Page 125 of The Billionaire Is Back

It’s not Vera or Crabby or Mark the raccoon.

It’s Grady freaking Barber. In an Armani suit. And an apron with the Beacon Harbor Fire Department logo on it.

I don’t understand what’s happening. He should be at a fancy celebratory dinner at some fancy restaurant on Madison Avenue or wherever they have fancy dinners in Manhattan. “What are you doing here?” I realize I’m wearing a face mask, so I take it off and repeat myself.

“Hey. I stopped by to talk to Jake on the way, and he told me you fired Vera. So I figured you could use some help.” He says it with a little shrug, like it’s no big deal. Like he’s offering to help carry my books to class because he’s big and strong and happens to be heading in thesame direction. Not like he’s hundreds of miles from where he should be right now.

I just keep staring at him, too overwhelmed to speak because my brain is being flooded with images of Grady coming back to me. That first time I saw him standing in my store to pick up his welcome-home cake. The time he jogged over to my car in the middle of Main Street when I was trying to hide from him. Grady on my parents’ doorstep. Grady in the foyer of the house he rented for us here. And I don’t even remember how much it hurt to miss him.

He holds up a paper bag that has grease stains on it. “I also brought you a couple of burgers because I figured you forgot to eat dinner.”

I have never been so turned on by a greasy brown bag in my life. Tears start squirting out of my eyeballs as I throw my arms around his neck. I never want to let him go, but my timer is going off. “Shit! I have to check my glaze. Come in, come in!”

I run back to the stove and see that my mixture has started to bubble, so I remove it from the heat and stir in the gelatin. Glancing over, I see Grady closing and locking the door. I feel a pang of guilt as I remember the last time he was here I told him to go. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“Is it okay that I’m here?”

I smile at him. The first genuine smile that has appeared on my face since the evening of the day my bakery reopened. “It could not be okayer.” Another timer goes off as I pour in condensed milk. “Shit! Um. Can you helpme get my cakes out?”

“I can help you do anything, baby,” he says calmly.

And that just sets me off into another round of sobs. “They’re in the fridge, not the oven,” I explain. “They need to come out now so they don’t dry out! Put them on the center table! Thank you!”

“You got it.” He puts the bag of burgers on a side table. “I can’t believe you were planning to do all of this by yourself, Claire.”

And suddenly, it makes no sense to me either. But I can’t really think about anything except my mirror glaze because it has to be perfect. When I finally look up from my blue-tinted base color glaze, Grady’s placed the stacked cake and the flat cake on the table in the center of my kitchen. He’s admiring the base cake on a side counter that I’m about to pour the mirror glaze over. It’s covered in a smooth buttercream, so it doesn’t look like much yet. “This looks amazing, Claire. This is the design?” He picks up my colored sketch.

“Yeah, I’m going to pour blue-and-aqua-and-white mirror glaze over the base so it looks like glistening sea water, and then I have to carve the upright body of the lobster, and then, see, I have this template for carving out the head and the tail and the claws, and then I soak the cake in simple syrup, and then all the parts get covered with buttercream and crumb coated, back in the fridge, then iced again, back in the fridge, then red fondant to cover the pieces, detail the fondant, sculpt the smaller claws and legs out of red fondant?—”

“What about the antenna?”

I sigh. “Yes. Right. The antenna. And then the beady black fondant eyes. Paint the entire surface with gel foodcoloring. Attach to the body. Lobster gets attached to the base cake so it looks like it’s emerging from the sea. Blammo. Done.”

“Super simple,” he says, hands on his hips, nodding. “Should take, what? Forty minutes?”

“Something like that. Forty minutes plus a couple of hours, give or take another hour or two.”

“I have a question.”

“Shocker.”

He holds up my design sketch. “What about this crown that the lobster is wearing?”

I squeeze my eyes shut. “Fuck me. That’s more fondant. I need to make a yellow-gold fondant. Fuck!”

He puts the sketch down and places his hands on my shoulders. “Babe. Claire. We’ve got this. I’m going to help you.”

“But you don’t know how?—”

“Hey. I helped you bake cupcakes for that bake sale in high school, remember? And since then, I’ve paid a lot of money for a master class with Buff Goldberg from the Christmas baking show. I know how to work with fondant.”

I grin and cross my arms in front of my chest. “Buff Goldberg, huh?” I scoff. “American baking shows are so overproduced.”

“No argument there, but he’s a great baker and I know my way around fondant.” He brushes away flour from my forehead, or maybe he’s just touching my forehead—I don’t know and I don’t care. I just love it. “Just sayin’. Let’s get to work.”

I shake my head in amazement. “I still can’t believeyou’re here.” I grab him and hug him again. I want to kiss him but I don’t have time to kiss him, and if I do kiss him I’ll never stop kissing him, and we both need our mouths for other things for the next twenty-four hours, like eating burgers and giving speeches and thanking the mayor after she tells me I’ve made the greatest cake she has ever seen or tasted and stuff like that.

He rubs my back. “Come on. We’ve got a crustacean to carve.”

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