‘Anything I can do to help?’
Sam froze at the male voice that accompanied the bang of the kitchen door. Her reaction was ridiculous: for starters, she knew her husband’s slightly nasal tone well enough to realise that this wasn’t him. Plus, despite their long marriage, he wasn’t considered a local—no one from Murray Bridge ever was—so the open invitation didn’t extend to him. Besides, even if he had been here, there was no way Grant would swan in offering to help when there were free drinks circulating outside.
Carefully placing the palette knife on the bench, she took a steadying breath before turning to face whoever had intruded on her hiding space. Not that Sam needed to hide: she’d known most of the guests her entire life, even her brother and grandparents were out there. But she also knew small towns, knew how they loved to gossip. If she hid in the kitchen, they could talk about her, speculate on what had gone wrong in her marriage. Yet if she ventured out to the party, they would talk to her. And, with a bit of booze in them, far too many would ask for details. She wasn’t an accomplished enough liar to deal with their questions, and couldn’t rely on Christine to screen them all.
For the last few months, she’d waved off the questions in the cafe with ‘We’re just taking a break’ or ‘Can’t chat, I’m flat out, got a phone order to fill’ excuses. Nobody believed her, but with Christine in the shop every open hour—she just happened to like quilting in the sunshine-filled window seat—they didn’t dare press any further.
But now Christine was busy circulating through the guests so she could share her purse-lipped disapproval about the ceremony—as though she hadn’t spent hours embroidering Sharna and Taryn on the mulberry silk pillowcases she had wrapped and then placed, without a card, on the gift table. Christine hid her caring behind the persona she had created. And Sam totally got that.
She dredged up her own unfailingly cheery persona. ‘Sorry, what did you want?’ The afternoon sun bathing the courtyard created a halo around the guy in the doorway, making it impossible to see his features.
‘Gabrielle suggested I could take refuge in here with you.’
Refuge? Sam stiffened: what the hell? Gabrielle had carefully not asked about her situation and, with her air of culture and calm, was the last person Sam would have suspected of flapping loose lips around the place. She crossed her arms over her chest, her facade dropping as her scowl rose. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Her words should have been a challenge, but instead came out quavery. She used to be confident—everywhere except her own home—but the past couple of years had eroded her self-assurance.
‘Oh. Hi,’ the guy said, his tone lifting in apparent surprise as he moved further into the room.
As her eyes adjusted to the backlighting, Sam assessed him. Black hair, flecked with grey on the sides, was neatly faded into more length on top. His dark eyes and skin hinted at genetics rather than a tan. His nose, clearly broken at some time in the past, saved him from being ‘too pretty’, as Ma would say.
Her gaze darted beyond him. Sounds of the party out on the front lawn billowed toward them, a cloud of laughter, music and happiness that eased the tension between her shoulder blades. She was safe, everything felt right.
The guy tapped his chest, and she choked back an urge to laugh at his collared shirt, the deep V-neck laced so that it stretched open across his upper chest. He belonged on the Gold Coast, not anywhere near Settlers Bridge. ‘Pierce,’ he said as though it should mean something to her.
She raised an eyebrow and a shoulder.
‘We met about six months ago,’ he persisted.
Six months was a lifetime, as far as she was concerned. ‘Sorry, I don’t recall. A lot of people come through the shop.’
‘It wasn’t … Doesn’t matter,’ he said, seeming to change his mind mid-sentence. ‘Pierce di Angelis.’ He introduced himself more formally. The name tweaked something in her memory, but she couldn’t place it.
Pierce gestured toward the oven. ‘Gabrielle took pity on me and suggested maybe I could help out here. To save me from further embarrassing myself.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, toward the empty courtyard.
She couldn’t help but grin. A guy who didn’t take himself too seriously made for a refreshing change. She indicated the laden bench that stood between them. ‘The kids have the savouries doing the rounds, and desserts are ready to go a bit later.’ It was lucky Gabrielle’s kitchen was solid, otherwise the benches would be groaning under the weight of sweet dishes. Some, like Christine’s pavlova stacks, would replace the vases of pastel peonies and roses as the centrepiece on the larger tables. The finger food, including jelly cakes, cream horns and tiny almond and cherry cheesecakes—which contained no cheese of any kind, but Christine refused to concede they were actually frangipane tarts, and insisted they go by the name in her 1930s CWA recipe calendar—would be distributed the same way as the savoury dishes.
Sam had deliberately kept busy in the kitchen, tidying and choosing to handwash the dishes. Having run out of distractions, she had been threatening her current nemesis with a palette knife when Pierce appeared.
‘Is that the wedding cake?’ he said, approaching the five-tiered structure on the bench.
‘Lucky guess,’ she said dryly. She had carefully ombre-blended the delicate apricot, peach and yellow tones of the first two fondant-covered cakes so the join was imperceptible.
‘It’s amazing,’ Pierce said, walking around the island bench, as though assessing the cake from every angle. ‘The colours are perfect. To go with the pastel theme on the tables, right? Fruit cake?’
She nodded. ‘The bottom layer is fruit cake, to support the weight. The next is chocolate mud cake. Sharna and Taryn agreed on those two, but Sharna had me add the top three as a surprise.’ Shaded from deep mauve, through lilac to amethyst, they were the ones she was really sweating on: she was worried the heat would either dry out or melt the painstakingly smoothed fondant, or that the dowels holding the cakes together would slowly sag to one side. Using a lavender watercolour palette, she had hand-painted a delicate pattern of tendrils climbing the sides of the cakes, linking the five tiers.
‘Those three are to match the bride’s—well, bride number two’s—dress, right?’ Pierce asked.
She nodded, flattered that he’d seen the connection.
‘And you made this?’ He sounded impressed.
‘God, no, I wouldn’t even attempt it.’ An actual chill ran through her at the thought of being responsible for producing the enormous cake. ‘The fruitcake is Christine’s, Tracey did the mudcake. Then they and Roni did one of the top cakes each.’ Christine had been adamant they should have only traditional sponge, while Tracey wanted to add popping candy, knowing Sharna would get a kick out of it. Roni had smartly sat back and waited for the dust to settle before quietly insisting she would do orange chiffon with thick Chantilly cream for her layer. ‘Because Sharna’s the biggest kid around, each cake is a different flavour. Some of them a little … surprising.’
‘But the decorating?’ Pierce dropped to his haunches to get a closer view of the lowest cake, before standing slowly, inspecting each level.
‘Ah. Yeah. That was me.’ She was surprised by his interest. Wedding cakes weren’t a guy thing, at least not among the men she knew.
‘Including these?’ He pointed at the spill of lavender and blush pink flowers that formed a crescent on the top cake, before tumbling in a widening cascade down one side of the tower.
Nerves prickled the inside of Sam’s mouth and she swallowed hard. She’d spent so long carefully assessing, removing and remaking flowers that didn’t look perfect, but there would be something wrong. Her dad had always found fault, and she’d known Grant would, too, if she gave him a chance. ‘Yep,’ she said shortly. Who needed some city guy to come in here criticising? Sharna would be thrilled with the cake, and that was all that mattered.
Pierce gave a low whistle. ‘These are piped buttercream, right? You’ve even got the stamen in there. But how did you get the colour so natural? It’s like they’re …’ He clicked his fingers, searching for the word. She noticed that he was careful to move his hand away from the table. ‘It’s like the actual colour of the petals, not just the physical flower, is three-dimensional. If that makes sense.’
‘Because the flowers are so pale, the trick is to put equal amounts of two different shades of pink in your piping bag at the same time. If you look at a real rose—Gabrielle has plenty in the garden—the pale ones often have more than one tone.’
Pierce nodded slowly, as though filing away the information, but his gaze still devoured the cake. ‘Is that hand-painted fondant? Or airbrushed? And … no, wait.’
Her fingers tightened on the palette knife as he leaned closer. It was nice he was admiring her work—her friends had also done so, but they kind of had to. This guy? Not so much. But no amount of admiration would make up for him accidentally bumping the construction.
‘The three large flowers, are they sugar roses? You know how to make them?’
‘I wouldn’t say “know”. I watched how to do it on YouTube, and gave it a go.’
‘Yeah, right,’ he said, though he sounded disbelieving.
‘You can find just about anything on YouTube.’
He shook his head. ‘This is sensational.’
‘Oh.’ Sam willed herself not to press a palm against her hot cheek. She couldn’t remember the last time she had blushed. ‘Not really, just trial and error. You should see how much of the evidence I had to eat.’
‘Ha. Best and worst part of the job, right?’
‘The violas and violets are real. Crystallised. Also YouTube.’ She groaned inwardly. Seriously, one compliment, and she went into information overload.
‘Amazing,’ he murmured. ‘I can’t imagine the hours of work that went into this.’
That he would even consider what it had taken was incomprehensible to Sam, and she frowned, trying to work out his angle.
‘You’re pulling my leg about YouTube, though, right?’ he said. ‘You’re a professional.’
She wrestled down the instinctive urge to agree, to keep the peace at all costs. Disagreeing meant arguing. And arguing meant … no, she had to get that out of her head. ‘Not at all,’ she said with a dismissive wave of the palette knife. ‘This is my first go at a wedding cake, and you can see I shouldn’t have tried so many different-sized roses. An extra shade of purple in the spill would probably look better.’
‘It’s bloody amazing,’ Pierce said. ‘If I had half your talent, I’d be running a cake shop, not a—’
‘Oh, now I’ve got it!’ she exclaimed, relieved as her brain finally pinpointed his familiarity. ‘You catered a function for Gabrielle, right?’
‘Just delivered sample cakes, actually. Or tried to, but got lost in the process.’
‘So you didn’t make those cakes?’
‘The ones you didn’t try?’
He spoke teasingly, but she couldn’t remember the details of their interaction. There was a lot of her life over the past few years that she preferred to blank out.
‘Yeah, I made them. They were nothing like this, though. This is … una grande passione.’ He spoke with one hand, pinching his fingertips and thumb together. ‘There is love in this creation.’
His words were as certain as his manner, and she was surprised to realise that he was right: she had loved both the creation of the cake, and she loved Sharna, who she had known all her life.
‘This isn’t just a job, is it?’ Pierce pointed at the cake. ‘I recognise the hunger, the drive to get it right. It’s how I feel about creating the perfect dish, the right balance of sauce, the silkiest pasta. You’re fired by desire, but there’s also a sense of dread, yeah? A fear that, even though you’ve put everything into it, your creation won’t be perfect.’
Sam blew out a long, steadying breath. ‘Exactly. I’m terrified the buttercream will be gritty—though I ate enough of it, testing each batch, to be sure that it isn’t. Or that I’ve overworked the fondant and it’s dry and will crack—even though no one ever eats fondant, anyway. Or that nothing is set hard enough, and it will melt when we get it outside. Or, you know, that a flying unicorn will land on it and take a dump,’ she added with a grin, knowing that she had to sound nuts. The other women in the CWA were quietly—or not-so-quietly, in Christine’s case—confident in their work, churning out scones and biscuits and cakes by the dozen to feed shearers, labourers, family and fundraising stalls.
‘Interesting.’ The corners of Pierce’s eyes crinkled, and she realised his irises were almost as dark as his pupils. ‘You don’t generally come across much insecurity in this business. Most creatives are too busy posting their latest triumph on their socials to have time to doubt their ability.’
Sam nodded. ‘Then all the likes show up on their page, and you wonder if anyone’s actually tasted the food, or they’re all just buying into the hype.’ She had jealously drooled over enough posts to know what Pierce meant.
‘Exactly. And it seems to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.’ Pierce made a grand gesture with the sweep of an arm. ‘“I say I am amazing, therefore I am.”’
‘My ma would say it’s an emperor’s new clothes kind of thing. No risk of that happening here, though.’ She tapped her chest. ‘I don’t have social media.’ She didn’t have the confidence to post either her baking or her plating, and couldn’t imagine ever doing so. It was taking everything she had just to allow her friends to see she was branching out, to let them judge her work.
‘No socials? Well, we have to immortalise this somewhere,’ Pierce said, pulling his phone out of his jeans pocket. He gestured at the cake. ‘Do you mind? I’ll put it on my restaurant page. Well, the restaurant page.’ His correction was accompanied by a fleeting scowl.
‘Sure. Whatever.’
He waggled his fingers, trying to get her to move closer to the cake. ‘Hop in the frame, you deserve the recognition. Do you want to be tagged as Sam or Samantha?’
She stiffened. She didn’t need anything that would remind Grant of her existence, cause him to wonder where she was when the cafe was closed.
‘No. That’s fine,’ she said woodenly. ‘Don’t mention me.’