Wedding Willies

He’s just a guy like any other guy, she repeated to herself along the way. He’s not anything special. He’s just a regular guy.

A regular guy who would probably run screaming into the night if he knew her track record.

With her hand on the alley door to the kitchen, Kit braced herself, determined that she would take being with Ad in stride.

And that was exactly what she intended.

But intentions aside, the minute she opened that door and went in, she couldn’t help eagerly scanning the place for him.

Anymore than she could help the wave of instant disappointment when she discovered that the kitchen was empty.

Or the utter elation when, a moment later, he came through the swinging doors that connected the dining room to the kitchen.

“There you are,” he greeted when he spotted her. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d forgotten about me.”

I wish I could…. “I wanted to make sure your customers were all gone and your staff had finished up for the night before I barged in,” she lied, rather than let him know eight o’clock had come and gone while she’d been trying to get herself in the right frame of mind to see him again.

One look at him shot a hole through the theory that he was just a regular guy, though. The man was staggeringly handsome and that fact struck Kit all over again.

He had on a simple pair of jeans and a hunter-green polo shirt with the restaurant’s name embroidered above the breast pocket. But both the jeans and the shirt fit him to perfection, accentuating broad shoulders and chest, narrow waist and hips and thick thighs.

Plus he appeared to have taken the time to shave very recently and he smelled terrific, too—a clean, sea-breeze scent that was tantalizing and seductive and…

And she needed to get her head out of the clouds!

“How about a glass of iced tea or lemonade while we work?” Ad offered.

“Lemonade sounds good,” Kit accepted, wondering if she should just pour the cold liquid over her head.

While Ad filled two glasses she forced herself to get busy so she wasn’t just standing there gawking at him.

She went to the stainless steel work table in the center of the room and began to unload her things from the giant-sized shopping bag.

“I brought my own sugar, flour, vanilla and liqueur because they aren’t the everyday varieties. I also had Kira get the grocery store here to order in the European butter I use, but she said you’d told her I could steal the eggs from you,” Kit chattered to conceal her reaction to him.

“Yeah, I think I can spare a few eggs,” he confirmed. “And anything else you might need.”

“I shouldn’t need anything else. Except raspberries and cream later. But I can pick up those when the time comes. Oh, and chocolate,” Kit added when she reached it at the bottom of the bag. “I also brought my own chocolate—white and bittersweet. They have to be a certain kind, too.”

Ad brought the glasses of lemonade to the worktable and handed one of them to Kit. “Raspberries and chocolate? I take it you aren’t doing a run-of-the-mill cake.”

Kit sipped her drink, peering over the rim of the glass at the oh-so-yummy man with the aquamarine eyes. “I’m making a dark chocolate cake that I’ll brush with a raspberry liqueur called framboise,” she explained. “Then, on each cake, there will be a layer of chocolate ganache, then a layer of thickened fresh raspberry puree. I’ll cover all that in a thin frosting of the chocolate ganache, then do a second frosting and the decorations in white-chocolate butter cream.”

“Holy cow. Better make a big cake, people around Northbridge don’t see anything as fancy as that. I can guarantee they’ll go back for seconds.”

“I’m making four graduated tiers with five satellite cakes around the bottom tier. Kira wants to be sure there’s plenty.”

Ad counted the variously sized round cake pans Kit had stacked on the table.

“Yep, nine pans. Looks like we have our work cut out for us.” He held his arms wide. “Use me as you will.”

Kit laughed and tried not to think of better uses for him than buttering and flouring pans.

But that was the task she gave him—along with cutting rounds of parchment paper for the bottoms of each one.

While Ad did that Kit began beating egg whites and putting the cake batter together.

With the electric mixer running the noise level was too high for them to talk much. Mostly Kit gave instructions and Ad did as he was told. It might have been better if they had been able to keep up a conversation because maybe then it wouldn’t have been so difficult for Kit to keep from sneaking peeks at him, from noticing how adept his hands were, how agile his long, thick fingers could be. It might not have been so difficult to keep from studying the furrows his brow creased into as he concentrated on what he was doing. It might not have been so difficult to keep from glancing in the direction of his derriere when he dropped the scissors and bent over to retrieve them.

When the cakes were in the ovens, Kit and Ad worked together on the cleanup. Once that was accomplished they were left with nothing to do but wait.

“Let’s sit out where it’s cooler,” Ad suggested, nodding toward the front half of the restaurant.

They left the swinging doors open so Kit could hear the timer on the ovens, taking refills of lemonade with them.

Chairs were up on the tables in the seating area but Ad took two down for them to sit. Without thinking about it, Kit did what she would have done at any other time after finishing her baking—she took off her chef’s coat.

Only after she had did she recall that she’d been using it not only as protection from splatters, but also as camouflage for the tight red T-shirt she’d put on that morning with Ad in mind.

But it was too late to cover up again and she just pretended not to notice how his eyes dropped momentarily to her breasts in an appreciative glance that she found much too gratifying.

“So, you seem to know your way around a restaurant kitchen,” he said after they’d each taken a seat at the table.

“I should. My first job was making pizzas in my Uncle Mackie’s bar. Uncle Mackie was my mother’s brother. He had a little neighborhood place around the corner from the house where I grew up.”

Ad seemed to find pleasure in that information because he smiled. “You were a pizza-maker?” he said as if he didn’t believe it.

“I could throw the dough in the air and catch it and everything,” she bragged with a laugh.

“I’d like to see that sometime,” he said, quirking up his left eyebrow to make the comment seem lascivious.

“I’ll bet you would,” she countered.

“Is pizza-making what got you interested in baking?” he asked then.

“I’d always liked making cookies as a kid, but—as a matter of fact—it was the pizza-making that started the wheels turning for me as a baker. I loved the feel of the dough. The smell of the yeast. Being able to turn a few simple ingredients into something mouthwatering.”

Now she was giving a sensual tone to it all.

She consciously curbed it.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I started to experiment with adding more sugar to the pizza dough so I could make cinnamon rolls. I went from those to quick breads, then cakes and more complicated cookies than I’d made as a kid. Pies and tarts and tortes came next, and by the time I graduated from high school I knew I wanted to go to culinary school rather than college and be a pastry chef.”

“Did you stay at your uncle’s bar all the way through that?”

“I did. And for a while even after I graduated. He gave me part of his kitchen to work in and featured any kind of dessert I wanted to make. Where else could I go and do exactly as I pleased fresh out of school?”

“When did you leave your uncle’s place then?”

“When I wanted to start my own bakery. I spent two years after school saving every penny until I had enough to rent the storefront next to the bar and buy the ovens and equipment I needed.”

“Do you still work out of that storefront?”

“No,” Kit said after a drink of lemonade. “I stayed there for a few years but the business grew and I needed more space. By then I also realized I was making most of my money from the cakes, so I changed from a bakery that offered breads, rolls and other pastries to Kit’s Cakes.”

“Which, according to what I’ve heard, took off. It’s hard to believe you can make a living just doing wedding cakes.”

Kit laughed at his skepticism. “I do other cakes, too. For parties, retirement send-offs, graduations, wedding and baby showers, birthdays. But, yes, most of my living comes from the wedding cakes. I’m doing Kira and Cutty’s cake as part of their present, but you’d be surprised what I can charge for it. Let’s hope getting married never goes out of style,” Kit finished with a joke that made him smile again and dimple up for her.

The timer rang, and without saying anything, Kit hurried into the kitchen. She didn’t expect Ad to follow her but he did, expressing an interest in how she knew when the cakes were done.

She demonstrated the method of using a cake tester and then pressed a gentle finger to the center of one cake to show him what he should be looking for that way, too. In case he actually did ever bake the recipe she’d promised him.

The cakes were sufficiently baked but she explained that they couldn’t be removed from the pans for ten minutes. Then they had to be completely cooled in order to wrap them and store them in the freezer.

When the ten minutes had passed she flipped the cakes and removed the circles of parchment paper that had come out with the rich chocolate confection. Then she and Ad washed the pans before returning to the dining room to sit again.

“If you’re bored or have something else to do I can take it from here,” Kit told him, realizing belatedly that there wasn’t much reason for him to stay at that point.

“I’m not bored and there’s nothing I’d rather be doing,” he assured, pleasing her more than she wanted to show.

“Okay. Then what about you?” she asked after more lemonade. “How did you get into the bar and restaurant business?”

“I started busing tables here,” he said with an affectionate glance around. “When I was ten.”

“Ten?” Kit parroted. “Wasn’t that a little on the young side? Like by about six years?”

“My dad was a mechanic and when I was ten a car he was working under fell on him. He was killed—”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Kit said, flinching at the image.

“It was a long time ago. But my mom hadn’t held a job before that and was left with five small kids to support on only a pittance for an insurance policy. She went to work at the dry cleaners but we were still struggling and—in my ten-year-old brain—I thought I could help.”

Kit pictured Ad as a boy who felt that kind of responsibility, and she was torn between her heart breaking for him and admiring how at even that young age he’d taken action to help his family.

“How did you get hired when you were hardly more than a baby?” she asked.

“Bing—Bingham Murphy—owned the place then and he sponsored and coached our little league baseball team. He was always saying he needed help sweeping the floors or taking out the trash if somebody wanted to earn a little money for a new bike or something. It wasn’t really like being hired, it was more like getting an allowance for doing chores. But when I talked to Bing and told him what was going on at home, he let it be my job exclusively from then on.”

“Did you work every day? After school? Weekends?”

“After school or after baseball practice and on weekends. I’d sweep floors and the sidewalk out front. Wash windows. Take out the trash. Bus the tables. Pour water for customers. Small stuff.”

“And this Bing-person would pay you?”

“Right. Plus, folks around here knew us and knew what had happened to my Dad and wanted to help without it seeming like charity, so they’d tip me. It added up. I didn’t do too bad.”

“For a ten-year-old.”

“Hey, I ended up owning the place,” he joked as if his childhood earnings had accomplished that.

“How did you end up owning the place?” Kit asked.

“Stick-to-ittiveness. I stayed put, moved up from busboy to doing just about everything else there was to do—wait tables, tend bar, cook. By the time I was working my way through the local college for my business degree, Bing had retired and I was running things. Then he offered to sell out to me and I made payments to him until it was all mine—the business and the building. Two years ago I renovated and remodeled until it really felt like my own place.”

“So you found your niche at ten years old?” Kit summarized.

“That’s really the truth. I always liked being here. I liked the work, the socializing. I just felt right at home from the start.”

“I understand that. I felt that way at my uncle’s place. It was hard work but it was nice.”

And so was sitting there like that, with Ad, having an excuse to look at him, to get to know the intricacies of his features, the way his eyes could actually go from aquamarine to dark turquoise with the changes in his emotions….

But letting herself be mesmerized by it all was not wise, and Kit knew it.

It just wasn’t a breeze to tear herself away.

She did it, though, standing up and taking her glass with her.

“Those cakes should be cool enough by now.”

Ad stood, too, following her back to the kitchen.

He played assistant again as she wrapped the cooled cakes in plastic and then sealed them in bags and stored them in the walk-in freezer where they would be left undisturbed by his staff.

Then Kit gathered her equipment, Ad turned off the lights, and they went out the alley door, locking it behind them.

The whole way up the stairs Kit had to fight feeling sad that her time with Ad was ending but she did that, too, reminding herself that this was a temporary, superficial relationship and not the beginning of something. Even if it did feel like the beginning of something.

“Did Kira tell you that we have fittings on the wedding clothes tomorrow afternoon?” Ad asked when they reached the landing of the side-by-side doors to the two apartments.

“She did,” Kit confirmed, trying not to breathe too deeply of the scent of his cologne because either that or just being so near to him was making her head go a tiny bit woozy.

“The tailor is just up the street, how about if we walk over together?” he suggested.

That pleased her way, way, too much.

“Okay,” she said as if it didn’t make any difference.

“I thought maybe afterward we could have dinner back here—Kira and Cutty and you and me. Since they’ll already have Betty staying with the twins and I know they’re both tired and stressed out dealing with the wedding and the construction on the house, dinner out might be a little break for them.”

“I think it might,” Kit agreed.

He nodded toward his door. “I’ll go in and call Cutty right now to make the arrangements.”

“Good idea.”

But he didn’t do that. Instead he glanced over her head at her door and said, “Did you do all right in the apartment last night? You had everything you needed? The bed wasn’t too hard or too soft?”

“I did great, had everything I needed and the bed was perfect.” Except that she’d had trouble not thinking about him in his bed next door.

“So you’re okay over there?”

“Fine,” she said, wondering if she was imagining it or whether he was purposely dragging this out.

Not that she was rushing inside herself. In fact she wasn’t even altogether invested in what they were talking about because even though she was making all the right responses to what he was saying, Kit was suddenly finding her thoughts split between that and a scenario that was forming in her head.

A scenario in which they were at the end of a date.

A date she’d enjoyed.

And they were about to kiss good-night.

But they weren’t about to kiss good-night.

“I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” she forced herself to say, attempting to escape her daydream.

Ad nodded, but he continued to look at her as if he were trying to read something in her eyes.

A moment of panic ran through Kit at the notion that he could somehow tell what she’d been thinking.

But then Ad finally took the last step to his own door and said, “Good night.”

“Thanks for the use of your kitchen and all your help tonight,” she added as she unlocked and opened her door, doing a little prolonging of her own.

“Don’t mention it. I’d be your assistant anytime,” he joked with another lascivious note in his voice, tossing her a sexy half-smile to go with it.

“Careful, I might take you up on that,” she warned as she stepped into the studio apartment and closed the door behind her.

And that was when it struck her again that Ad Walker absolutely was not like any other guy.

And that spending the last couple of hours with him hadn’t cured whatever it was she’d been infected by the moment she’d met him.

No, if anything she thought that she really had been bitten by the Ad bug. Bitten but good.

And she wasn’t sure what to do about it….

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