Enemies With Benefits (Loveless Brothers 1)

I glob frosting off of my face and look around. Then I just wipe it on my pants, because they’re covered in frosting anyway.

“Any chance someone from the bakery is still here?” Eli asked.

“They were gone before noon,” I say.

He nods, very serious. There’s already frosting in his hair and a light smattering on his arms and down the front of his jacket, but he doesn’t pay it any mind as he considers the cake, eyes crawling over every square inch.

“What happens if we don’t have a cake?” he asks.

My stomach flips. I think my vision narrows.

“Not an option,” I say.

“I’m just asking —"

“There needs to be a cake,” I say, the urgency rising in my voice. “This thing cost twenty thousand dollars, and I’m sure we could get sued for much more than that for ruining a five-hundred-thousand dollar wedding.”

“Twenty thousand?”

“At least.”

“Do they know there are children starving in —”

“Eli, for fuck’s sake!” I say, panic spiking through my veins again.

“Okay,” he says, holding up his hands, his voice surprisingly soft.

He looks at the cake. I look at the cake. Brandon, Zane, and Janice all look at the cake, all totally silent, contemplating the confectionary disaster in front of us.

I sidle around to the other side of the cake. There are pine needles embedded in the frosting.

I hate trees.

“Janice,” he finally says, still studying the thing. “Go get me all the frosting you can find or make. Buttercream, ganache, fondant, I don’t care. Anything decorative that can go on a cake, bring that too. If it’s pretty and edible, I want it. And every single spatula we have.”

“We need to move it to the side of the barn so the guests can’t see it,” I say, pointing at Brandon and Zane, both college students working in the kitchen for the summer. “Do you have the dolly?”

All three of them nod and hurry off, looking rattled and shell shocked. Now it’s just me and Eli and the cake.

“How are you at decorating a cake?” Eli asks me.

“Bad,” I say.

“How are you at picking pine needles out of frosting?”

“As good as the next guy, I guess.”

“And when are they supposed to cut the cake?”

I look at my watch.

“Now,” I said.

Brandon and Zane come back, pushing a dolly in front of them.

“Push it back half an hour,” Eli says.

For once, I didn’t question him or argue.

I just pick up my frosting-covered radio, call Lydia, and get it done.* * *I pipe the last of the frosting into the massive cake rift. My arms are sore and shaking, because I’ve been doing this for twenty minutes now and it takes way more strength than I’d thought.

Bakers must be ripped, I think.

I’m sweating. I’m even more covered in frosting than before. I look like terrifying lovechild of an ent and a yeti, because after picking tree debris out of wedding cake, I’m covered in both.

I’m halfway up a ten-foot ladder, staring at my wedding cake repair job.

It’s bad.

I wasn’t lying when I said I was bad at cake decorating. Things get ugly when I try to decorate cupcakes, let alone a beautiful, twenty-thousand-dollar wedding cake.

It had been my job to smash whatever chunks of cake I could back into the rift, then patch it together with buttercream, filling in any gaps with gobs and gobs of the sticky, heavy stuff. While standing on a ladder. And panicking.

Now the cake looks like it has some sort of tumor situation, but it’s probably better than what it looked like before.

I take a deep breath and lean against the ladder, dropping the icing bag to my side. Frosting blobs out of it onto the ground, but right now I couldn’t care less.

Eli’s head pops around the cake.

“That done?”

“It looks awful.”

A smile flickers around his eyes. It doesn’t last, and I barely catch it, but it’s there.

“Don’t worry, that’s the back,” he says. “Here.”

He takes the icing bag and replaces it wordlessly with an offset spatula, then goes back to work on the front of the cake. I get back to smoothing out the blobs.

We work. We don’t talk much. Every so often he hands me a tool, I give him a report, or say something into my radio, but for the most part, we labor in a frenzied, stress-filled silence.

I smooth. He decorates, coaching my unsteady hands even while he works, his voice surprisingly soothing, calm, and above all, nice.

I don’t have time to think about the fact that Eli is being nice. I don’t have time to think about the kiss or the maid of honor, and in that way, this disaster is pure bliss.

I only have time to fix frosting.

Finally, Eli steps back a few feet. He considers the cake, crumbs and frosting everywhere: on his clothes, streaked on his face, spiking his hair. My radio crackles again, Lydia’s voice punctuating the ambient quiet.