Ryan just threw a cupcake at my window. I craned my neck to look out the window behind me and saw him standing there on the runway. He was wearing a bright orange safety vest over his long jacket, and it looked like he had the same colored orange icing smeared all over his clothes. Confused didn’t even begin to describe what I was feeling.

It only got worse when I heard a familiar voice a few seats back.

“Excuse me,” asked a sweet sounding, little old woman’s voice.

Grammy was inexplicably standing from her seat. On my plane. All the unlikely coincidences so far this morning combined with Ryan on the runway told me something was going on, but I couldn’t even begin to guess what it was.

“Now,” Grammy said to the stewardess she had stopped. “I’m not saying I have a bomb. But I’m just asking, if someone did say they had a bomb on the plane, would it delay our flight?”

The stewardess looked extremely uncomfortable, and her eyes kept darting toward the front of the plane, where two other stewardesses were standing and talking. “Y-yes. That would mean we would have to delay the flight.”

“Wait,” Grammy clutched at her chest. “Actually, no, I think I’m having a heart attack.” The stewardess, who was clearly confused out of her mind, half-reached toward Grammy and then decided to loudly call for help.

During the chaos, Grammy slid her eyes to mine and gave me a wink before flopping to the ground and swearing up a storm about who she was going to come back to haunt and how “heaven gon’ be lit.”

Between the people who were watching Grammy with mixtures of horror and bewilderment and the people who were trying to figure out who would throw a cupcake at an airplane, chaos was in full swing

For my part, all I could do was stay where I was and stare at the orange frosting smeared across my window. Why would he be here? Why would Grammy be on my flight? Why cupcakes? Obviously I was in the middle of a plan, and I was out of the loop. If I’d had a quiet place to sit down and think, I was sure I could’ve figured it out, but I felt suffocated and claustrophobic.

A few minutes later, a group of EMTs rushed on the plane with a stretcher. The last man in the group was Ryan. He’d ditched the orange safety vest for an EMT jacket that was much too big for him, but nobody seemed to notice he’d just slapped it on over his jacket and pants.

He motioned for me to follow him. Meanwhile, I could hear Grammy cursing at the EMTs to stop molesting her unless they had good insurance, because they could bet their tight asses she was going to sue.

Ryan stopped me just outside the airplane in the tunnel. He was covered in sweat and grinning like a crazy person.

“Can you please tell me what the hell is going on?” I asked.

“Next time,” he said, “I’m just going to text. But I had this whole thing planned.” He held up a hand for me to wait and fished around inside his jacket. His hand made a wet, squishing sound that had me cringing, but he ended up pulling out a mangled cupcake with orange frosting. A piece of paper was stuck in it and completely coated in smeared chocolate and frosting.

“It’s, well,” he sighed, rubbing some of the frosting off on his pants and holding it up for me to see. “It’s a plane ticket. I may have to get a replacement, but the plan was to catch you on the bridge. I was going to give you a cupcake with the plane ticket in it.”

I motioned to the plane. “I already had a ticket… And why a cupcake?”

He sighed a little impatiently. “No, like. A ticket for me. To Paris.”

“What?”

“A ticket for me. To Paris,” he repeated.”

“I heard you,” I laughed. “I just—that’s crazy. You’ve got all your shops here. And I appreciate the gesture, but be realistic. I’m going to be in Paris for two years. What are you going to do, stay a few weeks? It doesn’t change anything, even if it’s sweet.”

“Considering the Bubbly Baker is expanding to Paris, I wouldn’t say I’ll exactly be a stranger. I’m the self-appointed foreign business manager, too, which means my ass is on the line if we don’t get some franchises overseas soon.”

I tilted my head. “Your ass is on the line to who, exactly?”

“To whom,” he corrected. “And I’d be reporting to myself, technically. But I promoted Stephanie, and William promised he’d help, since he kind of got this whole thing started, I figured it was the least he could do.”

“Well,” I said slowly. “It’s just too bad we broke up, then, because it’s going to be hard for you to find a new girl in France when you don’t even speak the language.”

"I was hoping that part was negotiable. The break-up."

“Oh?” I asked. I was managing to keep my composure, but my heart was thudding violently in my chest. I was still playing mental catch up, but my heart had no doubts about what it wanted. All this time I’d been seeing Ryan as one of two doors. He was option “B” and chasing my dream was option “A.” I’d never even considered a world where I could have both, because what man in his right mind would follow a girl he just met to Paris, especially when he’d be leaving behind a rapidly growing business empire.

“What do you say, new deal?” he asked. “Last time, I promised I’d let you go when the time came, no strings attached. I have a new offer.”

“I’m listening.”

“This time, I don’t let you go, no matter what. Okay, actually, that sounded kind of wrong. I mean, if you wanted me to, obviously, but—”

I rocked forward on my tiptoes and kissed him. “Deal.”

He grinned with a wonderfully stunned look on his face.

“You never explained what the deal was with the cupcakes, or why you seemed to think it was necessary to smear them all over your body.”

“It was symbolic,” he said a little sadly. “I mean, not the smearing on my body part. That was more because of a security guard who had a fixation with putting things up my butt.”

“Uh, should I be jealous, or do I even want to know?”

“No. You’re way cuter than he was,” he said. “But I messed things up the first time with a cupcake, kind of, at least. I wanted to fix them with a cupcake. Full circle and all that.”

I looked at the mangled bits of baked goods covering him and the sad excuse for a cupcake in his hand. I swiped my finger across the icing and licked it from my finger with a little smirk. “From the looks of things, I don’t know if perfectly executed plans are in your DNA, but I’d be happy to come along for the messy ride.” I paused, then put my fingers to my lip and felt my smirk widen. “That actually sounded really dirty. Sorry?”

“Please don’t be, and I’m going to hold you to that. The messy ride bit.”

Just as he was finishing his sentence, the EMTs came from the plane with a struggling Grammy between their arms. “Get it, girl,” she cackled. “Don’t worry about me! My grandson-in-law is a raving mad billionaire. He’ll bail me out of this jam.”

We watched her kick and shake her way down the tunnel in the hands of the EMTs, then Ryan turned back to face me. “So, uh, I also couldn’t manage to get a flight for today. So I’ll actually have to meet up with you tomorrow.”

I laughed. “This plan of yours really just didn’t go like you wanted, did it?”

He sighed. “No. But the most important part did.”

I kissed him again. “You can be cheesy. But it’s a good kind of cheesy.”

From the stupid smile on his face, he was about to say something dumb. “Would you go as far as to say it’s a Gouda kinda cheesy?”

I rolled my eyes and laughed. “Leave the horrible puns to William. Speaking of William, I’m pretty sure he was getting chased through the airport by security for shoplifting. I don’t know if he’s going to be able to bail Grammy out as quickly as she was hoping.”

“That explains why I didn’t get a text when you showed up.”

“Okay, you’re seriously going to have to sit me down and explain how complicated this failed plan of yours was.”

“Is this before or after the messy ride you’re going to take on me?”

I wiggled my eyebrows. “After?”

He kissed me this time, and he held his lips against mine in a soft, tender kind of way before he pulled back and gave me that smile of his that made me want to melt on the spot. “You’d better get back on your flight. I’ve got some loose ends to tie up, and then I’ll meet you in Paris.”

“It sounds so romantic when you say it that way.”

“Good. At least one part of this went romantically instead of comically wrong.”

He gripped my hand and squeezed it. “Don’t let them crash the plane.”

“I’ll do my best. And when you get to Paris, maybe you should just call me? No grand stunts or anything. I don’t know if I’d trust you to survive another complicated plan.”

“Deal.”