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Chapter Fourteen

Willa

The problemwith being good at my new job is that I forget all about my other one.

Which means on Friday, I find myself pulling an all-nighter, baking and decorating cookies the moment they’re cool enough. This is not how I like to do things—last minute, rushed. It’s also not my favorite to be awake past midnight. I don’t turn into a pumpkin or a Gremlin, but it’s close.

My feet keep going numb, and I’m not doing the best job with my flooding because I keep making my icing too thin. I’ve remade it two times but keep ending up with the same consistency, somehow. Rather than simply filling in the outlined sections, it’sliterallyflooding over the edges of the cookies.

At least Sophie will have no shortage of samples. I could also probably sell them to Bellamy—he doesn’t care about how pretty they are.

“They’re never going to dry.” I say this out loud, because one o’clock in the morning is apparently the time of night when my thoughts need to be vocalized.

Or I’m just trying anything at all to stay awake. Coffee is no longer helping. There’s a certain point at which caffeine reaches max levels and bottoms out. I might as well be drinking water.Each time I take a sip, it’s like the warm liquid is giving me a pitying pat on the back, sayingThere, there, childinstead of the caffeine zinging into my bloodstream like the jolt of electricity I need.

To be clear, I’m still drinking it, nursing the same pot of coffee I made at eight o’clock. Right after a text from my client came in saying how excited she was to see the cookies.

Actually, what shesaidwas that she was excited and then she asked for a sneak peek. I was forced to lie and tell her the cookies were already packaged.

Which would have been true—had I not forgotten to make them in the first place. What makes it all worse is that this is someone I know from high school. Angie and I have always been more acquaintances than friends, barely keeping in touch via social media. I was surprised when she reached out via the contact form. The message was filled with exclamation points and emojis and a few mentions of supposedly shared high school events I had no memory of.

I’m not sure if she actually remembered us as friends more than I did or if she was angling for a discount, but I gave her twenty percent off. And agreed to stay for a little while when I dropped the cookies off before the party.

The latter concession hurt more than the discount, which definitely hurt. I’m such a pushover.

The only saving grace to this order is that it’s relatively simple. It’s a mermaid themed birthday party, one of my most popular birthday packages. I could practically scallop mermaid tails in my sleep.

Honestly? That’s almost what I’m doing. If this were last month’s order of incredibly detailed flowers for a garden club that required true-to-life colors and details, I wouldn’t have been able to manage. Right now, my eyes are blurred with sleep and my hands have the slightest tremble of exhaustion.

I’m mid-yawn when the swinging kitchen door flies open. My yawn becomes a shriek as Archer strides into the kitchen with the force and intent of someone coming to object at a wedding.

I don’t realize I’ve squeezed a fist around the piping bag until Archer says my name sharply, his laser eyes dragging my gaze down to the counter in front of me, where there’s now a whole pile of icing like a big turquoise turd.

Groaning, I drop the bag and spin to the sink, washing my hands before the food coloring stains my fingers.

“You can’t just burst into rooms like that!” I practically yell. “Now I have to make a third batch of royal icing.”

“I’m … sorry?” His words are hesitant, like apologies are a new-fangled invention to him.

I dry my hands on a dish towel and turn to face him. He’s still in a suit—because of course he is—but he’s lost the jacket and tie and is just wearing a light blue button-down tucked into black slacks. I wonder if this is Archer Gaines’s version of business casual. Or pajamas. The thought almost makes me burst into hysterical laughter.

“Do you sleep in a suit, boss?”

His brow furrows as he glances down at himself. “What? I—no.”

Before my thoughts can devolve into imagining Archer in low-slung pajama pants and no shirt—too late!—I ask, “What has you barging into the kitchen in the middle of the night?”

“Couldn’t sleep. What has you decorating cookies in the middle of the night?”

I slide a spatula under the pile of icing, lift it, and unceremoniously dump it in the trash. “I forgot an order,” I mutter. “I’m sure it’s hard to imagine since that big Ivy League-educated brain of yours probably never forgets things, but we can’t all be so lucky.”

As I pull out an unopened bag of confectioner’s sugar and the meringue powder, Archer leans a hip against the counter, staring down at the cookies I’ve finished.

The good news is I’m a little over halfway done. The bad news is that I still have a dozen cookies to ice. And then I have to hope they dry so I can package them. If I had a dehydrator, I could use that, but it’s not exactly in the budget. I can use the oven at a super low temperature if I need to, which I suspect I will. I hate doing that because I don’t want the consistency of the cookies to change. I’m also always afraid I’ll fall asleep and burn them.

“I keep lists,” Archer says, and I glance over at him, noting for the first time how tired he looks.

“What?”