Holly Jolly Cake Fight

Chapter 1

Candace was sure there must be banjos lurking somewhere.

“What was that, ma’am?” the driver asked.

“Nothing,” she muttered, not wishing to explain to him her deep-seated belief that she was safe wherever she was as long as she couldn’t hear banjos.

She’d lived her entire life in Trenton, New Jersey.

She’d dealt with everything from rich, creepy pedos to meth heads to gluten-free soccer moms. And it wasn’t that she didn’t like being in natural settings.

She loved hiking and camping. But there was a difference between day-tripping to the Poconos and being driven to a location unknown in the Appalachian foothills of North Georgia.

“This is just . . . a long way from what I’m used to. ”

The man looked around as though he wasn’t sure where they were, either. “Yeah, never gotten a ride this far from the city. You wanted Jasper, right?”

Candace already had the address memorized, but she pulled up the four-day-old email on her phone to check again.

Congratulations, you’ve been selected as a contestant in the Food2Love Network’s Christmas Spectacular Bake-Off!

She hadn’t expected an invite after the scandal she’d caused the network last time, not after she’d gotten caught on camera with the producer’s hand up her skirt — not that she’d wanted it there to begin with.

She certainly hadn’t expected the invite only four days before the show was scheduled to film.

Even more surprising was the plane ticket and the postscript that she’d have to find her own transportation from the airport.

They did promise to reimburse for that, but it was still strange.

Most shocking? The $100,000 cash prize. That was enough to drop every one of her commitments through the rest of the month, including Thanksgiving.

That $100,000 was exactly what she needed to get herself back on her feet, if it was possible at this point.

She didn’t know if she’d ever be able to rebuild the bakery she’d lost in a freak flood over the summer — no flood insurance — but she’d be able to build something with that money, even if it was a food truck.

She just needed to do her absolute best and play the game the way the network wanted her to play.

She’d always been a villain, even before the incident with Lucas Barrett in the pantry.

It wasn’t anything deliberate on her part.

She happened to have a resting bitch face and a driven, impersonal attitude that could easily be edited into a nightmare.

If the network was inviting her back so soon after the scandal, clearly that was what they wanted. She would be their villain.

If the banjos don’t get me first, she thought as the Uber driver maneuvered his Mazda onto a path that was more mud than pavement.

At first, she thought it wasn’t a road at all, rather a dirt trail, until she saw the heavy grooves left on either side of the lane by trucks too wide for the narrow blacktop.

“Never seen nothing like that,” the driver said as Candace craned in her seat to get a better look at the Goliath that appeared in front of them when they reached a clearing. The contraption shrieked and shook violently as it spewed white foam all over the trees surrounding it.

A harried young woman with skewed glasses, a blouse half-tucked into professional slacks, and neon Chuck Taylors darted out toward them. The Uber driver rolled his window down, letting in a belch of exhaust and white plastic tendrils.

“Hiya!” the girl squeaked as she peeked in. “Who’s your—oh, Candace! Hiya! Big fan!”

Unprepared as ever for the pep and the fan-girling, Candace sat as far back as she could in her seat.

“I’m Jordyn-With-a-Y,” the girl said as though the phrase itself was on her birth certificate.

“I’ll be your talent liaison for the next two weeks.

” She pulled a twenty out of her pocket and handed it to the driver along with directions to turn off at the next fork and drop Candace off at Gate 5.

She waved them on as another car pulled up, but the morning sun’s glare obscured whoever else was arriving.

This time, there really was no pavement. Candace sprawled her arms and legs to pin herself in her seat as the driver launched them over the most unintentional roadway she had ever seen. There was no way this wasn’t a horror movie. That foam had to somehow be made of corpses.

“What’s a talent liaison?” the driver asked.

“A gofer who needs her own title so she can tell her friends and family she’s special,” Candace guessed through gritted teeth.

“Are you famous?”

Candace snorted. “God, I hope not,” she muttered as the driver parked next to a big number 5.

“Well, good luck,” he told her as a couple of crew members scurried out from nowhere to get her luggage.

She was going to need that luck after the Summer Bakes debacle. Truly, no one was as surprised as she was to be invited back to a Food2Love competition.

“We’ll be alright if you don’t win this,” Pauline said for the thousandth time, somehow managing to keep her voice pert while shouting over whatever the deafening machinery was on the other side of the Mazda stopped in front of them. “We’ll figure something out.”

Laurin’s stomach churned, a ghost of gameday nerves.

He’d thrived off that sensation once upon a time, but his ACL made sure he’d never again feel it on a pitch in front of fifty thousand people.

He would never admit to his family that he hoped to feel that gameday churn again in a fake kitchen in front of a few cameras while competing against sweet old ladies, but once a champion, always a champion.

And Pauline was wrong. It would not be alright if he didn’t win. Not because of the damage it would do to his pride but because without that prize money, they’d have to decide between their bakery and their house. And since the bakery was their sole source of income, the choice was obvious.

The Mazda moved on, giving Laurin a clear view of the beast making the ruckus.

He was impressed by the fake snow machine, but Genevieve’s eyes went wide as she clenched the armrests of her booster seat.

Laurin worried, not for the first time, that the next two weeks were going to be hard for both of them.

He reached back and took her little hand. “You sure you’ll be okay without me, Vivvy? Two weeks is a long time.”

“Sure it’s only two weeks and not forever?” she said with all the considerable sass a six-year-old raised by her French grandmother possessed. “That thing might eat you.”

He grinned and jabbed a thumb toward the metal monster. “That guy? He’s on a Styrofoam diet.” Hopefully it wasn’t really Styrofoam, though. It was spewing gunk all over the North Georgia wilderness.

Vivvy didn’t look convinced, but how many second-graders wouldn’t be terrified in front of that loud, foul-smelling beast?

A frazzled-looking young woman ran up to the car. Pauline, in the driver’s seat, rolled down the window, and the woman said, “Sorry, ma’am, park’s closed until the end of the month.”

“Oui, I saw zee signs,” Pauline said, thickening up her French accent, the one she’d been careful to maintain in the fifteen years since she’d moved to America. “Mon fils is here for your leetle show.”

She knew full well how to say ‘my son’ in English, but Pauline was always in character.

The woman pulled out her phone, scanned something, and looked past Pauline to Laurin.

Her jaw dropped slightly when she spotted him.

She recovered quickly and shot him a smile that wasn’t quite appropriate in front of his mother and daughter, too much eyebrow action, but his life was mostly playing both mom and dad to Vivvy these days, so it was nice to be appreciated.

A moment later, the woman looked at her phone again and grimaced.

“Laurin Lavigne,” Pauline told her. “I am sure he is on zee list?”

Another wide eye. “Oh, uhh, yes. Sh-he is on it. Can you take him to . . . crud . . . Gate 7, I guess.”

Laurin hoped she wasn’t suddenly acting weird because his mom had driven him here. They only lived an hour away, and it was just the three of them — him, Pauline, and Vivvy — against the world, so it was easy to forget this looked like there was something wrong with him.

Nope, he was just a washed-up professional athlete raising a kid with his mom, who was also his business partner at a struggling bakery. Nothing weird or lame here.

He leaned across his mom to stick his hand out the window to show he wasn’t antisocial or anything. “Hey, I’m Laurin.”

“You don’t look like a Laurin,” the girl rushed out, her face flushing an even brighter pink than the canvas sneakers she wore. “I mean, umm, I’m Jordyn-With-a-Y.”

He shook her hand firmly. “Great to meet you, Jordyn-With-a-Y,” which made her flush even more brightly. “Do you mind if the little lady and I walk to Gate 7? She’s never seen anything like this.” Laurin hadn’t, either, but he was no stranger to television cameras.

The back window rolled down. “I’m Vivvy,” the miniature brunette said as she, too, stuck her hand out the window. “Are you gonna make my papa a star again?”

Jordyn laughed and shook the tiny hand. “I’ll do my best, but only if you stick close to him on your walk, okay? There’s some dangerous stuff here.”

Vivvy scrambled like a monkey up onto Laurin’s shoulders the moment she was released from her booster seat and immediately started grilling Laurin about everything they walked past. She pointed out a lot of common things she saw every time they went camping — hiking trails, squirrels, fire pits — but there was plenty to learn, too.

“That’s a camera dolly,” Laurin said of the video equipment she pointed at, although he couldn’t imagine they were going to get much use out of it in the woods. “It’s a wheeled cart, see, so they can move the camera around steadily.”

“That’s a camera? It’s huge!”