Chapter Twenty
M ac was in the bottom three.
Helping Magda had distracted him and the judges had scolded him for his broken buttercream, but if he’d had to do it over again, he still would have offered up his oven without hesitation.
In the end, his flavors saved him. Walter went home, and Magda survived. She’d even been in the top three, her face still red during judging from the torrential tears.
He’d never seen her break like that. But who could blame her? This place. The pressure. He knew it was just cupcakes, but it felt like so much more, and he knew how badly she wanted to do well.
He hadn’t been thinking—during the challenge or the immediate aftermath. He’d just been acting on instinct, but now his brain wouldn’t settle. He was agitated when he got back to the inn. He ordered a room service burger, as had become his habit, and then took a shower to wind down and wash off the stress sweat of the day.
The Red Team had gotten into the habit of eating together in the inn’s dining area, but Mac steered clear because the truce with Magda was a tentative one. The PAs often ordered from local restaurants and brought in food for all of them. He was well fed, but he missed cooking. He missed his kitchen.
He’d never baked so much in his life—and he did enjoy the test of the various challenges—but he missed those quiet mornings before his staff came in when it was just him in the Cup, figuring out what he wanted to do for specials, prepping sauces, trying out new combinations when no one was timing him or judging him, and no one even knew if a new recipe crashed and burned.
Those mornings centered him, and he was distinctly off-balance now.
He’d just stepped out of the shower when a knock came at the door—the PA with his burger, no doubt.
“Just a second!” he called out, yanking on pajama pants and a T-shirt so he wouldn’t scandalize the poor kid, and padded barefoot to the door, rubbing at his wet hair with a towel draped around his neck.
He yanked open the door—
But it wasn’t a PA.
Magda stood in the hallway in soft yoga pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt—one of those ones with thumb holes that she’d tugged down over her hands. Her black curls were wet and piled up on top of her head in a messy knot secured with a pencil. There was something determined, almost confrontational about her expression—but also something else that he couldn’t quite identify.
“Hey,” he said brilliantly. “Uh… did you want to come in?”
“I can’t. Production rules.” She frowned up at him, her bright blue eyes narrowed. “Why did you do it?”
“What?”
“You know what. You didn’t have to help me.”
“I know.” She seemed almost angry, and he frowned. “You don’t owe me anything, okay? It just wouldn’t have been fair for you to go out like that.”
“You would have done it for anyone,” she said, something almost accusing in the words. Or insistent. As if she was forcing them to be true.
“Sure. Yeah.”
She shook her head, glaring at him. “You almost got eliminated.”
“Yeah, well. Horseshoes and reality television. Almost doesn’t count.”
“Was it so people would like you?” she demanded. “The guy who almost got eliminated because he’s such a noble guy he gave up his oven to help another contestant no matter the cost.”
He arched a brow. “I almost got eliminated because my buttercream was crap.”
“And you’re saying it would have been crap even if you weren’t distracted helping me?” she challenged. “I don’t think you’re supposed to help other contestants outside of team challenges. It’s a rule. You could have been eliminated—”
“They weren’t going to eliminate me for sharing an oven—”
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “You could have gotten rid of me. Taken ownership of the maple cake. Won the feud. Pride of Pine Hollow.”
“That’s not how I want to win.” He met her pale, angry, confused eyes. “You would have done the same.”
She shook her head—more baffled than disagreeing. “I can’t figure you out. You hate me, but you won’t act like it.”
“I don’t hate you, Magda. I never hated you. You just drive me crazy.”
“I hate owing you. I hate feeling like you’re—” She broke off, struggling for words. “Is it just for the cameras? You’re playing the good guy so America will love you instead of me? So they’ll side with you? You always were better at the people stuff.”
Irritation flashed through him. “Are you seriously accusing me of helping you just to make myself look good after I saved your ass today?”
“Well, is that why you did it?”
“Maybe I didn’t want you to go home!”
“That’s not how this works,” she snapped back. “We’re competitors. We’re supposed to be cutthroat. You’re not supposed to be nice to me. The only thing that makes sense is that you’re doing it to mess with my head or to make yourself look good—”
“Or because I’m not a complete asshole?”
“Then why have you been an asshole to me for the last fourteen years?” she shouted.
“I don’t know!” he shouted back.
He was vaguely aware that they were yelling at each other in a hallway that was very far from private, but right now Magda had driven all logic and reality television self-preservation instincts from his brain.
“I don’t know, Magda,” he repeated. “I don’t know why you make me insane and I lose all rational thought when I’m with you. I’m sorry about the cake, okay?” He hadn’t stolen the damn thing, but he would apologize for anything right now just to end this .
“It wasn’t about the cake!” she shouted—and he roared back.
“ Thank you! Finally!” Finally she was admitting he hadn’t stolen it.
“I was never mad because you stole from me,” she said—ruining his moment of victory. “I was mad because you dismissed me. You treated me like I was nothing—”
“You were a child!”
“Stop saying that!” she yelled, taking a step forward, almost as if she wanted to take a swing at him again. “I had feelings. I had ideas. Yes, I was younger than you, but you treated me like I was a joke, and you still have not admitted that I helped you. All those car rides, talking about the Cup, how to expand it—so what if you didn’t want me? So what if I embarrassed myself by throwing myself at you? You could have at least acknowledged that we were friends . Real friends. But instead you treated me like I was so far beneath you that the very idea of me contributing anything was laughable. I have always been invisible, but I thought you saw me—”
“Invisible?” he barked incredulously. “You are impossible to ignore. I wish I could. I wish I didn’t notice you whenever you walk into a room. I wish you didn’t suck up all my attention and focus and make me feel so goddamn irrational. I can’t think when you’re here!”
“Then why didn’t you let me get eliminated?” Magda yelled.
“Because I don’t want to be here without you!”
He shouted the words, and for a moment they hung in the air as they stared at each other, breathing hard, air crackling—
Then his hands were cupping her head, and he was kissing her like he needed her to keep breathing.
And she kissed him back.
After a startled beat, she softened with a groan and her hands gripped his T-shirt, dragging him closer. She’d gone on her tiptoes, but he still hunched over her to compensate for their height difference, his mouth devouring hers. His brain was gone. Evaporated. A flash of heat like a kitchen fire, and it had vaporized. All that was left was instinct and need, and fuck did he need her right now.
She made a small sound in her throat, and he chased that sound, backing her across the narrow hallway until she bumped into the wall and he pressed against her front. Her hands were in his hair now, her nails lightly scoring the back of his neck, and he released her lips at the sharp-sweet sensation, moving along her jaw to the curve of her neck, sucking the soft pale skin.
“Mac.” His name was a sigh.
He ran his hands down her sides, cupping her hips in those insanely soft pants, and it was the most natural thing in the world for her to raise one leg, hooking it around his waist, and he stroked his hand down, catching her behind her knee, his brain completely consumed with the necessary calculations of lifting her up and pinning her against the wall with his body so they aligned just right—
A throat cleared.
Magda’s soft body went suddenly rigid in his arms before the tentative voice spoke.
“I, uh, your burger, Mr. Newton?”
Fuck fucking room service.
Mac hissed out a curse under his breath and went motionless, his still cloudy brain now working on the complex calculation of how exactly to get out of this position in the least incriminating way possible.
He had just pinned Magda to a freaking wall in a hallway that was possibly bugged and most definitely public.
Shiiiit.
He released her knee, and she dropped her foot to the floor. He looked down at her, his body still curled protectively over hers, but she was staring at the floor, her face incandescently red in the low light of the hallway.
Mac turned, still using his body to block Magda from the PA’s view as much as possible—as if they didn’t all know exactly who she was and exactly how much the young man had seen.
“Thanks,” Mac said, as casually as if he was caught groping a fellow competitor in the hallway all the time. He reached for the burger tray, accepting it, and then giving the twenty-something PA a very pointed look that meant his work here was done.
But the PA didn’t take the hint. Instead he fidgeted, looking incredibly uncomfortable, but as if he absolutely had to say something. “Um… so… fraternizing is…”
“I was just leaving.”
Magda slipped out from behind him before he could put out a hand to stop her—not that he would have, but his entire body was protesting the sudden absence of her warmth behind him.
“Good night,” she said, either to the PA or him, it was hard to tell since she was pointedly looking at neither of them as she started down the hall, head held high. Nothing to see here. The most regal walk of shame he’d ever seen.
Not that either of them had anything to be ashamed of.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Newton,” the young PA offered when she was out of earshot. “But you know the rules…”
“I know,” Mac acknowledged, moving toward the open door to his room. It wasn’t the kid’s fault he’d interrupted one of the most insane and perfect and unexpected and incendiary moments of Mac’s entire life.
Madness. That had been pure madness.
And he’d never wanted anything as badly as he wanted to do it again.
Mac closed the door between him and the PA, and swore again, this time in a sort of prayer of thanks for whatever the fuck had just happened. He’d had good chemistry with women before, but that had felt like he’d been plugged into an electrical socket. He’d lost his fucking mind . And he wanted to do it again as soon as possible.
But this was Magda. And they were in a competition where they weren’t allowed to be alone in a room together—and even if they were home in Pine Hollow there was no world in which this wasn’t going to get complicated.
He didn’t know what had just happened. He didn’t know if this thing between them had grown out of the feud, or if they’d been feuding all along because both of them had sensed this thing between them under the surface—and he didn’t care.
Their past was a shitshow, but the future? The future was suddenly very, very interesting.