Chapter Two
“What do you mean, twelve dozen?” Leah gripped the bottle hard, squirting a fat blob of icing right in the middle of the delicate antenna she’d been drawing on the butterfly-shaped sugar cookie. With a huff of impatience, she shoved the ruined cookie across the table and grabbed another one that had been base-coated. “Here. I wrecked this one. Eat it. And explain. The order sheet says twelve, not a hundred and forty-four. I checked it this morning.”
Q happily accepted the cookie, biting into it as he held up the order sheet. “See?” he asked, the word slightly muffled from his mouthful of cookie. “There’s a d after the twelve. Twelve dozen.”
“Where?” She squinted at the sheet, and Q moved it closer to her face. “Aww, marmot tits. That is a d right there. How’d I miss that? Fuuuck. Sorry, Q.”
He just shrugged, unconcerned by her swearing, and shoved the rest of the cookie into his mouth.
“The customer is picking them up at eleven?” Leah quickly did the mental math as she put down the icing bottle and headed for the cooler. “It’s almost six now. If we include the four dozen I made for the store, plus the twelve—well, eleven now—that I’m finishing here, we’re still short seven dozen.” She pulled out a few blocks of butter, spaced them out in a quarter-sheet pan, and put them on top of the convection oven where it was warm enough for them to soften quickly, but not so hot that they’d melt completely. “What’s that—eighty-four?”
“Yep. Want me to help back here?”
Although Leah would’ve loved the help, it was Saturday morning, and they’d be opening in less than five minutes. “No. You’ll have your hands full making coffee and working the register. I’ll be fine.” I hope. As Q headed for the front, Leah called after him. “Nice catch! Thanks!” If he hadn’t noticed that the cookies seemed a little sparse, it would’ve been a much bigger catastrophe at eleven when the customer came to pick up the order.
She weighed out the dry ingredients, getting everything ready so that they could be mixed together as soon as the butter was soft enough, and then returned to decorating the cookies she’d already made. As she dusted sparkling sugar over one of the butterflies, someone cleared his throat. Startled, Leah glanced up to see Hamilton in the open back doorway.
“How many times have I asked you to keep the back entrance locked for security purposes?” he asked, scowling at her. He was dressed in his usual running gear, which wasn’t tight but still managed to show off his incredible body. Earlier that morning, she’d propped the door into the hall and then the exterior door open, allowing the cool March air to flow inside the kitchen.
“It gets hot in here with the ovens and all.” Her voice was absent as her brain spun with an idea. It was crazy, but she was desperate. “What are you doing this morning?”
“What am I doing? I’m trying to make you understand that it’s not safe to leave this door open. This is Denver, not Mayberry. Anyone could walk inside while you’re here alone.”
“You’re upstairs, and Q’s here. Besides lecturing me, do you have anything else going on this morning?”
His expression turned cautious. “Why?”
“If you don’t have anything terribly urgent besides watching reruns of SpongeBob, I could really use some help.”
“Help? Here?” He glanced around the kitchen, looking a bit hunted. “With you? Here?”
“Yes, help, here, with me, and, once again, here,” she said, desperation making her talk faster. She had to mix the dough, chill it, roll it out, cut at least eighty-five cookies, bake them, cool them, basecoat them, decorate them, and package them before eleven. Help would be a godsend. “Please? I messed up an order, so there are a crap-ton of cookies to make and decorate. I’ll pay you.” Hamilton was going to say no. She could see it in his expression. “In cupcakes. If you help me for the next four hours, I’ll make you whatever you want tomorrow.”
That caught his attention. “Anything?”
“Anything. I’m closed on Sundays, so I will dedicate the morning to baking whatever your heart—and stomach—desires.”
“Cream-filled cupcakes.” The words rushed out of him, as if he was afraid she’d take back the offer if he didn’t accept quickly enough. “Extra filling and extra frosting.”
“Done. What flavor?”
Somehow, he managed to look both appalled at himself and delighted at the same time. “Vanilla. Some with chocolate frosting and some with vanilla. No sprinkles, but they can have that glittery sugar on top.”
“It’s a deal. Aprons and hairnets are over there in the dry pantry.” She pointed.
Taking a step in that direction, Hamilton paused. “Hairnet?”
His hair was short enough that he probably didn’t need it, but Leah didn’t tell him that. He could’ve also just worn a hat, but she didn’t mention that, either. For some reason, she was taking a great and secret delight in the idea of Mr. Anthony Fitzgerald Hamilton III wearing a hairnet. To his credit, he just made a very small face before heading toward the aprons—and hairnets.
Without Leah even mentioning it, he washed his hands for an extra-long time, using the nail brush vigorously. She considered making a joke that they weren’t performing surgery, but she figured it was probably best not to mock her newly bribed employee—at least not until the cookies were decorated.
The timer beeped, reminding her that the caramel rolls were ready. She pulled out the pans, calling “Hot!” with each one.
“You don’t have to do that for me,” Hamilton said, watching her from a safe distance several feet away. “I’m capable of using logic and figuring out that something that’s been in an oven is probably hot.”
Leah laughed. “It’s just habit. When I did my internship at Pan Perfect—that bakery downtown?—there were so many people working in the kitchen that you had to warn the others. A couple of times when people forgot, someone almost got smacked across the face with a hot pan.”
“Ouch.”
“Exactly. It made me paranoid. I even announce it when I’m alone.” She turned on her digital thermometer and poked it into the center of the caramel rolls. “Here. You can start earning your cupcakes. This should get up to at least one-eighty. If it doesn’t, pop the pan back in the oven for another few minutes.”
As Hamilton took over checking the temperature on the caramel rolls, Leah weighed out the now-softened butter and dumped it into the mixer with the sugar. As she turned it on, she pretended to be concentrating on combining the cookie ingredients, but she couldn’t stop sneaking glances at her landlord turned baking assistant. He looked so serious as he checked the thermometer and then inserted it into the next pan with extreme precision. There was something about Hamilton that was strangely fascinating.
“You doing okay? Oh.” Q charged into the back, stopping abruptly when he saw Hamilton. “Mr. Hamilton’s here. Good. You’ll be fine, then.” Without even waiting for Leah to confirm if she would be fine—or not—Q pushed through the swinging door, disappearing into the front area once more.
“Everything’s great,” she said fake-cheerily. “Thank you for asking and staying around for an answer.”
There was no response from the front, but Hamilton was smiling just a tiny bit in that newly discovered endearing way of his. “These are all the appropriate temperature.”
“Perfect. We’ll let them cool for fifteen minutes or so before flipping them.”
“Flipping them?”
“You’re looking at the bottoms right now.” Leah turned off the mixer and detached the flat beater, scraping the cookie dough off of the blade with her fingers. “Here. Did you want to clean off the beater?”
He accepted it gingerly. “Wash it, you mean?”
“No. You can just leave the dirty dishes, and I’ll do them this afternoon.” Wrapping up the dough, she stuck it into the freezer. Normally, she would’ve refrigerated it, but they were in a time crunch. “I meant that you can clean it off. Licking it. With...uh, your tongue. Or using your fingers... Eating it. Oh, for God’s sake, you get my point.” Something so innocent shouldn’t have sounded so dirty. Just saying the word tongue to Hamilton made her flush, not to mention licking or fingers or eating. Obviously, she needed to get out more. Something was wrong with her that she was getting all lusty for her uptight landlord.
“What about the risk of salmonella?” He hadn’t touched the dough, but he was still holding the beater, eyeing it like it might bite off his tongue if he touched it. “There are quite a few raw eggs in that.”
“Up to you.” She cleaned off her butcher-block table. “I always think the taste of raw cookie dough is worth the risk, although I’ll probably change my mind about that if I ever actually get salmonella.”
There it was again. His longing look was back, the I-want-to-but-I-shouldn’t gaze. Leah could almost hear his angel and devil arguing from their perches on his shoulders. When he brought the beater over to the dirty dish tub and laid it inside without touching the dough—with neither his tongue nor his fingers—Leah was a little disappointed. His angel—rather a priggish creature—had won that time. Leah was determined to give the devil a win at the next opportunity.
“We have nine minutes before the pans need to be flipped,” Hamilton said, washing his hands. He seemed to be scrubbing extra hard, as if to clean his earlier temptation right off of him. “What are we doing now?”
“Prepping for rolling out the dough.” She tossed flour on the table and then swept it with her hand, spreading it so that it dusted the surface fairly evenly. “It will probably be quickest if we each roll out a section, rather than both of us trying to work on the same area. Are you up for that?” Glancing at him, she tried to judge how freaked out he was at being conscripted into her baking army and forced to make cookies for cupcake payment. It was hard to read him, but she was fairly certain that he was taking the whole thing in stride. She supposed that, after being in the army, baking cookies wouldn’t register very high on the freak-out scale.
“Yes.” He was watching her movements intently. Taking his own handful of flour, he sprinkled it with enormous care. Leah bustled around, gathering rolling pins and cookie cutters. When she returned to the table, she blinked at Hamilton’s half. The flour was so perfectly distributed that his side of the table looked like a wallpaper pattern.
“That’s very...neat.”
Hamilton looked immensely satisfied by the compliment. “Thank you. Four and a half minutes until the caramel rolls need to be flipped.”
“Um...thank you.” She didn’t bother to say that the fifteen-minute cooling period was just an estimation. Leah had a feeling that estimation was a dirty word to Hamilton. “Why don’t you grab four full sheet pans to put the caramel rolls on?”
Leah pointed him toward the stack just as the timer beeped again.
“What does that indicate?” he asked, pulling four pans off of the stack.
“Pull-aparts need to be rotated.” She pulled on her oven gloves and turned the loaf pans in the oven one hundred and eighty degrees. “I use the scraps from the caramel rolls to make cinnamon pull-aparts.”
He watched as she closed the oven doors and then yanked off her gloves. “Efficient.”
“Sweet dough is expensive. Lots of butter and milk and honey and eggs and cinnamon.” She grinned at him. “All the good stuff.”
Although he didn’t smile back, Leah had a feeling that he was tempted to. “Fifteen minutes is up.”
“Let’s flip these, then.” She turned the caramel rolls onto the sheet pan, thumping the bottom of the metal pan with a spatula until it echoed, indicating that the caramel rolls had released their hold. Lifting off the now-empty caramel roll pan, she scraped the excess caramel and pecans clinging to the bottom onto the sticky buns. When she glanced up, Hamilton was frowning.
“What?”
“They’re crooked.”
Glancing down, Leah saw that the rolls had landed on the sheet pan at a slight angle. “That’s okay. Q will cut them apart and put them into individual containers. No one will see them on this sheet.”
“We’ll see them.”
“Well, sure.” She tried to think of a kind way to explain that no one else would care. “It’s just a short-term landing spot for the rolls, though. Whether they line up with the edges of the sheet pan doesn’t really matter.”
His frown deepened. “May I try flipping one?”
“Sure. Flip away.” Taking the sheet of crookedly de-panned buns, Leah realized that she was scowling at the poor, defenseless rolls, and she made herself stop. It was not the caramel rolls’ fault, and it didn’t, as she’d tried to explain to Hamilton, matter. Now, though, after he’d pointed it out, the slightly off-centered-ness of the rolls was all she could see. Forcing herself to ignore it, she slid the sheet pan on a speed rack and turned her back. It still bugged her, but she refused to pull it back out and try to fix it.
“There. That’s better.”
At Hamilton’s satisfied pronouncement, Leah peered around him to see a perfectly aligned rectangle of caramel rolls sitting on the sheet pan.
“Did you use a ruler?” she asked suspiciously.
“Of course not.”
“A T-square?”
“No.”
“A level?”
“No, but that’s not a bad idea.”
“Yes, that is a bad idea. Move over.” She elbowed him to the side. “It’s my turn.”
She could tell he didn’t want to give over flipping control, but he moved aside, grudgingly. “Make sure to line it up in both directions.”
“No backseat flipping allowed.”
“I’m not backseat flipping.” He paused. “I’m giving you helpful suggestions.”
“Not really helpful.” As she flipped the pan with more care than she’d ever taken before, Leah tried to remember why she’d thought it was a good idea to recruit her landlord to help her bake. Seven dozen extra cookies to mix, shape, bake, and decorate. Right. “What is your day job, anyway? Besides this slumlord thing you do, I mean.”
“I’m an actuary. Slumlord?”
He sounded so offended that she had to look down at the pan she was thumping to hide her smile. The sound changed, echoing hollowly, and she carefully lifted the pan off of the caramel rolls. To her admittedly biased eyes, it looked perfect. “Kidding. You are a very responsible, diligent and conscientious landlord. It’s too bad you’re not as good at flipping caramel rolls as I am, though.”
The sound he made was hilarious—a sort of wounded quack—and Leah couldn’t hold her straight face anymore. She dissolved into giggles as he leaned closer, trying to get a more centered view of the newly turned rolls.
“The left side is higher than the right.”
“It is not.” Her shoulder bumped his as she moved over, examining the rolls critically. “Your eyeballs are what’s crooked if you think that. These are perfectly aligned, down to the millimeter.”
“Hmm.”
Leah had been expecting a better comeback than his distracted hmm, and she glanced up at him. He was staring down at her, his eyelids slightly lowered, with the exact same expression as the one he wore when looking at cream-filled cupcakes—the ones with extra frosting. His angelic and demonic shoulder advisors were definitely in a serious battle, and, judging by the focus of his gaze, they were arguing about her.
“What’s the holdup?”
At Q’s question, Leah and Hamilton turned toward the door, stepping away from each other in a movement so synchronized it was like they’d rehearsed it.
“Um...” To her horror, Leah felt heat creeping up her neck toward her face. Why was she blushing? They’d been flipping caramel rolls. That was it. There had been nothing else going on, except perhaps in her sex-starved imagination. “What do you need?”
“We’re down to our last caramel roll.” Q’s words came out in his usual easygoing manner, but his mouth quirked up on one side in a way that made Leah flush even more hotly. She warned her body firmly to knock it off. “How’s round two coming along?”
“Three are flipped.” Her heart rate slowed and her face cooled at the prosaic question, one he asked every Saturday. “Give us thirty seconds, and we’ll get the last one de-panned and the whole lot of them up front.”
“Done,” Hamilton said, sliding the last sheet pan of rolls onto the rack. It was, to Leah’s annoyance, perfectly centered, so much so that it made the one she’d just flipped look ever so slightly crooked.
“Show-off,” she muttered, gaining a smug look from Hamilton and a confused one from Q.
“Thanks.” Without bothering to ask what she’d been talking about, Q rolled the rack through the swinging door to the front.
“What’s next?” Hamilton looked almost eager.
As she made her way to the freezer, she said, “Let’s see if the cookie dough is cool enough to roll out.” She poked at it. “It’ll work.”
Dividing the dough into two portions, she dropped Hamilton’s share onto his perfectly floured side of the table and her blob on her less-perfectly floured half. Earlier, before the battle of flipping caramel rolls, she’d been planning on giving him a smaller amount. Now, though, she was positive his roll-out would be perfect. Grabbing a toothpick and a Sharpie, she made a mark just above the tapered point and held it out to him.
“You want to roll out your dough so that it’s this thick throughout.”
Accepting the toothpick with an endearingly serious nod, as if he were embarking on some sort of universe-saving quest, Hamilton picked up his rolling pin. Before starting to use it, though, he paused, the pin poised above the dough.
“Like this.” Leah showed him. “Flatten it out a little with your hands first. Then, you can use the rolling pin. You don’t want to smack it down. Just even, gentle pressure from the inside out.”
After watching her make a few strokes with the rolling pin, Hamilton turned back to his own dough. They worked quietly for a few minutes. Every so often, Leah looked over, checking on Hamilton’s progress. She was impressed. He was a quick study, and his dough was looking very even for a beginner. Her quick glances started to focus less on the dough, and more on his face and his intent expression. She was fascinated by his concentration, by his determination to do it right, even something as simple and basic as rolling out cookie dough.
She was so preoccupied by watching Hamilton that Leah almost rolled her own dough too thin on one side. Catching herself just in time, she gave herself a mental lecture. Having help with the cookies wouldn’t be much of a time-saver if she let herself get distracted. She concentrated on rolling out the thicker sections of the dough, allowing herself to fall into the calming rhythm of the movements. This was one of the things she loved about baking. Working with dough always calmed her, even when there were unexpected orders or when the ingredient deliveries were delayed or when customers were cranky.
She checked the thickness, smiling in satisfaction when the toothpick sunk to the perfect depth. An annoyed grunt brought her attention back to Hamilton. He was trying to fix a thin spot and just making it worse.
“The beauty of rolling out cookies,” Leah said, nudging him over as she picked up a pizza cutter, “is that the shape doesn’t matter. Croissants, on the other hand, are a bit trickier.” She cut out the section of too-thin dough, balled it up, and set it aside. “We’ll save this for the second round.”
Hamilton frowned at his now Pac-Man–shaped dough but gamely started rolling it out again. Picking up the butterfly cookie cutter, Leah made an even row along the edge of her dough, making it a game to get as many cookies—and as few scraps—out of the first roll-out as possible. Hamilton paused briefly, watching her, and Leah knew he was calculating the exact same thing.
She did another row of butterflies before moving on to the daisy-shaped cutter. By the time she switched to hearts, Hamilton had checked his dough, frowned, and rolled it out three more times. He repeated the process twice more before giving a satisfied grunt and putting down his rolling pin.
“Very nice,” Leah said, watching as he checked the depth in various spots again.
Despite the compliment, he scowled at the dough. “It’s too thin here.”
She paused, her cookie cutter poised in the air, and leaned closer to get a good look at the spot he was indicating. “Just trim the bottom few inches. The rest looks good.”
As he cut off the thin strip, he asked, “Can we use any of those?” He gestured toward the box of cookie cutters.
“The cookies are for a five-year-old’s birthday party. Don’t ask me why they need a hundred and forty-four decorated sugar cookies, plus a cake, for a child’s party. Those kids are going to be so hopped up on sugar. I pity the parents.” Hamilton was looking at her with his eyebrows raised, and she realized that she hadn’t answered his question. “Sorry. They want a spring theme. Flowers, butterflies, suns—I just use the round cutter for those—birds, bunnies, that sort of thing.”
He picked through the cutters before holding one up. “What’s this?”
“Ladybug. That’ll work. It helps to dip it in flour first.” She pushed the cake pan filled with flour closer to him.
With a nod of thanks, he lowered the cutter into the flour with the same careful precision that he did everything. As usual, Leah watched him, torn between fond amusement and fascination as he lined up the cutter with infinite care. He pushed down, wiggling slightly as he’d watched her do, and then he pulled the cutter away. Gazing down at the ladybug shape he’d just made, Hamilton smiled. It was the sweetest, slightest upward curl of his lips, and Leah couldn’t stand it. She tore her gaze away from him and stared at the dough in front of her.
Do not hug him. Do not hug him. It would not be welcomed. Do not hug him, even though he is the most adorable thing in the world, and he just proudly smiled at his ladybug cookie like he’s never made sugar cookies before, which meant he was a serious little boy who never got to put jelly-bean buttons and too much sparkling sugar on his Christmas snowman cookies, and now I want to hug him and bawl my eyes out, and I just need to stop.
“Leah?”
Blinking rapidly and damming the torrent of emotion that was about to break free and force her to hug him and feed him numerous sugary things, Leah met his gaze. “Yes?”
“I asked how many of each kind do you want?”
“Oh.” She finally got her brain off the hug-Hamilton track and back on the make-cookies-without-forcing-inappropriate-advances-on-your-landlord track. “Let’s do about a dozen, and two dozen of the circles. They can be suns and happy faces.”
Dipping his chin in a slight nod, he turned back to his ladybug cookies. Leah started pulling her scraps away from the cookies and adding them to a ball that would become her second roll-out. Don’t ask him. Don’t ask. Don’t do it, Leah. She only lasted fifteen seconds before she gave in to temptation. “You’re good at this. Have you done this before?”
“No.” He switched his ladybug for, after serious consideration, a puppy shape.
The urge to hug him started to rise up in her again, and Leah beat it back, focusing on placing her cookies on the parchment-lined sheet pans. “Never? Not even as a kid?”
His hand paused for a moment before he pushed the puppy cookie cutter into the dough. “No.”
“Oh.” Do not hug him, or you will lose your baking helper and gain a lawsuit. In self-defense, Leah started babbling. “My grandma loved baking, but she hated cooking. Growing up, I was the only kid I knew whose family would have Chinese takeout for dinner with homemade cream puffs for dessert.” As she spoke, he stopped cutting cookies and watched her with such baffled curiosity that Leah started to feel like a zoo animal. “What?”
“That just sounds...” He turned back to his dough and was silent for so long that Leah resigned herself to never hearing the end of his sentence. “Nice.”
“What?”
“That sounds nice.”
“Oh.” She studied a butterfly cookie without seeing it as grief rose inside her, missing her grandma with painful intensity. “You know, it really was.”
Once the cookies were out of the oven, Leah, with Hamilton’s help, put them in the freezer to hurry the cooling process. She eyed the flour-covered table, but another worry was more pressing than cleanup. “I’m going to check on poor Q. Saturday mornings are crazy, and he’s on his own today.” She moved toward the door to the front. “In fact, I haven’t heard much from up front. He might very possibly be dead.”
Hamilton made a choking sound that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. It startled Leah so much—she’d never, ever heard her landlord laugh—that she stopped abruptly. He managed to not crash into her back, but it was a close thing, and his hands landed on her shoulders as if to steady her preemptively. The contact made her skin catch fire for just a moment before he yanked his hands away, as suddenly and violently as if he’d touched a pan right out of the oven. Hamilton even took a step back, putting distance between them.
“Sorry,” she said, flushing when she realized she’d just stopped dead for no reason and then proceeded to stare at him like an idiot. “I just...thought of something. Which I can’t remember right now, because... Uh, I should check on Q.” Completely flustered, she forgot to hold the swinging door open for Hamilton, instead letting it fly back toward him. “Sorry!” She cringed as she turned to see him holding the door braced open, his poker face firmly in place and one eyebrow lifted in his I’m-not-sure-you’re-quite-right-in-the-head expression, a look she hadn’t seen from him all morning. She hadn’t missed it.
Squeezing her eyes closed, she tried to gather her composure. Taking a deep breath and attempting to get it together so she didn’t embarrass herself any further—or at least didn’t do any physical damage to her very helpful helper—she opened her eyes and moved to join Q at the counter.
She waited until he handed off a latte to a waiting teenager—who looked all of fourteen—before asking Q in a low voice, “How’s it going? And is it just my imagination, or is your fan club getting younger?”
The place was full, with people crowding all four tables, but no one was waiting in line at the counter. Q turned toward her. “It’s fine, steady but not crazy—the bakery, I mean, not the fan club thing. That’s crazy, and a little creepy. Those are seventh-graders over there.” He discreetly tilted his head toward a huddle of girls by the door.
“They look like such babies,” Leah agreed under her breath. “Should they even be drinking caffeine? Can we get in trouble for serving kids who are still growing?”
Q gave a low laugh. “If it helps, most of them get hot chocolate.”
After considering it for a moment, Leah wrinkled her nose. “It helps not stunt their growth, I guess, but knowing that makes their obsession with you even more wrong.”
He matched her grimace. “Exactly.” His voice dropped even lower. “I’m thinking about coming out at school.”
“Yeah?” Leah kept her voice equally low as she filled a cup with coffee, leaving several inches of room at the top. “Will that make things tough for you?”
“Yes and no.” The bell over the door jangled as three more teenagers came in. Q turned back to the register, and Leah pulled half-and-half out of the mini-fridge. After pouring in a good dollop, she added a considerable amount of sugar. As she stirred it, she turned to find Hamilton watching her.
“Is that how you take your coffee?”
“No.” She handed him the cup. “It’s how you take your coffee, and you deserve a little refreshment after giving up your morning to help me. Take your pick from the pastries, too.” Grabbing her water bottle from beneath the counter, she took a drink and gave the girl at the counter a little wave. “Hey, Shauna. How’s your mom?”
Shauna grinned, showing off her multicolored braces. “Crazy, as usual. She’s decided she’s going to make our bread. Like, bake it herself.”
“That’s great! Tell her I’m here if she has any questions.”
“Please.” Shauna waved her hand, making the assortment of bracelets on her wrist rattle as they bumped together. “It’s so not going to last. Remember when she decided she was going to make all those cupcakes for the track fund-raiser?”
Leah pretended to scratch her nose so she could hide her smile. “You mean that time I stayed up all night making five hundred cupcakes at the last minute?”
“Exactly. Thanks, Q.” She took her coffee. “She’ll be in here in a couple days buying all the bread.”
Not able to hold it in any longer, Leah laughed.
Leaning over the counter, Shauna flicked a glance over Leah’s shoulder and asked in a whisper, “Who’s the Thor look-alike eating all of your scones?”
Thor? Even though she knew there was just one person behind her, Leah couldn’t help but glance behind her to see Hamilton holding a half-eaten scone. Although she knew he was too hot for her own good, she hadn’t compared him to Thor before. If he grew out his hair, though, she could see it. “That is my landlord, Mr. Hamilton.”
As she said his name, Leah felt strangely formal. Now that he was working for her, basically her cookie bitch, she should call him Anthony. Her nose wrinkled slightly. That seemed so...not right. He was Hamilton in her mind.
“Yum,” Shauna said quietly, interrupting Leah’s mental debate. “I wish our landlord looked like that and not like the bug-man in Men in Black.” With a smirk, she joined a group of her friends crowded around one of the tables.
Leah laughed and stored her water bottle under the counter. “You’re good up here, then?”
“I’ve got it. If you get a chance to make more, we’re running low on gluten-free brownies.”
“Got it, and thank you, Q.” Heading for the door to the kitchen, Leah twisted around so she could give Q a tiny bow with her hands pressed together at her heart. “You’re a dream employee.”
“Maybe I should get a raise, then. Put your cash where your mouth is.”
She made a mock-apologetic face. “Dream employees are actually paid in fairy kisses and unicorn tears. I don’t know about this ‘cash’ you speak of.”
Q laughed before giving Hamilton, who was hurrying to finish off yet another scone, a stern look. “You need to stick to your guns with Leah, or you’re going to be paid in challah braids and chocolate-chip cookies.”
“Cupcakes,” Hamilton corrected with a straight face.
“No!” Melodramatically, Q pressed his fists to his head, making the young girls by the door dissolve into giggles. “You’ve fallen for her evil scheme!”
“Okay, Q. Quit trying to unionize.” Leah hooked Hamilton’s elbow with her hand, pulling him along behind her as she hurried for the kitchen door. She knew Q was only teasing, but she didn’t want to give Hamilton any ideas. The bakery was starting to show a profit, but she had plans for that money, plans that involved a sheeter and possibly a new mixer. They didn’t involve putting more money in her wealthy landlord’s pockets when she could just pay him in cupcakes instead. “Yell if you need help. I’m taking my very well-paid temporary employee back to decorate cookies. Time’s a-ticking.”
“Cash, man,” Q called after them as Leah hauled Hamilton through the swinging door into the kitchen. “Just say no to sugar payments!”
“Sorry.” Leah realized she was still clutching Hamilton’s arm—his very, very strong arm—and released him. “That wasn’t really a relaxing break for you.”
“It was fine.” He finished his coffee by tipping back his head and draining the cup. Leah’s attention was caught by the strong lines of his neck and jaw, and the way the vulnerable spot right above his breastbone was revealed by the movement. He tossed the cup into the trash as he headed for the hand-wash sink, breaking her trance. Leah tried to shake off her distraction. If she was going to finish those cookies by eleven that morning, she needed to stop lusting after her temporary kitchen elf, no matter how fascinating he was.
“Good.” She dragged her brain back onto the tracks and followed him to the sink. After he’d washed his hands for about a dozen hours, she took her turn. It was a bit disconcerting to wash her hands with Hamilton’s gaze on her. She felt as if he was judging her technique and washing time, picking apart the way she used the nail brush and the amount of soap. By the time she rinsed her hands and grabbed a paper towel, she was thoroughly rattled.
Stop it. Focus. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. Normally, baking was what soothed her. It was her meditation, and she loved the process. She also was addicted to feeding people treats, so the bakery was the perfect spot for her. Having Hamilton there, though, with his endearing perfectionism and seriousness, threw her off her game. All of her calm left her every time she looked at him or he said something or she even thought about him. It was concerning.
Enough was enough. She needed to pull it together. They had cookies to decorate. Once they were done, Hamilton would take his cupcakes and retreat to his upstairs loft, only showing up at the bakery to complain about the door being open or worrying about her licking a utensil and then sticking it back in the frosting—as if she would ever even consider doing something so unsanitary and gross. She only licked things and reused them at home, when she was baking for herself and her roommate, and where she didn’t get unexpected visits from the health inspector and her fussy landlord.
“Ready to decorate?” Her voice sounded strange, too high and tight, but Leah didn’t care. She was going to get through the morning, the order was going to get filled, and she wasn’t going to obsess about the Thor-like appearance of her landlord any longer. She was a professional, damn it.
She pulled open the freezer door with a bit too much force, almost smacking herself in the face with the handle. A small sound made her look over at Hamilton suspiciously but his face was completely composed. If he’d actually laughed, which she doubted, then it was over now.
The cookies were cool enough to work with, so she used a bench knife to scrape the flour on the table into a pile. After watching her for a few seconds, Hamilton followed her lead, creating an overly neat mound of flour. Leah knocked her flour pile into a garbage, and Hamilton’s face dropped slightly, as if he was sad to ruin all of his careful work by dumping it into the garbage.
“Did you want to keep it?” she asked, straight-faced.
He gave her a suspicious look, showing her that his sarcasm radar was working properly. “Of course not.” With barely a pause, he swept his tidy pile into the trash to join her discarded flour.
“Here.” She handed him a scale and a bowl and then arranged her own equipment across the table from him. “Hold on. We need confectioner’s sugar.”
Hurrying across the bakery to the dry pantry, she hoisted the large container full of powdered sugar. Muttering curses under her breath as she maneuvered the heavy, ungainly bin around the shelves, she reminded herself to get a larger container with wheels. With all the frosting and icing she made, she could easily go through fifty pounds of the stuff in a week.
Just as she turned around, she stopped abruptly. Hamilton’s tall and broad form blocked her way. Before she could ask him what he was doing and if he could move his bulky self, he took the bin out of her hands and carried it effortlessly to the table. She was torn between annoyance and admiration at his ease.
“I could’ve done that,” she muttered, rejoining him at the table.
“It was more efficient for me to do it.”
“I carry fifty-pound bags of flour around all day.” Apparently, her mood pendulum had swung toward annoyance. “Just because you spend a zillion hours at the gym doesn’t mean you’re stronger than me.”
He blinked at her. “I spend an average of five hours a week at the gym, and I am stronger than you.”
“Whatever.” Just because it was true didn’t mean she had to admit it. “Moving on. This is a sifter.” She held hers up. “We’re going to sift three hundred grams of confectioner’s sugar into our bowls. Be prepared, because powdered sugar makes the most god-awful squeaky noise when you scoop it.”
Not looking overly concerned at the prospect—which obviously meant he’d never heard the nails-on-a-chalkboard sound powdered sugar made before—Hamilton seemed to take that advice in stride. Once again, he watched closely and then followed her lead.
“I like that you use metric measurements,” he said as he carefully poured milk into his bowl, keeping an eye on the scale readout. “That makes more sense than staying with the imperial system.”
“Whatever makes math easier is the measurement system for me.” Leah passed him the almond flavoring. “I already have to deal with the whole dozens thing. Why, historical baker people? Why does everything have to be counted in twelves?”
“It probably has to do with the British monetary—”
“That’s okay,” she interrupted, handing him the box of various shades of food coloring. “I’m fine not knowing. In fact, it’ll probably just annoy me if I don’t consider it to be a good enough reason. I’m just going to keep pretending that it was very important to start the tradition of multiplying everything by twelve and leave it at that. Pick a color.”
“Any color?” He eyed her cautiously, as if suspecting a trick.
“Any color.” Glancing at the various options, she reconsidered. “Any color except for something nasty, like gray. This is icing for the base coat, so it’s pretty runny. Whatever you choose, remember that it’ll be light. Red will be pink, purple will be lavender, and so on.”
Leah put her own bowl aside, leaving it white, and grabbed another. With the ease of daily icing mixing, she started weighing out ingredients again. “I use yellow for the suns—I know, not very creative of me—but that’s about it for color standards. You can go as wild and crazy as you want, especially for a birthday party. The kids go nuts over pink dogs and green happy faces. They think it’s hilarious.”
After careful consideration, Hamilton picked blue.
“Good choice,” Leah said, catching herself before she called him Hamilton. As she whisked the icing ingredients, she surreptitiously studied him. It was silly to keep addressing him so formally as they picked colors for icing, but she hesitated to ask him if she could call him Anthony. It just didn’t fit him. “What do you usually go by?”
“What?” He squeezed a few drops into his bowl and mixed it, giving the silky white icing swirls of bright blue before it blended together into a light robin’s-egg shade.
“Your name. It seems weird to call you Mr. Hamilton now that you’re my cookie bi—ah, my cookie assistant.”
His gaze caught hers, his expression severe except for what might have been the tiniest hint of humor very, very deep down. “Your cookie bitch?”
“As if I’d ever say that.” Her best attempt at being completely aghast wasn’t very successful. “Moving on from that...term of endearment, can I call you Anthony?”
“No.”
It took a moment for his answer to sink in, since it was not at all what she’d expected. “I can’t? You actually want to sit here with me, both of us covered in flour and powdered sugar, picking colors like we’re finger-painting together in kindergarten, and call you Mr. Hamilton?”
“You can call me Hamilton.” He picked up another bowl and set it on the scale. “No one who likes me calls me Anthony.”
That struck Leah as extraordinarily sad. She couldn’t imagine that his parents had called their son by his last name, which meant that he believed his parents didn’t like him, unless something had happened to them. Maybe they’d died when he was young, like Leah’s parents had, so they couldn’t call him Anthony and put love and fondness into his name. “No one?”
He shrugged. “Is it eight grams or twelve of vanilla?”
She was perfectly aware that he was trying to throw her off the subject, to end the painful discussion of how no one who loved him called him by his first name. Sometimes, though, she knew the topic needed to be changed. After her parents’ deaths, she had become very familiar with awkward conversations. Therefore, she didn’t bring up the fact that he’d never had to ask for help with any of the recipes, and that she was beginning to suspect he had a photographic memory. “Twelve.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Ham-on-rye.”
His hand holding the small bottle of flavoring paused in mid-air. “Am I going to regret giving you permission to leave off the mister?”
“Most definitely, Ham-hock.”
“Wonderful.” His tone was very, very dry.
“You get cupcakes and multiple nicknames.” She whipped the icing a few more turns, admired the light yellow shade, and then she set it aside. “Bonus.”
“Bonus? Are you sure you want to use that term?”
“Positive.” Reaching out, she used the measure in the bin to scoop up some powdered sugar. It squeaked painfully, and she grimaced. “There it is. Painful.”
“Karma.”
His one-word retort was barely audible, but she heard him loud and clear. Dipping her finger in the green icing, she dabbed it on the tip of his nose before he could cringe back. With that small dot of green, he looked even more adorable than usual. What would it take to make Anthony Fitzgerald Hamilton III unappealing? He swiped at his nose, examined the frosting, and then licked it off before going, once again, to wash his hands.
Leah studied his back for a moment before she followed him to the sink. Sometime in the past three hours, between his willingness to do anything for cupcakes and his adoration of the metric system, Hamilton had elbowed his way into her heart. She had to admit it—she was becoming completely and dangerously smitten with her uptight landlord.