Don't Go Baking My Heart

“Hmm. If you’re this cranky after kissing me, I might be losing my touch.”

He handed her the piping bag, meeting her gaze head-on. Reba may have been like a devil silently taunting him with that raised brow and smirk, but Devon would prove they could make it through this without another slip-up.

“It’s me, not you. You have definitely not lost your touch.” Alright, he needed to get them back on track, not make this moment more awkward.

Reba was loving his discomfort. It was exactly what she had been trying to do from the beginning. He might have been a fool to kiss her back, but he wasn’t one about this. She had told him she wanted to get him out of his comfort zone. Fucking kryptonite indeed.

She smiled oh so sweetly and gestured to the cookie tray. “Yes, I know. Let’s get back to this, shall we?”

They had resumed working on the cookies—Reba making hers in extra-weird shapes while he stuck to those that he had seen online—when her phone rang. He had purposefully put on his music today so he wouldn’t have to make it through another one of her playlists, so her phone had only been set up to film sporadically. She put down her piping bag to check the screen.

“I don’t know this number, but it could be a potential client. Let me take this.” She swiped to take the call. “Hello?”

Devon continued with his piping. It looked like they were going to get a lot of cookies out of this. Hopefully, they would be a success, and he could casually take some to work. He had been resisting Reba’s call for him to aim to be a bit more personable to his co-workers—the karaoke notwithstanding—but while he had been working on his presentation last night and this morning, he had created a spreadsheet to determine just how risky her suggestions were.

He didn’t actually have anything to lose by being more outgoing, he supposed. The numbers showed as much. It also showed he would need to expend time and effort. Those were what gave him pause. Did he have time to devote to this? Would the outcome be favourable? What if he did all this and still didn’t get that Principal position? Then what?

Dax wasn’t the only one he needed to impress. He may have built the company from the ground up, but he answered to the Board as well, and some of the members were the type that would want Devon to jump through hoops and kiss ass to prove he had earned a place as partner in the firm. Devon didn’t kiss anyone’s ass. He expected his abilities to speak for themselves.

Which was why the notion of the cookies didn’t sit quite well with him, but he preferred to test out the theory, at least. Failure wasn’t an option. Of course, plans got derailed all the time, but Devon wasn’t ready to accept that he wouldn’t achieve the next phase of his goal.

Would showing up to the office on Monday bearing cookies fast-track that plan? He wasn’t sure. People were an unknown variable in this whole equation. He couldn’t plug in the entire board or every single one of his co-workers in his risk software simply because he didn’t know them that well outside of their work encounters and would be lacking key input data. Which, he supposed, was what Amanda had been talking about.

“So this is what we’re doing? Calling from unknown numbers now?”

Devon jerked out of his musing at Reba’s caustic tone. He’d never heard her sound like that, even when she had been angry at him. Her back was to him as she continued her phone conversation.

“Yeah, I enjoyed the free sushi. That doesn’t mean I want to suck your dick again. How is it my problem you just now realised you screwed up?”

Devon cleared his throat to get her attention as perhaps, in the heat of the moment, she forgot where she was. She looked over at him.

“Maybe you’d like to take this in the other room?” he suggested.

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t worry about who that was,” she said back to whoever was on the line. “Have a good day. I’ll be over here enjoying my deep-voiced, big-dicked companion.” She ended the call, phone clutched in her hand. “This mother-effer, I swear.”

That sounded like a situation that could escalate into some drama. “Everything alright?”

She placed her phone back on the counter. “Yes, great. Absolutely fine. Just my ex regretting his life choices, I guess. What the fuck else is new?”

“Do you…want to talk about it?” He cringed as soon as the words left his mouth. He would prefer not to, but Reba looked ready to explode. It was an intriguing sight when he was used to her sunshine persona.

She shook her head. “I’ll save you the hour-long tirade about how men are all assholes. I’m good.”

“Thank God because I really didn’t want to.”

A laugh burst out of her, and he felt a sense of relief. “Then why did you even ask?”

“You just looked so…” He trailed off.

Reba was usually frank with him, to a fault. But if he told her she looked like she needed comfort, they would go right back to that moment with the kiss. She would tease him about the type of comfort he could provide. Maybe he should have just said it anyways, consequences be damned. He didn’t like that look in her eyes. She would have forgotten all about this asshole ex of hers. Why he felt he needed to soothe her at all was odd. She could clearly deal with whoever this guy was. None of this made sense.

Exhaustion. That had to be the reason for these…feelings.

“It’s my fault for dating losers. Or so my parents say.” She picked up the piping bag. “Why can’t you just find a nice young man who isn’t ashamed to introduce you to his family, huh? If you stopped being so flamboyant, you’d find a perfectly good man.”

“They’ve said that to you?”

“Well, the first part, yeah. I seem to somehow always find the ones who love what I do in the bedroom but suddenly want me to be a whole different person when it’s time to get serious. Apparently, I’m the good time girl and not the one who people see for the long term.” She shrugged like none of that mattered, but Devon hadn’t gotten to where he was without being observant.