest differently.

  9

  Small-Town Cupcake Girl, Big Connections—Josh Kincaid’s Girlfriend Hangs With Billy Brenton! —The W
indy City Scoop

  Tennis was a fun sport, Kimmie had decided after ten minutes on the court. Esme was a great instructor, and with Kimmie’s yoga and Pilates regimen, and her experience playing softball in her youth, she hit the ball pretty well. It wasn’t long before Esme had covered the basics and suggested a practice game.

  Being out in the fresh spring air and thwacking the stuffing out of a tennis ball was a pretty decent way to recover from the trauma of touring Sweet Dreams, and then taking the long way to the club so Esme could show her Josh’s favorite places from his teenage years.

  “You’re a natural, Kimmie,” Esme called from the other side of the court. “Are you sure you’ve never played before?”

  Kimmie smiled. “Must be beginner’s luck.”

  “Oh, no, dear, you’re wonderful.” Esme tossed the ball in the air and served it, and Kimmie scrambled to return it.

  She was doing well. She suspected Josh’s mom was going easy on her—most people did, in nearly everything—but Kimmie was having fun. And she was relaxing. And thinking more clearly.

  Esme was sweeter than simple syrup. As long as Kimmie ignored the part of her conscience protesting making friends with Josh’s mother, she was enjoying the company.

  It helped that Esme hadn’t said anything about the tour of Sweet Dreams—maybe she had noticed the tension—and instead had steered the conversation to Bliss, asking questions about Kimmie’s hometown and the weddings and Knot Festival. Mostly. When she wasn’t talking up Josh’s innumerable virtues.

  They volleyed until Kimmie missed. She scrambled to retrieve the ball, then met Esme at the net.

  “You’ll have to help me talk Clayton and Josh into a doubles match.” Esme winked. “Stubborn men don’t want to do anything where we women might beat them. But wouldn’t it be fun?”

  Kimmie gulped. “Absolutely.”

  “They think they have to be better at everything, don’t they?”

  Kimmie nodded.

  “But the exercise would certainly do Clayton good.” Esme frowned. “I worry about him. He works too hard and eats too many of those snack cakes. If something ever happened to him…” She shook her head, then smiled again. “But that’s what modern medicine is for, is it not?”