Chapter 2
TWO
LUCK
Present day…
Seriously, I was tired.
But I had to get this cake done and delivered.
It was for a five-year-old’s birthday party.
It was Encanto themed: bright and cheerful with lots of flowers coiling along the sides with two chocolate straws poking out the top.
Swagging between them were colorful, fluttering pendants made from fondant, and of course, a cute Mirabel stuck in the middle under the streamer.
It even had bows on the sides that lit up.
That five-year-old was going to be thrilled.
And once that cake was delivered, and I was paid in full, I was finally, after years of on-again, off-again covering Kevin, going to be getting ahead.
I had a decent, if not healthy, amount of savings. I had enough money in the bank to pay my bills for a couple of months. And to me, this was the absolute minimum of what I had to have on hand to live my life and be able to roll with the punches it inevitably landed on you.
Damn, I might be able to buy myself a new dress, the first treat yo’self moment in at least a year.
Man, with that guy, there were a lot of things I felt like a complete moron about, but covering him financially flashed blazing at the top of the list.
You see, I was a baker, cake decorator and pastry chef (that last one was a stretch, but I had the training) by trade.
So, not exactly a billionaire.
I didn’t have a professional kitchen. No way could I afford that. I made my cakes in the tiny kitchen in my tiny one-bedroom apartment at the Oasis Square complex, where me and all my besties—Shanti, Raye, Luna, Jessie and Harlow—lived.
I made the cookies, muffins and cupcakes that were sold in the case of the coffee cubby at the front of The Surf Club in the fabulous kitchen at SC.
I was also a server at SC, and when asked to come on as a full-time employee, I’d jumped at the chance.
I needed the money, for one. It was a fabulous place to work with good bennies, for two.
Tito, the owner, was eccentric (to say the least), but quiet and a great boss, for three.
The semi-recent addition of Tex buying into the place was a shocker, and even if he was loud and grumpy, he was also a very good guy (he just hid it well) and his loud and grumpy was pretty hilarious, so that was four.
All my besties worked there, which was a big, fat five.
Last, tips were decent, and that was six.
Sure, this meant I had to get up at four in the morning so I could get ready to look presentable for my shift and go into work to bake stuff for the case, after which, I waited tables.
And then when my shift was done, I had to hightail it home to keep baking whatever orders I’d agreed to do (hence me being so danged tired all the time).
And sure again, customers were often assholes.
Not the ones at SC. There were some jerks, but that wasn’t the norm.
The ones for Willow’s Good Stuff.
I swear, people were crazy. It wasn’t like I didn’t have a website that shared my policies. It wasn’t like I didn’t reiterate them when discussing an order. It wasn’t like they didn’t legally accept them when they signed the contract.
It was just that people these days thought they could get away with shoveling a lot of irrational shit, and you’d be a-okay with eating it.
No, I wasn’t going to nix my deposit policy for you.
No, I was not going to hand over a cake I spent hours baking and decorating and you could “settle with me later” for the rest of what you owe.
No, I was not going to deliver for free. Do you do something for a stranger, pay for gas and spend time driving around Phoenix for free? No? No way you’d do that? So why should I?
No, I was not going to wait around for half an hour if you weren’t there at the appointed delivery window. I was on time. You need to be on time. My policies state I’d wait fifteen minutes beyond the window. You go one minute past that, I’m gone, and so is your cake, not to mention your deposit.
And I wasn’t coming back. You wanted it, you came and got it and paid the extra ten bucks my policy states you had to pay to get your cake if you wasted my time.
Ugh, you are so becoming what Gabe said you’d become. Bitter and gross, Dreamer admonished me.
No, Logic clapped back. She’s looking after herself and never, ever going to be anybody’s doormat again. For sure she’s never going to be anybody’s meal ticket.
I stared at the cute Mirabel on my cake, scared Dreamer was right.
And not particularly happy Dreamer brought up Gabe.
So, okay, I’d been obsessing about our ugly convo now for months.
Not to mention, it was one of the least fun things I’d had to endure in my life, Gabe having to be my bodyguard for days after we had that exchange of words (not to mention part two, I knew how he tasted, and dang, he tasted phenomenal, and the man knew how to use his mouth (and tongue)).
But for once, I was mentally bellyaching about something else, a nice reprieve from mentally questioning my sanity that I followed up that amazing kiss with that horrible chat.
I shook off these thoughts, and after I took several snaps and did a quick video of the cake, I started to build the box around it that would keep it safe in transport, glad I only had that one cake to deliver that day.
Because, as if having a job and running my own business wasn’t enough, I wasn’t only a baker, cake decorator and server, I was also an Avenging Angel.
No, this wasn’t a paid position.
In essence (okay, not essence, in total), along with Raye, Luna, Jessie, Harlow, Shanti, and our newbie chicks, Gemma and Joey (who also lived at the Oasis and worked at The Surf Club), I was a vigilante.
Unh-hunh, you read that right.
We were vigilantes.
This was how I learned Kev and his now long-ish-dead friend, Trev, were pulling a dating app scam.
This was how me and my gals, and their guys, and the entire Hottie Squad got involved in trying to figure out who murdered Trev.
We’d had a few minor missions since all was revealed about what happened to Trev, nothing too exciting, or dangerous.
But it was the only excitement I got nowadays.
We were currently in a lull with missions, and this was both good and bad.
Good, because I needed the time to do other things, things that meant I could make deposits into my bank account.
And bad, because this meant life was all grind.
My grind was a never-ending cycle of baking, decorating, delivering, and serving.
Sometimes (rarely), I’d hang with the girls at our killer AA headquarters (which was actually a storage unit, but trust me, our mysterious benefactor, Arthur, set us up sweet).
Or sometimes, I’d hit an Oasis Square shindig (my apartment complex was the best in Phoenix, and not just because it had an awesome mural painted on the outside, window boxes filled with greenery the tenants didn’t have to tend, and a recently refurbished pool and courtyard area, but because, yeah, some of the tenants were a little loopy, but they were all fun).
Or, last, I’d hit up a whole Avenging Angels/Hottie Squad get-together.
Those were even rarer for me because, obviously, Gabe could be there (and often was), so I avoided them, but I couldn’t avoid all of them or people would start to notice.
On those occasions I didn’t, he gave me a wide berth (ouch) and barely acknowledged me (ouch times two).
But I’d bought that. It was on me.
It was what I wanted.
Oh, girl, I was there during that kiss, and all that delicious tension scorching between you two before it, and you are a big, fat LIAR, Dreamer said.
He’s gorgeous. He has a great body. He obviously is seriously practiced at kissing, and we know what THAT means, so he probably thinks he’s God’s gift, thus we totally dodged a bullet, Logic replied.
You, like, exist to rain on our parade, Dreamer snapped.
I, like, exist to keep our shit tight and not get walked all over, Logic snapped back.
“Shut up,” I snapped at the cake.
Oh my God, I was talking to myself, not like normal people talked to themselves, like split-personality people talked to themselves.
Yikes.
I needed a break. I needed a vacation.
But I was about a hundred cakes and a hundred shifts at SC short of being able to afford that.
After I stamped the box with my cute Willow’s Good Stuff logo, wound my pink and green bespoke ribbon around it and fashioned a cute bow, the cake ready to rumble, I checked my watch. With relief I saw I was going to be on time in my promised fifteen-minute delivery window.
This meant I was going to have to fight rush-hour traffic on the way home (who had a five-year-old’s birthday party at suppertime on a Thursday?), but I’d be home before five-thirty for the first time in forever with blissfully nothing to do.
I could take a long, hot bath.
I could read a book.
I could open a bottle of wine and chill.
I could do all three.
On these unusually happy thoughts, carefully, because that cake was a masterpiece, I hustled it out the door.
I was nearing the switchback stairs to the upper level when I caught sight of him.
I also noted he’d already caught sight of me.
Damn, crap, argh.
Just my luck, Gabe was jogging down the stairs, probably after debriefing from some important mission with Cap and/or Eric.
Oh, by the by, me and my fellow AAs were untrained, unpaid vigilantes who did what we did to right the world’s wrongs. But also, we did it because Raye started it all due to the heartbreakingly tragic history she had, and, you know, besties were besties, so you clicked in when shit got real.
Even if you yourself were making it real or wading into it when it had not one thing to do with you.
Gabe, on the other hand, was a member of the Nightingale Investigations & Security team, so he was a bona fide badass—trained and paid.
I couldn’t ignore him, since he was staring at me, and the small fact he was even hotter jogging down a flight of stairs in faded jeans and a black T-shirt that valiantly remained in one piece as it stretched across his formidable pecs.