She led Didi to Ollie’s station first. Ollie slid his pan of lemon bars closer to the two women. With Piper’s hand on Didi’s elbow, Didi took a forkful from one corner. She lifted the bite to her mouth. After a moment, she frowned. Then her nose wrinkled. Then she shook her head. “Too much lemon,” she announced, setting her fork down.
Ollie’s eyes went wide. “But they don’t suck?”
Didi gave him a reproachful look. “You seem like an intelligent young man.”
“Thank you.”
“Isn’t there another word you could use to express what you mean?”
Ollie thought about that for a moment, not looking even the tiniest bit ashamed. “Probably,” he finally told her. “But suck communicates clearly so I don’t see a reason to find another word.”
Didi studied him for another moment. “It’s a little crude.”
“So was the taste of my first batch,” Ollie told her.
Ollie wasn’t being impolite. He said what he meant. Often without a filter, but with pure honesty. It was one of Cam’s favorite things about him.
Didi finally nodded. “All right, then. No, they don’t suck. But you can do better.”
“Don’t know that I’m cut out for baking,” Ollie said.
“What are you cut out for?” Didi asked.
Cam glanced at Max and then at Dax. They hadn’t expected Didi to have a conversation with each of them.
“I’m the lead of our creative team,” Ollie told her.
“And what’s that mean?” Didi asked.
That seemed to stump Ollie for a moment.
“It means I come up with the ideas.”
“What kind of ideas?”
“Ideas for our video game,” Ollie said. “I write the stories, create the characters. Then Dax designs them.”
Didi nodded, considering this. “What about Hot Cakes?”
“I helped with ideas for this event,” Ollie said.
“Like what?” Didi wanted to know.
Ollie glanced toward the alpacas. “The petting zoo.”
Didi looked in that direction as well. “Well, what do alpacas have to do with cake?”
Ollie just blinked at her.
“So you don’t do anything?” Didi asked him. “You don’t get your hands on the things you do? You don’t make anything?”
“I, um… surround myself with people who have talents far beyond mine for those things,” Ollie said.
Didi didn’t roll her eyes. That seemed like it might have been beneath her. But she gave every impression that she was rolling her eyes internally.
“You might be pleasantly surprised by how rewarding it is to be directly responsible for something that makes someone else happy,” Didi told him.
Then she turned and headed for Cam.
She actually left Piper a few steps behind.
Everyone on stage was stunned.
The only person who challenged Ollie, really, was Piper, but she didn’t really question him. She pointed out when he was being a pain in the ass or when one of his ideas was just way too crazy to work out, but she didn’t really make him explain himself. None of them told him to do something himself rather than making them do it. They all just accepted that Ollie would say and do some big, crazy things and that their jobs were to mitigate it. They didn’t really ask him why.
Speaking of stunned, Cam noticed Whitney had finally joined the crowd. She was at the back, on the very edge, closest to the alpacas, but clearly her grandmother’s voice had drawn her over.
She looked like she wasn’t sure if she should come intervene with Didi. Or disappear entirely.
He wondered if Whitney had caught the detail about Didi bidding on him. Well, she would find out soon enough.
“Camden,” Didi greeted him as she came to stand directly in front of his cooking station.
“Hello, Mrs. Lancaster,” he said.
A faint smile curled the side of her mouth. “I already know that your bars will be good.”
“Why is that?”
“Your grandmother was the best baker I’ve ever known.”
It was a fact that Letty Lancaster had been the best in the eastern part of Iowa if not the entire state. But hearing her ex-best friend, the woman she’d feuded with for most of her life, say so struck him as particularly complimentary.
“Is baking talent genetic?” he asked with his own smile.
“Fabulous baking is fifty percent about practice,” Didi said. “And I know you’ve been in the kitchen since you were a little boy.”
He nodded. Buttered Up had been a second home to his whole family. He knew every inch of the bakery.
“The other fifty percent is about love,” Didi said. “And I know that you were taught to put love into the things you make.”
That also hit him hard. Directly in the chest. Letty had been proud of her bakery. Stubbornly so, in fact. She’d never changed her menu in all the years she’d owned the place. All of the recipes were original and were as familiar to the people who bought them as the goods that came from their own grandmother’s kitchens. There were families in Appleby that had never had a pie or a cake that hadn’t come from Buttered Up.
But a lot of Letty’s emotion about the bakery after she and Didi had parted ways had been about proving that she was better than Didi and didn’t need Didi to be successful. He’d always had the impression that there was as much resentment there as there was love. It had always made him sad for his grandmother, actually, and he’d hated that she’d passed it on to his sister.
Thankfully, Zoe had changed her mind and was looking at it differently now that the guys had taken Hot Cakes over. Aiden had had his work cut out for him though. It had definitely helped that Zoe was in love with him before the guys had bought the business. Even if she hadn’t realized it.
“I was taught to do everything I do with an eye toward being the best,” he finally said.
That wasn’t saying that it wasn’t about love. He did love the company and product that he and the guys had created together, but he knew that it was more that he loved having created it with the four men who were like
