Enemies With Benefits (Loveless Brothers 1)

Instead, it falls straight into me.

Softly. Slowly. Gently, almost.

My outstretched hands are no match for the thick, soft buttercream. My fingers squish as they finally reach the cake, and the whole thing slumps against me like a sleepy toddler after a long day at Disney World.

“Help,” I squeak out.

Janice grunts, launching the tree back upright, the needles and branches along one side are covered in off-white frosting. Then she turns and looks at me.

“Oh, fuck,” she says, her eyes wide as saucers. Both her hands go to her temples, in the universal gesture of oh fuck.

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck. Don’t move, Violet, I don’t — fuck!”

Janice is freaking out as she looks at me, at the cake, at the tree, then frantically around as if someone’s going to run in and save her.

I gather my wits to the best of my ability, which is not great right now.

“Janice,” I say. “There’s a radio on my belt,” I say, sounding far calmer than I feel. “Call Lydia and ask her to get Eli out here.”

I don’t know why I told her to get Eli. He’s probably busy right now, and he’s not even a pastry chef, but that’s what came out when I needed someone to come save the day.

Janice grabs the radio. The cake slumps a little further, and I try not to wonder what it’s like to drown in cake.

“Hello?” she says, mashing the buttons. “We have a cake emergency at the barn. I repeat, WE HAVE A CAKE EMERGENCY.”

I stand there, perfectly still. As the only thing standing in the way of a complete and total cake disaster, I can’t move, so I close my eyes and try to go to my happy place.

Eli behind the brewery —

Nope. Wrong happy place.

Janice keeps talking into the radio, saying, “Yes, literally an emergency!” and “A TREE!” The cake is soft and pliable, surprisingly warm with my body heat.

Cake makes a good blanket, I think. Who knew?

If I ever get stuck at work overnight and the power goes out, I can just sleep in a wedding cake.

I wonder if strippers who jump out of cakes like it because of this.

“Okay,” Janice says. She still sounds panicked, but at least she’s making progress. “Yes. NOW. Like, now now! Thanks.”

She clears her throat.

“Okay, he’s coming,” she says.

“Cool,” I answer, because there’s not a whole lot more that I can say, and we wait. I still have my eyes closed, the cake very slowly slumping against me more and more as I pretend that I’m actually doing something really fun that involves being covered in a warm, sticky, thick substance.

I admit that I’m having trouble coming up with something that fits the bill. A mud bath at a spa, maybe, but a pretty gross mud bath.

“Jesus tapdancing Christ,” Eli’s voice says, and my eyes jolt open. I didn’t even hear him coming. “What the fuck happened? Did that tree fall on the cake? Give me that and take the other one to the other side,” he says, not waiting for any answers.

He stands there with a huge round pizza spatula, his eyes drifting over the cake, a look of total concentration on his hot face.

Thank God, I think.

It might be the first time I’ve ever been relieved to see him, but I am. Eli is a lot of things, and God knows we’ve got issues, but I know one thing for sure.

He’s gonna do his damndest to save our butts, and his damndest is a lot.

“Zane, get on the stepladder and lift the top two layers. Brandon, you get the next two and I’ll move this bottom one so it’s centered again. On three.”

I can’t even turn my head without coating my face completely in frosting, but I hear the sound of a stepladder being unfolded and deployed, feet climbing up, Eli giving further instructions.

“You got it?”

“Think so.”

“Okay. One. Two. Three!”

The weight of the cake lifts off me. It feels like a miracle, because it turns out cake is pretty heavy. I step back, freed, and watch as Eli carefully moves a cake layer back to where it belongs, depositing it and sliding the pizza peel from underneath it as gently as possible.

“Okay, next,” he says, his voice tense. “Careful.”

He guides the rest of the layers into place. I watch, still holding my breath, cake-covered. At any second the whole creation could go off-balance, topple over, and then we’d be well and truly fucked.

“Careful,” Janice whispers, mostly to herself. She stands off to one side, wringing her hands, still clearly wigging out.

Zane and Brandon balance the cake. They pull pizza peels back, slowly, carefully.

The cake stands on its own. It looks like an absolute wreck — frosting smeared to hell and back, gouges of exposed sponge where the frosting stuck to me instead — but it’s standing on its own, and that’s step one.