Gingerbread Christmas at Mustang River

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Laney Forrester was having a royal icing-related issue. No matter how hard she tried, she wasn’t getting the right combination of flavor and the cement quality that she needed to get this mock gingerbread house to hold itself together.

She had never met a single thing that she couldn’t DIY. There wasn’t a video online that would go unsearched, there wasn’t a stone she would leave unturned when it came to figuring out information so she could just do the damn thing herself.

But she was starting to feel like she was in over her head, which she hated.

It reminded her of long nights trying to get a business plan together, trying to get her restaurant up and running, trying to move out of the realm of food trucks and pop-ups, only to have her ex continually telling her that she wasn’t good enough, that she was never going to make it.

That she couldn’t do it. Only to have that be revealed as true when he stole the money that she had saved up for the deposit on her own brick and mortar, and left her absolutely in the lurch.

She had an allergy to failure. Especially failure that she shouldn’t have to own as hers. Unfortunately, even though the restaurant collapsing hadn’t been her fault, she bore the scars and consequences.

She liked her life here in Mustang River, she really did, but it didn’t mean that the pain of that previous failure didn’t linger.

It didn’t mean that it didn’t affect her. Which was perhaps why she was now sitting in the kitchen of the Painted Ridge dining room covered in icing.

She was not a pastry chef.

Agreeing that her very first gingerbread house that wasn’t just something she was doing at a kitchen table should be a giant display for the gingerbread jubilee that the ranch was hosting, set up in the lobby, a scale model of the resort, had been foolish on her part. She could admit that now.

Now that she was in the middle of icingpocalypse.

Her gingerbread tiles weren’t holding, and she could admit the miniature frame she’d built out of wood was…

crooked. Which was so irritating because she knew how to use power tools.

She wasn’t a novice at building or remodeling.

She’d done enough of her own renovations on the three different food trucks she’d built out, and on the restaurant that she’d lost to be pretty confident in her carpentry skills.

But somehow this was making her a worse baker, and a worse construction worker.

She growled and looked at the time. She had a job interview soon.

She didn’t like being the boss. That was one thing she struggled with when it came to owning her own business.

Mainly because she wasn’t afraid of being a hardass, and sometimes she was too much of one.

And often, she didn’t straddle the line well between good leader and asshole.

Or at least, that’s how people perceived her.

She had learned a long time ago that when the highest compliment people who knew you could pay was: you don’t care who you make mad. It wasn’t really that much of a compliment.

She looked at the application that she had printed off and had sitting on the counter.

Chloe Malone.

Twenty-two years old, applying for a sous chef position.

That was young, and she didn’t have much in the way of experience outside culinary school.

Though that she’d been to culinary school at all felt like a minor miracle.

But that also meant that she surely wasn’t local.

Laney was stereotyping, but in the few months since she’d moved here, she’d discovered a pattern.

Locals were often eager but powered by enthusiasm rather than expertise. And if she did manage to find a fully qualified candidate from elsewhere, she could be certain they’d be gone expeditiously.

People would move to small towns because they romanticized them, and then they would discover that they found them very boring. Or, they would decide that they finally needed to leave their small town, because it wasn’t doing it for them anymore.

Whatever the reason, she found that keeping employees was not the simplest thing out here in the middle of nowhere.

Some people came intending to start a new life, and then decided they didn’t like the new life. It was hard to tell right off the jump if somebody was a stayer or a goer. And that put Laney in situations like this.

Not the icing. The icing was still all her fault.

She stood back and looked at the prototype that she was fiddling with. She was going to have to start construction on the real deal soon. The opening of the gingerbread jubilee and Christmas tree extravaganza was upon them.

Well, she had a week or so.

They would be putting gingerbread houses and trees made by people in the community on display in one of the venue barns at the resort.

And the large gingerbread house that Laney was making was going to be set up here in the lobby, sparkling brilliantly and smelling delicious, if she could manage to get her stuff together.

She had a great sensibility for cooking. For flavors.

Her gingerbread tasted amazing. It was the part where it had to be load-bearing gingerbread that was causing her issues. But because Laney was somebody who also knew how to build furniture, she had figured that she could wed her expertise with cooking, with her building skills.

No such luck so far.

She took a step back, and ran into something hard, solid, and human.

Her stomach plummeted, and she caught the scent of a spicy cologne, along with the scent of hay and skin before she turned.

She should have known.

Because there was only one man, one person, that she was that attuned to on the ranch.

“Pike. You scared me to death.”

“Sorry about that.”

Pike and all his charm had been busy working her up into a fantasy frenzy for the last few months.

She was physically so, so into him. He was gorgeous.

Dark brown hair with gray at the temples, smile lines that made her knees go weak.

And he was competent. She had watched him do work on the ranch, and he was just good at everything.

People didn’t take him seriously because of his demeanor, but she knew real, bone-deep competence when she saw it. She also knew a leader.

She worked in professional kitchens, had spent the last twenty years of her life doing that. They were fierce, male-dominated environments, and it was where her own ferocity had bloomed and grown.

She could tell when somebody had head chef energy.

Pike had that kind of energy. It made it feel strange that he was here, on the ranch, working for other people, taking a back seat in the proceedings, and seeming happy to do so.

But, people contained multitudes.

Still, it was that leader in him that caused her stomach to tighten up whenever he was around. Feeling uncomfortable, or like someone had power over her had always made her mouthy. And Pike was no exception to that general rule. When he was around, she just said things.

“You ever going to give me that one-night stand?” she asked.

Might as well shoot her shot. He wouldn’t take it seriously, of course.

But she was serious.

She hadn’t had sex in months. The dissolution of her previous relationship still stung like it was fresh and she hadn’t even found anyone to blow off some steam with yet.

Being a chef was a high-stress job and back in the Bay Area it had put her in the path of other people with high-stress jobs who had the same ethos she did. Work hard, play hard. Get some whenever possible.

But then she’d gotten into a long-term relationship, and that had twisted her up and bent her in so many ways she just wanted to feel like the Laney she’d been before all that.

Like Laney in her twenties who would have gotten a new tattoo and a new partner in less than twenty-four hours. Pike made her feel like that.

Like she wanted to be wild and lose her head for just a little bit.

He lifted his brows. Flirting with Pike aggressively was sort of how she interacted with him. And the best part was he didn’t really think she was serious. So she couldn’t embarrass herself. Except, she was absolutely serious, and if he took her up on it...

“Sorry, I have to work tomorrow. But I did come to ask a favor of you.”

That almost hurt. Pike was as dedicated to ignoring her advances as she was to making them. She had a feeling he thought she was doing a bit. She kind of was. But also if he said yes she’d do it in a heartbeat.

“A favor?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Not a sexual favor, though.”

“I’m afraid not.” He smiled, and she was almost sure that there was something like regret in his gray eyes. It made her stomach twist. “What the hell are you doing?”

She turned around and looked at the mess of gingerbread. “Oh. I’m making a gingerbread house for the jubilee.”

“It looks to me like you’re making a gingerbread mess.”

“I’m sorry, are you an expert?”

Something sharpened in his eyes then, and it was like a knife turning between her ribs.

Oh. She had the sudden urge to take a step back and say yes, chef, and that was not an urge that overtook her very often.

She had been the boss for a good long while.

People said yes, chef, to her, not the other way around.

“I might be,” he said.

Shit. People didn’t say it like that if there was a possibility they weren’t an expert.

She was well familiar with the sort who postured and tried to make a case for the fact that they were the best in whatever field they were in.

Pike didn’t do that. And maybe that was why all along she had sensed there was something more to him.

Maybe that was why, all along, she had sensed that he had hidden depths.

“Seriously, are you? Because I have gotten myself into a very deep hole.”

“That is a shame. And, I want to talk to you about the favor that I’d like, and then we can talk about your gingerbread house.”

“I kind of need to talk about the gingerbread house first.”