Читать книгу Wedding Vows: Just Married - Nancy Warren - Страница 22

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 spent so much time with tiny plastic brides and grooms and animals made of fondant that she’d forgotten how to be around normal people. She felt the foolishness of her remark, saw that Karen was looking at her in a funny way, and blurted, “I read a lot of spy novels. I was thinking you’d be hard to describe. It’s one of the things that makes a good spy.” Like keeping your mouth shut.

Karen gave a social laugh, the kind that says, let’s move on, but Ron seemed to consider her remark seriously. He said, “I’m a CPA. Being the kind of guy who disappears in a crowd is very useful for that profession, too.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. I mean, you’re not…” Oh, Lord, what did she mean? A blush started to mount her cheeks.

“Laurel’s very artistic,” Karen said, in a way that suggested she wasn’t good with words or people. Which was, of course, basically true.

“I can see that,” Ron said, gazing at the cake behind her. He was so incredibly neat, his not too long and not too short hair parted precisely, his shirt wrinkle-free, his shoes shining.

Today, as she often did, she wore clothes in Indian cotton that were already wrinkled, and she had a bad habit of getting icing in her hair. Her apron was certainly well-splotched with food coloring, bits of icing, and she noticed, glancing down at her plastic clogs, that there was a lump of marzipan on her toe. Next to this extraordinarily tidy man she felt like a disaster.

“This cake is incredible.”

“Thanks. It’s obviously a traditional cake, but I do all kinds.”

“There’s a book out front with samples of her work. You’ll have to take a look when you get a second.”

“I’d like that,” he said.

“And this is Anton. He’s one of Chelsea’s people,” Karen said, smoothly leading him to another part of the kitchen. They both admitted that Anton’s soup smelled amazing, and then Karen whisked Ron away to meet the caterer who was upstairs.

Chelsea arrived in the kitchen herself not half an hour later and Anton said, “Why do we have a CPA prowling around the kitchen? We’re not getting audited, are we?”

“No, of course not. Karen’s dating him and I guess they got to talking and she decided to hire him.”

“Karen’s dating Ron?” Laurel gasped.

“Sure, why not?”

“I don’t know, he seems so…” She couldn’t find the word she was looking for. All she could come up with was “understated.”

Chelsea grinned at her. “Well, they do say that opposites attract.”

She thought of herself, One Big Mess—and a colorful mess at that—and the tidiest, most understated man in the world and the strange, instantaneous attraction she’d felt toward him. “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

“SO, WHAT DID YOU THINK of our operation?” Karen asked Ron as they settled themselves back at her office. Lasagna was a treat she didn’t allow herself very often, but she felt she needed to do something special for Ron after his embarrassment yesterday morning when Dexter had shown up at her door far too early in the day. Or maybe she felt some urge to punish herself by porking out on hundreds of calories of all her favorite things. So, she’d work extra hard at the gym tonight on her way home.

“You’ve got a great setup here. I think you’re smart to have alliances with other businesses without setting yourself up as their employer. Makes your life a whole lot easier.” He paused, took off his glasses and reaching into his pocket removed a cloth and began to polish the lenses. Then he replaced his glasses carefully. “Now, let’s take a look at your accounting setup.”

Karen was only too happy to have an outside expert look over her books and her systems. Ron was an easy person to have around, he didn’t irritate her or ask her a million questions when she was busy, he simply got on with his work quietly.

And, much less quietly, she got on with hers.

“You want a live streamed video feed of your ceremony to go online?” she said into the phone, rolling her eyes as she grabbed a pen. “Right, I’m sure it would be nice for the folks back home to watch you live. Mmm-hmm. Yes, I’m sure they do offer that in Las Vegas.”

She sighed. Scribbled notes. It was always something. “It’s not a service I get called on to do very often, but let me look into it and get back to you.” And she hung up the phone.

“People want to have their wedding televised?” Ron asked, looking startled.

“It’s like everybody wants their own reality show these days.”

“Can you do it?”

She glanced up from her notes. “Provide a live feed? Oh, sure. I can do pretty much anything if it’s legal and somebody’s willing to pay for it.”

“If I ever get married, I won’t want it on TV.”

Chelsea strolled in just then with a menu in her hands. “Won’t want what on TV?”

“Ron doesn’t want his wedding televised.”

Chelsea blinked at him and then at Karen. “You’re getting married?”

Ron looked understandably harried by this turn in the conversation and Karen had to laugh at his hunted expression. “No, we were talking about some of the outrageous requests I get from brides and grooms.”

Chelsea stepped forward and placed the menu on Karen’s desk. “This is the menu for the underwater crowd. Let me know what you think. I may have gone overboard on the fish courses.” She stepped back and added, “I’ve always said if you call your business If You Can Dream It, you have to expect strange requests.”

“There’s a perfect wedding for everyone. I simply help make it happen.” She looked up at Chelsea, so busy with her catering company that she wasn’t getting her own wedding planned and decided this was the perfect moment to find out a few details subtly, so she asked Ron, “What would your perfect wedding be?”

He removed his glasses and polished them, which she was beginning to recognize as a stalling gesture. “Well, I can’t say I’ve given it too much thought,” he said to the lenses. “But now that my parents are both gone I suppose something very simple would suit me. A nice lunch, perhaps, for a very few friends and colleagues. And then my new wife and I would fly to Ireland.”

“Ireland?” both women said at once.

He replaced his glasses and blinked at them. “Why not? I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“Well, it’s not exactly the top honeymoon destination.” Chelsea smiled her lovely smile. “But maybe you’ll find an Irish woman to marry.”

“I only meant—”

“What about you, Chels?” Karen interrupted, knowing Ron was uncomfortable discussing something so theoretical. “What’s your ideal wedding?”

“Honestly? I cater so many weddings and there’s still so much post-divorce bitterness between my parents that my dream wedding is to hop on a plane, go to a first-class resort and be waited on.” A dreamy expression floated across her face. “No sourcing fresh ingredients or worrying about food allergies. We’d laze around all day and order room service when we got hungry. Or just stay in bed all day. Perfect bliss.”

“Why don’t you do it, then?”

She fiddled with her engagement ring. “It’s sort of complicated. First there was the whole fake engagement thing last year, and now that we’re really getting married, David’s entire firm is getting involved. Somebody’s brother-in-law will play the fiddle, another has a friend who’s a photographer, you know how it is.”

“You wouldn’t want to have your friends witness the event?” Ron asked.

“Not really. Weddings are starting to feel too much like work. We could always take pictures.”

“Go to Las Vegas,” Ron suggested. “You can have your own live TV wedding there.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Then she turned the question to Karen. “Well? What’s your perfect wedding?”

An image filled her mind. Her and Dex in a garden in June. The weather was perfect, the scent of roses hung in the air and she’d known in that moment that she was meant to be with the man beside her.

Apart from her mother refusing to sit anywhere near her father, and crying through the entire service, her wedding had been perfect.

“A garden wedding. But I already had my perfect wedding once. I doubt I’ll get a second chance.”