“Well…”
“Piper.”
“Drew Ryan is really cute.”
Whitney blinked at her. Drew Ryan was really cute.
Whitney crossed her arms. “Ollie has a thing for Drew?” she asked, knowing that was not the situation at all.
“Um…”
“Oh my God, Piper! Drew talked you into having a petting zoo?”
“The petting zoo was totally Ollie’s idea. At first,” Piper protested. “But… I went with him to talk to Drew.”
“And Ollie balked at the idea and you talked him into it?”
Piper winced. “Yeah.”
“You have a thing for Drew?” Whitney asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe I have a thing for Ollie being jealous of Drew,” Piper said with a shrug. “Anyway, somehow we ended up deciding that alpacas would be a great idea. And then Drew added the other animals for free.”
Whitney rubbed the middle of her forehead. She was paying for those alpacas.
“It’s great,” Piper reassured her, rubbing a hand up and down Whitney’s back, comfortingly. “You’re throwing the town a big party. It’s a way to show Appleby that we appreciate them. It’s just fun. It doesn’t have to make perfect sense.”
Whitney wasn’t so sure of that. She took a deep breath—tinged with the scent of alpacas—and said, “Be honest. Do you really think we’re pulling this off?”
Piper nodded. “Completely. You’ve done a fabulous job. I love how you organized this. Getting the Chamber of Commerce involved in narrowing down the top ten recipes was a great idea and having the town do the taste testing to choose the final three was brilliant.”
The people of Appleby had been invited to a huge taste-testing event last weekend where they had set up tents. Gauzy white tents with twinkle lights, white tablecloths, music, and a champagne fountain as a matter of fact. It had been more like a classy, outdoor wedding venue than a circus, thank you very much.
Whitney looked around. “It does seem like people are having fun with this today.”
Now those final three recipes were going to be baked live on stage by three hot, single, charming men with plenty of flirty baking innuendos and banter thrown around as they did it. Then the treats would be sampled by the Grand Dame of Hot Cakes herself, Didi Lancaster, and she would pick the winning recipe. As the company’s founder, it was perfect that she be the one choosing the new product.
Of course, Whitney would be a lot less nervous about that if she wasn’t Didi’s granddaughter and didn’t know Didi was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. At least no one else in town knew. No one.
Everyone thought Whitney was living with Didi simply because the older woman’s house was enormous and it was silly for them to both live alone. But truthfully, Didi couldn’t live by herself anymore. She wasn’t safe in the kitchen, she would get lost driving, and she wasn’t able to handle keeping track of her medications.
In another month, Didi would be moving into the gorgeous new wing of Sunny Orchard, the nursing home that Whitney’s friend Dax Marshall had recently purchased and revamped. Didi was excited to move in and be closer to some people she’d known her whole life, and Whitney was beyond relieved that her grandmother was good with the move. She really wanted to get her relocated before the dementia made it harder for her to adjust to new surroundings and routines.
So far today had been a good day, and if Didi could hang in there until the final judging, everything would be fine. All she had to do was taste three desserts and say which she liked best. Dessert tasting was as familiar to Didi as anything, and Whitney really thought they could make it through this one event without letting on there was anything unusual going on with Didi.
Whitney could only focus on one nerve-wracking, headache-producing thing at a time though, so she looked at Piper.
“They are totally having fun,” Piper assured her. “No one’s even thinking about alpacas and cake not going together.”
“Okay, so what do alpacas have to do with cake?” Jane Kemper asked as she and Zoe McCaffery came to stand with Whitney and Piper.
Whitney sighed. “Nothing,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”
“It’s fun,” Piper said, giving Jane a look. “It’s just one big fun time. That’s all that matters.”
Zoe looked at Piper and then slowly nodded as if catching on. “Right. That’s right. Totally true. Big-time fun. It’s great.” She gave Whitney a huge grin.
Whitney knew that Jane and Zoe and Piper were just trying to make her feel better. But she appreciated it. Zoe was engaged to Aiden, one of Whitney’s bosses and, maybe more importantly, she was a McCaffery. The McCafferys and Lancasters had long been rivals. It wasn’t so much that Hot Cakes and Zoe’s bakery, Buttered Up, were actual business competitors, but their grandmothers had been best friends at one time and when Whitney’s grandmother, Didi, had split off to start Hot Cakes, it had ruined their friendship and started a family feud that had lasted for nearly three generations.
Then there was the little detail of Whitney breaking Zoe’s brother’s heart and… yeah, Zoe even pretending to try to make Whitney feel better about this event meant a lot.
Whitney blew out a breath. “Thanks, ladies.”
“This is all a huge mess,” Paige Asher said as she came walking up.
Whitney sighed.
“No, it’s great,” Piper said, trying the wide-eyed look at Paige that had worked on Zoe and Jane.
But Paige shook her head. “No, it’s really not. I can’t bid on Ollie.”
Okay, that was not great. Whitney frowned. “You have to, Paige.”
Piper nodded. “You do. You have to bid on him.”
“Bid on him?” Zoe asked, frowning and looking between the three of them.
“The bachelor auction,” Piper said.
“Wait, I thought it was a dessert auction,” Jane said. “Ollie, Cam, and Max are going to bake the final three recipes on stage and then Didi is going to pick the winner. People are going to bid on those three desserts and the proceeds are going to the food bank.” Jane looked from Piper to Paige to Whitney.
