“Yep, do it yourself, Caprinelli,” Cam said, focusing on toasting his coconut.
Whitney is kind of toasting my coconut right now, he thought to himself.
“If you want anyone bidding on you, you better get going too,” Max said, folding the “crunch” part of the caramel crunch bars into his own melted chocolate.
“I’ll still bid on you, Ollie!” a female voice called from the crowd.
“I don’t need cookies! Just you!” another woman called.
“Yeah, I can get cookies anywhere!” someone else added.
Cam glanced over at his friend with a grin. Ollie pushed his glasses up his nose and looked out at the crowd.
“Well, in that case…” he started.
“Just make your stupid bars!” another woman called.
This voice Cam knew though. It was Piper.
He found her standing a few people back. She was easy to spot. She was wearing bright yellow today. As always, she stood out. In a very good way. Piper Barry wasn’t like the other girls in Appleby. She was funny and smart and blunt as well as incredibly capable and organized, keeping them all in line with barely an effort. Seemingly, anyway. Yet she had this high-maintenance way of putting herself together and an I-know-who-I-am-and-what-I-want air about her that kept her just shy of being completely down to earth.
Right now, her hands were propped on her hips and she was frowning at Ollie.
Cam and the rest of the guys suspected Piper had feelings for Ollie that went beyond employer-employee, but their friend was oblivious. Even while Ollie found himself jealous over Piper at times. For instance, he really didn’t like Drew Ryan, the alpaca farmer. And everyone liked Drew. But Drew flirted unabashedly with Piper, in front of Ollie, and that apparently rubbed the genius the wrong way. He just wasn’t genius enough to figure out why.
Ollie sighed. “I guess I’m making these bars,” he said dryly. “Though calling them stupid probably doesn’t help from a marketing perspective.”
The crowd laughed.
Piper’s eye roll was big enough to be seen from several feet away.
Ollie took his pan, dumped the contents into the sink, and sighed loudly into his mic. He turned back to the crowd and put on a truly excellent “sweet puppy” expression. “I will remake the bars, but I’m just going to warn whoever bids on me… you might have to do the baking. I, however, can bring plenty of other… talents… to our time together.”
There was a collective oooh from the front row and Cam shook his head with a grin. Ollie could bring the flirty-sexy when he had to. Nice.
Ollie went back to the top of his recipe and Cam and Max continued to banter as they finished theirs. But Cam couldn’t stop looking in Whitney’s direction.
She had now moved down the fence and was talking to another alpaca. No one was that into alpacas. She was plainly avoiding. He just didn’t know if it was the entire spectacle over here—which had all been her idea to start with—or him in particular.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a timer on this event so he couldn’t stomp over to the alpaca pen and demand to know what Whitney was thinking.
The no-time-limit thing was good for Ollie though, who was mixing and muttering into his mic. Whenever they were all finished, the auction would commence, and then Didi Lancaster would sample each dessert and determine the winner. Then they’d meet up with their date for the evening and head to their preselected location.
Max was going to take his date—who would certainly be Elliot—to the picnic area on the other side of the park.
Ollie was going to be bid on by Paige Asher and Cam wasn’t even sure if they were actually going to go on their “date.” Paige was a set up so that Ollie didn’t have to deal with an actual date. The guy got plenty of women, but most of them were hot, fun, very short-term hookups. He didn’t really do relationships. Mostly because Ollie sucked at things like remembering birthdays, or even showing up for dinner sometimes. Ollie was a great guy and a good friend, but he was also fortunate that he’d met the four men that were his best friends and partners. None of them ever took it personally that he forgot things like one of them having their appendix removed or one of their birthday parties.
Women, on the other hand, would get tired quickly of having their birthdays forgotten or him not showing up at the hospital. In his defense, he never would have been offended if they’d blown off his birthday or hadn’t brought him balloons to the hospital either.
Last year, Piper had reminded Ollie it was his birthday, in fact.
So it was better that he hang out with women who wanted to talk about Warriors of Easton—yes, their fanbase included women—and were happy with a one-night stand with one of the creators.
Their groupies were kind of like the girls who wanted to hook up with a member of their favorite rock band just to say they’d done it. The Warriors of Easton groupies just happened to often dress up as elves and stuff.
Cam had decided to take his date to Buttered Up. Well, outside of Buttered Up. His sister’s bakery had little tables set up in front of the huge windows in a sidewalk-café style. The dessert they’d be eating wasn’t from Buttered Up, but he’d get coffee from inside and he wanted the people who would be following the date on social media to remember that he was a McCaffery and that Buttered Up was his family’s business.
He would have taken his date inside but Zoe had forbidden it. Even after he’d pointed out what great publicity this would be showing how the McCafferys were now heading up all of the major dessert making
