Chapter 3
The cabin was small and sparse, furnished only with basic furniture, a full range of kitchen supplies, crafting necessities, and a full, unadorned Christmas tree.
It was clean, though, and had plenty of kitchen space and a well-maintained hearth.
It wouldn’t take much more than an occasional fire and a stack of books to make the little cabin in Jasper the perfect late-November retreat.
But Laurin didn’t know if he’d have many nights here.
He was not a quitter. He had, in fact, subjected himself to many ill-advised surgeries and questionable procedures before he admitted he’d been done in by injury and retired from his football club.
He was not about to quit this time, either.
The format for the show seemed to be a mix of baking and holiday prep, which wasn’t a bad thing.
Pauline Lavigne would have had her son drawn and quartered if the decorations he hung in the café didn’t meet her expectations of both subtle and exquisite.
Since Laurin’s bakery strengths lay more in finishing than mixing, the blended format favored him.
But could he pull Candace’s weight when he himself was struggling to drum up his old competitive streak? He wasn’t sure.
He refused to let Candace ruin him, though. To that end, he meticulously catalogued the contents of the kitchen and craft supplies. Every pot, every paintbrush, every glue gun. Candace pouted the whole time, keeping herself in whatever room Laurin wasn’t in and never once picking up her notebook.
The woman had a history of sabotaging other contestants.
Laurin had watched every episode of Food2Love’s Baking Greats competition series at least three times, first for entertainment as they were aired and then second and third this past month for research.
At the beginning of Candace’s five-year run, he’d been intrigued by her.
She was intelligent, attractive in a casual, artsy sort of way, and uniquely talented.
He’d been amazed by many of her bakes and attempted several in his own bakery, failing spectacularly most times.
But her recent losing streak had turned her ugly.
Viewers in online forums wrote off many of her antics as accidents, but she’d been caught red-handed on Summer Bakes.
Laurin wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but there was a huge difference between scuffing up the corner of a mat and fooling around with the producer as he promised her a better ranking in the competition.
She was sabotaging her own team this time. If Laurin was later told this was a hustle and Candace was getting paid to throw off the odds on the most ridiculous bet in Vegas imaginable — which was an actual thing that he’d discovered in researching the show — he wouldn’t be surprised.
“What’s your plan?” Laurin finally asked after they got the call to meet their golf cart out front.
She grabbed the fair isle-print pashmina scarf she’d been wearing during the first filmed segment and wrapped it loosely around her neck, using the full-length mirror set up next to the door for them to get it just right, even though the wind was going to blow it around anyway.
“Decorate a tree that doesn’t suck?” she suggested with a quirk of her pale, perfectly shaped brow.
“Not that. Are you going to let me do my thing in peace, or are you going to mess this up on me?” Despite the warm weather, he had to wrap on a scarf, too — required wear.
They’d been told attire appropriate for Christmas dinner plus one winter accessory.
His scarf was red and white with a fair isle pattern, as well, but his mother had actually knitted it for him years before.
He doubted Candace had any history with hers.
She flung the door open and stormed out of the cabin while Laurin caved and adjusted his scarf in the mirror as well.
“It doesn’t matter what I say,” she said to the wilderness ahead of them as Laurin’s longer stride ate up the distance between them.
“Let’s just get through this. There are only five cabins.
I figure we’ll be on singles rounds soon enough. ”
Hopefully she was right, and what a blessing that would be.
He could hole up in his room then and hardly ever cross paths with her.
Her tone infuriated him, though, so much that he couldn’t think of that boon.
“Is it just me, or do you hate all men?” he asked as he plopped down next to her in the back of the golf cart.
It was cramped quarters there, enough so that on the last ride, he’d stretched his leg up the narrow ledge running up past the front seat.
Now he deliberately turned his knee into Candace’s space to check her reaction.
Incredibly, she twisted her own legs to the side and crossed them at the ankle to give him space she didn’t owe him.
“Point of fact, I hate most people. You’re not special.
” She stated tartly, staring away from him, her delicate profile illuminated by the angled sun as she turned her nose up at him.
He shook his head to clear away any thoughts of appreciating that profile and thought about how he’d decorate the tree, whether he should go with classic red and gold or flock it heavily to do a more modern white and black.
If there was a push for non-traditional decorations, he could do an ocean theme with shells and seafoam green ribbons.
It all depended on what they were about to be told.
They were led back to their gaffer’s tape lines and waited while a teleprompter got set up for the hosts and cameras were blocked strategically to keep other cameras and unseasonably warm Georgia autumn out of frame.
“Sorry ‘bout earlier!” Stephanie said. Her cheeks were flushed, her hands shaking with nerves, but she smiled brightly. She may have had the Karen haircut and was probably a nightmare at PTA meetings, but she was sweet, lost, and nervous now. With notoriously clumsy Debbie as a partner, she had every right to be nervous. “My hearing’s terrible. I had no idea they were even shooting! Sorry.”
He waved her apologies away. “Not your fault. I’m surprised everyone else heard it. Even I barely caught it, and I’m a head taller than most of you.”
He winked at her, and she lit up, nerves all but forgotten. “You’re so sweet! I’m Stephanie, by the way. I guess you know that already, but we haven’t been properly introduced.”
He stuck his hand out, and she shook it. “Laurin. Wonderful to meet you.”
“Say your name again?”
If Candace had asked that, he probably would have been irritated, but Stephanie was so enamored he didn’t mind.
“Oh, it’s so much nicer how you say it!” she cooed, repeating it properly.
Any further small talk was cut off by the overhead loudspeaker.
“Quiet on the set!” Mike called out. “We’re going live in thirty . . . wait, forty-five seconds!”
Everyone adjusted themselves quickly and went still during the countdown, then leaned toward each other to silently fake chatting, as they’d been instructed to do, while the hosts welcomed back future viewers.
“Contestants!” Jannie barked, the cue for them to snap to attention.
Kate walked down the row, handing each team a red envelope.
“The judges have asked that you include three things on your trees. You must have lights, you must have no fewer than two dozen edible ornaments, and you must have a handmade tree topper. You’ve all visited your cabins, so you now know that we’ve supplied you with a tree and basic supplies.
Open your envelopes now, and I hope you paid attention to what we gave you, because you won’t be able to go back to the cabins before we take you on a trip to get the rest of your supplies at . . .”
Laurin watched closely as Candace opened the envelope and pulled from it a generic holiday card. She flipped it open to reveal a fifty-dollar gift card.
“. . . Walmart!”
Belle shrieked and pitched the card onto the floor. Laurin knew the scream well — it was the same as his mother’s when the rare, unfortunate cockroach skittered by — and instinctively rushed forward to take care of whatever critter had made its way into the envelope.
The envelope was empty of anything but the gift card.
Belle huffed and rolled her eyes up to the spotlights. “I wouldn’t be caught dead in a Walmart.”
“Cut!”
“Do you need glitter?” Candace asked as she jogged to keep up with Laurin.
She was not about to swallow her attitude to ask him to slow down.
The sound guy would surely pick that up.
Thankfully, there wouldn’t be any unmanned cameras in the cabins; they’d been warned there would be behind-the-scenes visits, the camera crew showing up occasionally at the cabins to get tape, but they’d still have their privacy in their downtime for the most part.
Laurin snagged a cart and entered the Jasper Walmart, scanning the hanging signs to get his bearings. “We should hit the Christmas supplies first. It’ll be easier to match the pre-made stuff.”
“Right, but you have to get glitter first if you need it.”
He gestured to the back of the store. “It’s over in crafts. We’ll do a loop after Christmas.”
Candace grabbed the cart and tried to push it in that direction, but Laurin wouldn’t budge. “Glitter Greg will get it all if we don’t beat him there.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her but switched courses to crafts. “Glitter Greg?”
“Yeah. He’ll buy up all the glitter and all the glue and coat everything he can in it. It’s his thing. There was plenty of glue in the cabin, so I’m not worried about that, but—”
“You saw the glue?”
It was Candace’s turn to waggle an eyebrow, but she wasn’t about to tell him she had a photographic memory. They wouldn’t be teammates forever, and there might come a time when that gave her an advantage.
“I can make some candy canes,” Laurin offered as he looked at the limited selection of glitter.
Candace cursed herself for not claiming the confection part of the challenge already.
She wasn’t all that crafty, but she figured she could bake up some windowpane cookies for ornaments.
If Laurin could make candy canes, the cookies felt lame by comparison.
That put her in charge of the topper, and she had no idea what she could do for that.
She glanced around for some inspiration in time to see a lady walk by with an angel in her cart. The thing was tacky, dressed in a fuchsia gown and adorned with dove plumage for wings. It advertised animatronic motion and real lights, but it gave her an idea.
She did know exactly one other craft.
She needed some time to pull it all together, though, so she told Laurin to go on to the Christmas department without her to make sure they got decent lights. He frowned but nodded, taking the empty cart with him, completely forgetting the glitter they’d come this way for.
She snagged a clearance Barbie before deciding she could shape a doll out of foam for half the price.
Tight budgeting was something she excelled at.
She then waited thirteen agonizing minutes for an employee at the fabric counter but leveled her irritation on the girl by asking for six-inch strips of the fabrics she’d chosen.
No one wanted to cut that.
She snagged some white-flocked branches from the floral aisle and headed to the Christmas department, satisfied that she’d get an impressive angel out of the ten dollars in goods.
She wasn’t dumb enough to make friends with Laurin, not when he’d eventually be her competition, certainly not when it was becoming obvious that the pairing was deliberate to create a heroes versus villains vibe — seriously, no one was as helpful and affable as him in real life — but she wasn’t going to throw the game over her casted villainy.
Her theory was strengthened when she found Laurin at a display of wired ribbon, grabbing a box from the top shelf for a girl who couldn’t reach.
The hijab the girl wore made it obvious, even from behind, that it was Zara.
He was laughing with her about something, and although he nodded in acknowledgment to Candace, he waited until Zara had fussed way too long over the ribbon before putting the box back and returning to the cart.
“What were you talking to her about?” Candace asked as they moved down the next aisle.
Laurin picked up a couple of boxes of metallic tinsel. “I asked her about her job. She hosts a YouTube channel.”
Candace made a face. She may have been little more than a professional reality show contestant these days, and yeah, she’d gotten her lucky break on Instagram, but she’d leveraged that into a real career. She was absolutely not a social influencer. “A baking channel? Those are so gimmicky.”
“She called it a ‘lifestyle channel.’ She started it for other Muslim-American girls, but now it’s so popular Food2Love is looking at purchasing the rights to it. How much is all that stuff?”
She looked down at the load in her arms as she warded off any feelings of inadequacy.
She’d been with the network for years, and she wasn’t getting her own show.
The execs knew how dire her situation was, but here she was feeling lucky to even have a spot in their Christmas competition.
Meanwhile, Zara was about to get a spot her first time in?
She was chummy enough with Laurin he’d probably be the first guest, too.
Candace set everything down in the cart, noting that he’d already gotten sugar, red dye, and peppermint extract for the canes.
“A little under ten. What are the oranges for?” If he was thinking of using them to flavor the canes, there was going to be a problem. He’d never get hard candy out of that.
“Oh, I ran into Harper — Belle’s partner?
— in grocery. Helped her find agave syrup.
She said they were doing two edible decorations, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to add some candied orange slices to the tree.
Plus, that’s a nice pop of color to add to .
. . oh.” He frowned as he took a second look at Candace’s fabrics. “You got blue.”
“I thought she’d look nice in blue,” Candace said defensively.
“Err, right. It just won’t match candy canes.”
“How much do you think that will matter?” She pointed to the row of display trees. They were a variety of heights and the trees themselves were different colors, but the decorations were mostly hodgepodge taken from the shelves. “It won’t look any worse than those.”
“Sure, but those are—”
He was cut off by the loudspeaker announcing that Mike Richards needed to return to the pharmacy. That was their warning that they had five minutes left in the store.
No time to worry about matching colors now.