No worries. They could do this. Still, she began moving a little faster as she started the next batch. It was going to be a long night.
• • •
Angie stood behind the table and yawned. Not a petite, bride-to-be yawn—oh, no, this was a jaw-cracking-bear-going-down-for-hibernation yawn. Mel was pretty sure she saw the filling in Angie’s back molar.
“Drink your coffee,” she said.
She pushed a large paper cup in Angie’s direction. Feeling as wrecked as Angie, Mel had already done caffeine recon at the resort and managed to talk the managing chef in the kitchen into hooking her up with some supersized java.
“You’re a goddess,” Angie said.
They had finished the last of the champagne cupcakes in the wee hours of the morning. The results were pretty amazing, although she wouldn’t say it was worth the lack of sleep.
The conference room in the Orange Blossom Resort on the north end of Old Town Scottsdale was big and posh. The Mission-style lighting was a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright with stained-glass panes of rectangles in varying earth tones. The room was large and rectangular with rough stone walls and thick wooden beams running across the ceiling.
Mel and Angie were manning the cupcake towers—there were five—at the back of the room next to the bar. While they arranged the towers, the resort staff scrambled to set up the upholstered chairs. A raised platform at the far end of the room had two comfy armchairs with a table in between them. This was where Cassie would interview Elise.
Mel had heard the event had been sold out for weeks. The price of admission paid for a signed book, a cupcake, and a seat at the talk. Given that most of the crowd was local, Mel had brought plenty of brochures advertising the bakery.
“So, let me get this straight. This chick writes a fictionalized tell-all about her neighborhood, sells it to a small local press, and now it’s being optioned for a movie?” Ray asked.
Ray was the brother on duty for the evening. For the past half hour, he’d been slouched against the wall behind them, reading Elise’s book.
“Yup,” Angie said. “Did you get to the part about the wife-swapping parties yet?”
“No, I just finished the bit about the doctor’s wife and her affair with the delivery guy,” he said. He fanned himself with the book. “Steamy stuff. You sure Tate is okay with you reading this?”
Angie blinked at her brother and then scowled. “Yes, he even lets me watch R-rated stuff on TV.”
“Hey, now,” Ray said. “There’s no need to get snarky.”
Angie rolled her eyes and Mel maneuvered herself between Angie and the cupcake table on the off chance Angie decided to lob a cupcake at her brother’s head.
“Where is Tate, anyway?” Ray asked. “I didn’t think he’d let you out of his sight.”
“He had a meeting with our attorney who vets all of the franchise applications,” Angie said. “He couldn’t get out of it, but he’ll be here before the talk is over.”
Ray nodded. He glanced down at the book and then back up to scan the room.
“Go ahead and read,” Mel said. “They haven’t opened the doors yet.”
“Thanks.” Ray flashed her a smile and then stuck his nose right back in the book.
“I never pictured Ray as a reader,” Mel said. “Is it the beautiful prose or the salacious tidbits?”
“Tidbits, for sure,” Angie said. “The last book Ray read cover to cover was Captain Underpants to our niece and nephew.”
Mel nodded. She could see that. She chugged her coffee, hoping to fight off the urge to crawl under the table and take a nap. She hoped that Elise was an entertaining speaker, because right now she and Angie were running on fumes.
She checked the time on her phone for the third time in as many minutes, when the doors to her right were opened and a crowd started to shuffle in. Cassie had instructed Mel and Angie to hold off on passing out the cupcakes until after Elise had given her talk, that way the people waiting for their book to be signed would have something to do.
At the time this had seemed like a great idea, but all Mel could think now was that if they gave out the cupcakes ahead of time, they could get the heck out of here.
The crowd surged in, hurrying towards the seats in the front. A few people looked longingly at the cupcakes, but several resort staff stood in front of the table directing people to their chairs and explaining that the cupcakes were for later.
As soon as the door opened, Ray put the book facedown and came to stand in between Mel and Angie. In their matching Fairy Tale Cupcakes pink aprons with the bakery’s retro logo on the front, Mel knew they represented the bakery well. With Ray standing between them with his thick gold chain tangled in the chest hair that sprouted out of the collar of the skintight black V-neck T-shirt he wore under his leather jacket, well, he was definitely giving a mixed signal.
One woman, with her bleached blond hair swept up in a cloud on her head, her skin a shade of copper not found in nature, and her girls pushed up and out leading her way like two beacons, paused to take Ray in. She eyed him like he was a cupcake and then batted her false eyelashes at him while biting her lower lip. Ray was halfway over the table before Angie cuffed some sense into him with a quick slap upside the head.
“Get ahold of yourself,” she snapped.
The woman frowned at Angie and then at Ray before she spun on the heel of one stiletto and moved up the middle aisle
