Two days before the bridal shower and four failed attempts at making the intricately designed teacup-shaped cookies, I finally threw in the towel. Grandma Nellie offered to help, but quickly gave up when she got the consistency of the royal icing wrong.

“Not gonna happen, Mari.” She waggled her finger at me. “We’ll have to order some from a bakery.”

No way, Jose. When I’d revealed our shower theme to my sister, I had promised home-baked, teacup-shaped cookies. I had to deliver them, even if it killed me. Which it might.

In a moment of clarity, I recalled that Derrick’s mother was a baker. It took some doing to locate the best man’s cell phone number. After all, I didn’t want my sister to know I had failed in the baking department, so I couldn’t ask her. Instead, I went straight to Phillip, who was happy to share Derrick’s contact information with me.

I called Derrick late Thursday evening, my nerves a jumbled mess. He seemed a little surprised to hear from me, but from the pleasant tone in his voice, I could tell it was a happy surprise. When I explained my predicament, he offered to call his mother on my behalf. “She usually needs a couple of weeks’ notice to fit in a new job. But she might make an exception if she’s not already booked. I don’t know if she has the ingredients, so she might need to make a run to the store.”

“I’ll bring the ingredients. She won’t have to do a thing.” I sighed. “Well, except the obvious. Teach me how to bake. And decorate.”

Derrick laughed. “Okay. I see how it is. I’ll have her call you, I promise.”

Ten minutes later I received a phone call from Mrs. Richardson, who agreed to help me.

“How many people are you expecting at the shower, Mari?” she asked.

I swallowed hard. “Fifty to sixty.”

“Ah. A lot of work, then.”

“Yes, ma’am. If it’s too much—”

“Nah, I do this all the time. You just come on over to my place tomorrow afternoon. And don’t you dare bring any ingredients. I have plenty, trust me. We’ll knock out those cookies. And if Derrick shows up, I’ll boot that boy of mine right out the door. He wouldn’t be caught baking, but he’s notorious for eating the baked goods.”

I couldn’t help but laugh at the idea of Derrick eating our teacup cookies.

I thanked Mrs. Richardson—who insisted I call her Nadine—before ending the call.

The following day passed quickly at the bank. Around two thirty I looked up when I heard a familiar voice traveling across the lobby. Derrick?

All the female tellers clustered around him like ants around a piece of candy. I fought the temptation to hide under my desk. Why I felt so embarrassed, I could not say.

Derrick glanced my way, then confusion etched on that handsome face. After politely weaseling himself away from my coworkers, he walked toward me, smiling. “Mari?”

“Mari Hays, personal banker, at your service.” I flashed a professional, over-the-top smile. “How can we help? Do you need a loan?”

He laughed. “No. I stopped by because I’m going to be filming a new commercial for your bank soon.”

“Hey, it’s not my bank. I just work here.”

“You know what I mean.” He gave me a playful look. “It’s the least I can do. Your manager, Bill Henderson, was my first Cub Scout leader. A boy never forgets his Cub Scout leader.” Derrick saluted me. Well, I guess it was a salute. Must be a Cub Scout thing. Regardless, it caused my already skittering heart to go bouncing down to my stomach and then back up again.

“Ah, so it all makes sense now. That’s why you do commercials for Accentuate Bank.”

“Yes.” He raised his hand, as if taking some sort of pledge. “I, Derrick Richardson, promise to do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people—especially my scout leaders—and to obey the law of the pack.”

“You have a pack?”

He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder. “You have a lot to learn, Mari Hays.”

I sure did, and he made a fine teacher.

Derrick excused himself to talk to Mr. Henderson. I went back to work, waiting on a final customer before preparing to leave for the day. Still, I could barely keep my mind on my work.

My shift ended when the lobby closed at three. Derrick was still deeply engaged in conversation with our bank manager. Well, that, and fending off flirtatious interruptions from a couple of my female coworkers. About the same time I had gathered my belongings, he shook off the giddy females and met me at my desk. “So are you headed to my mom’s place right now for the baking extravaganza?”

“I am. If I can figure out how to get there.”

“I happen to know the way.” He gave me a little wink. “Want to hitch a ride with me?”

My heart flip-flopped. From the cubicle next to mine I heard my coworker, Shawna, give a little cough. I could guess her thoughts: Say yes, girl!

And so I did. Five minutes later I was seated in the passenger side of his Dodge ram truck, headed to his mom’s house in the Memorial area. Under normal circumstances I would’ve been a nervous wreck, but his carefree conversation kept me at ease, as always. In fact, I found myself so comfortable around Derrick that I started to wonder why I’d ever been nervous in the first place.

When we got to her house, he introduced me to his mother. Nadine didn’t look a thing like her son. Where he was tall and solidly built, she was petite and almost as round as the cookies we were about to bake. She was also covered, nearly head to toe, in powdered sugar. I even saw bits of frosting in her hair. Not that she seemed to notice or care.

She wrapped her arms around me in a warm—albeit messy—hug. “Please forgive me,” she said as she led the way to the kitchen. “I’d like to say I don’t usually look like this, but I’d be lying.” A funny little laugh followed.

“It’s true.” Derrick nodded and laughed too. “There’s a white haze in the air all the time here, and it has nothing to do with the ozone layer.”

Sounded yummy.

Nadine gestured to several trays of adorable, baseball-themed cupcakes. “I’m just wrapping up an order for a Little League team. Let me put them away, and we’ll get this party going.” She glanced at Derrick, her gaze narrowing. “You scoot on out of here. You’re trouble in the kitchen.”

“What?” He feigned offense. “What are you talking about? You know I’m the best baker in this family.”

“Humph.”

“I plan to stick around and help.” He offered me a boyish grin. “Wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

“Fine. Then suit up.”

“Mom, really?” He groaned.

“If you’re gonna stick around, yes.” She pointed at a baker’s rack with aprons hanging from the corner knobs. “You too, Mari.”

I’d imagined what Derrick would look like in a tuxedo. I’d even taken the time to find photos of him in his uniform online. But I’d never—repeat, never—pictured the guy wearing an apron covered in powdered sugar and bits of cookie dough.

Turned out, he looked pretty great in that too. And I must’ve looked okay after I slipped a hot pink-and-white “Let Them Eat Cake!” apron over my head, because he leaned my way and whispered, “You look like a pro, Southpaw.” All I could do was smile. Well, smile and listen as Nadine gave me instructions for the cookie dough.

Turned out, her recipe was a little different from mine—only one egg instead of two and baking powder instead of soda. Interesting. A bit more flour, too, so the cookies would hold their shape.

I mixed up three batches of the dough and then, at her instruction, put them into large zip-lock bags and placed them in the freezer to chill for a few minutes. While we waited, she prepped the royal icing. Or, rather, she had Derrick prep the royal icing. Turned out, the guy was pretty handy. Who knew? He kept a watchful eye on his whirring mixer, and I helped roll out the cookies and cut them to look like teacups.

A short time later, I rolled out more dough and filled a couple more trays while the first two baked in the oven. I couldn’t believe how much better Nadine’s recipe seemed to be working. If the woman had seen my attempts at home, she would’ve cringed. Or maybe not. Maybe she would’ve taken my mess, plopped it back into the mixing bowl, and reworked it with her magic fingers.

While we worked, Derrick and I kept a playful banter back and forth between us. Nadine joined in, her voice ringing with laughter as she told story after story about Derrick’s childhood. I’d never had so much fun baking before. Of course, that might have a little something to do with the yummy-looking guy scraping the royal icing from the edges of the mixing bowl.

Nadine separated the white mounds of sweet, fluffy icing into several smaller bowls and began to add coloring gel. I watched as she worked to get the consistencies just right—thicker for the piping icing and thinner for the flooding icing. She passed off the bottles of icing to me just as the first two trays of cookies came out of the oven. They looked and smelled amazing. And they were shaped like perfect little teacups. The ones I’d made at home had looked more like little round blobs.

Derrick tried to snag one of the hot cookies from the tray, but his mother slapped his hand with an oven mitt. “Not on your life,” she said. “These are for the bridal shower.”

“But I’m the best man.”

“If you want to live to be the best man, you’d better keep your fingers to yourself.”

He grunted and waited until she’d turned toward me, then nabbed a cookie. I didn’t let on that I had seen him do it, but from the pained expression on his face, I knew it must’ve been too hot to eat. Still, he didn’t make a sound. Obviously, the boy didn’t want to tip off his mama.

“Speaking of bridesmaids, I hear you’re the maid of honor in this wedding.” Nadine gave me an admiring nod. “Never got to play that role myself.”

“Oh, no, ma’am.” I put another tray of cookies into the oven. “I’m just a bridesmaid.”

“No you’re not.” Derrick brushed the cookie crumbs from his hands and stared at me so intently I almost felt as if he could see my thoughts. “You’re not just a bridesmaid. You’re the one holding things together.”

“I . . . I am?”

“Sure. And I know why. The person who cares the most does the most. You clearly care the most, and Crystal is lucky to have you, not just as a sister, but as her go-to person. She really needs that right now.”

Well, now. If that didn’t make a girl feel better about things, nothing would. I stood in complete silence for a moment, unable to think clearly, what with his flattery going straight to my head and all.

“Speaking of holding it all together, let’s see if these cookies hold their shape once we get them onto the cooling racks, shall we?” Nadine dove right back into the baking project, never realizing that my heart was thump-thump-thumping after hearing her son’s sweet words.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Derrick take another cookie and pop it into his mouth.

“I have eyes in the back of my head, son.” Nadine turned to face him, hands on hips. “And laser-sharp hearing. Now, quit eating the merchandise or this poor girl won’t have a thing to take to that party tomorrow.”

We didn’t really have to worry about that. By the time the sun went down, we’d baked and decorated five dozen gorgeous teacup cookies. Nadine even took the time to help me with the cupcakes I’d left to the last minute. After feeding me dinner.

Derrick stayed put, all smiles and fuzzy conversation, as if working in the kitchen making teacup cookies with a discombobulated bridesmaid was something he did every day.

Maybe he did, in between innings. Or maybe, just maybe, this handsome best man was up to something else altogether. Yep. The cute little signature wink he gave me over the cupcake tray was a dead giveaway. Looked like Derrick Richardson was stirring up something a little sweeter than cookies and cupcakes. Maybe he was tossing me a pass. Hopefully my catching skills were a little better than my baking skills.