Chapter 13 #2
Candace huffed from beneath the hood and flopped down next to him on the sofa. She cracked open her book and didn’t say anything for a while, although she occasionally looked up and took a sharp breath as though she was going to speak.
After a dozen false starts, Laurin sat back and looked at her. Only her petite, upturned nose was visible under all the fluff. “Stop thinking about saying it, and say it.”
“Go back to your puzzle.”
He shook his head but did as she requested, fishing an edge piece out of the box. He was thoroughly surprised when she said, “I don’t know if I ever said it properly or not, but thank you.”
“For last night?”
“What about last night?” she squawked, then hissed, “Puzzle!” when he turned to look at her.
He grinned, understanding at least a small part of her. She wasn’t comfortable with piety when she was being watched.
“Yesterday. The cake,” she clarified. “Thank you for saving me . . . even though I don’t know why you would, considering how awful I am.”
“You’re not awful. You’re hurt. I get that you’re scared to open up, that you’ve been mistreated by the people you cared about, by your ex-husband and your family and Lucas.”
“I wish I’d never met that disgusting—”
She clammed up the second she noticed her outburst had drawn Laurin’s attention to her.
He went right back to the puzzle. “If I promise to keep my eyes right here, will you tell me what happened? I know you don’t want to talk about it, but I think you need to.”
She was silent for about a minute, holding her book so tightly it started to shake. Laurin stuck to his promise about not looking at her while he reached out to the book and eased it down to her lap.
She breathed out a heavy sigh. “Lucas started directing the show two years ago. I was already separated from my husband then, and he asked me out to dinner one night. I didn’t get it .
. . I’d been with my husband since college, and I never did anything without him.
I guess I should have noticed that he was, umm, controlling me — gaslighting me, I guess — but I just didn’t think about it.
At first, I’d say, ‘Oh, I’m going out with Adam,’ and he’d say, ‘I’m not doing anything, mind if I tag along?
’ and then one day I stopped trying to say I, and it was just we.
I never thought about how he didn’t actually let me do anything by myself, so .
. . so I was so used to doing a lot of platonic things, you know, that when we split, I didn’t think of those things as being dates.
“Lucas and I had a nice dinner, nothing special, and the stuff he asked me, I figured it was him getting to know his veteran contestants. Purely professional. It . . . it wasn’t.”
Laurin had to fight his instinct to look at her, to read her face, but his back went stiff, and his eyes wouldn’t focus on the puzzle. “Did he force you to—?”
“No!” Candace said quickly, but it was a knee-jerk reaction, and her clarification illuminated the lie in her truth.
“Not then. He tried to kiss me, and I said no. I told him I was separated but still married, and with our relationship, mine and Lucas’s, our professional one, anything between us was impossible anyway. ”
“It didn’t stay like that, though, did it?”
“I shouldn’t have been so polite about it or made excuses or . . . or . . .”
“Don’t you dare blame yourself,” Laurin growled, hating where he knew this was going.
“Right, but . . . if I had just said no, I’m not interested .
. . Summer Bakes was going to be his last Bake-Off.
The network was putting him on another show.
And my divorce had just been finalized. I thought he was seeing Kate — he was seeing Kate — and I didn’t want to jeopardize my chance of winning that season by upsetting him.
I was doing really well, and it was nice to have a distraction from everything at home.
I turned him down for dinner a few times, pretending like I’d made plans with others, because I had this gut feeling, you know?
But he was with Kate, so I thought I was seeing things that weren’t there. I’m so dumb. I—”
“You’re not dumb, Candace.”
“I am. If I’d been firm with it, told him right then and there that I wasn’t interested, he wouldn’t have cornered me in the pantry.
He wouldn’t have given me that whole speech about how it was fate that everything timed up so perfectly and we were meant for each other, how if I gave him what he wanted, he would get me the prize and . . . and . . .”
She leaned forward, rapidly digging through the puzzle pieces. Laurin wasn’t going to push her to say anything else.
“And he put his hand up my skirt.”
Laurin jolted up to his feet, needing to do something but not having a better option than to pace.
After giving her words enough time to sink in, to make sure he was going to react appropriately, he exploded.
“Why would they air that? Why would they make it look like you were fooling around with him?”
“I didn’t tell anyone what really happened.”
“Dammit, Candace!”
She squeaked out a harsh sob.
He bolted back to her and pulled her into his arms roughly, needing to hold her, contain her, show her that he was here for her however he could and his anger wasn’t at her but for her.
She struggled free, pushing him hard enough he was worried she’d hurt herself if he kept his grip on her. “Don’t touch me!” she screeched.
“God, I’m sorry,” Laurin gasped, realizing how that must have looked after such a confession. “I wasn’t trying to—”
She snapped back to the puzzle. “I didn’t think you were. But I can’t . . . don’t touch me right now or I’ll break.”
He scrubbed at his face, clearing away the residual feeling of holding her, of how right it felt to keep her pieces together when she was shattering.
It was hard to accept that she preferred gravity to hold her together.
He’d had enough of his own cake disasters in his bakery to know that distance didn’t keep leaning cakes upright. They had to be repaired and supported.
He'd let her have that distance for now, but the more she spoke, the more she showed him who she was, the more he prepared himself to be the one to put her back together.
“I get it,” he said, even though he knew she was wrong. “But why the hell didn’t you say something?”
“Do you know how difficult it is to prove something like that? How slim the chances are that it would have worked out for me? Everyone calling me . . . what they call me, do you think they would have believed me? And what the network showed, that was all the footage, nothing leading up to it. Even if they believed me, I would have been a liability at that point. They would have settled, and I would never have been invited back. Yeah, I would have gotten money, but it wouldn’t have been enough.
I’d just lost the bakery. I needed this if I was ever going to rebuild.
And . . . it would have gotten out. People would know why I was no longer on the show.
And you know Lucas is such a nice guy. With the short skirts I wear, I was practically begging for it,” she said bitterly.
As awful as it was, Laurin knew Candace was right about how difficult it would have been for her to prove that she’d been harassed.
It was a disgusting truth about the world that Laurin loathed.
It wasn’t fair that this could happen to her, and the only way she could make the money to get her life back was to hide it, but he knew she had at least one option. “Oh, but your family—”
The squeak of the front door silenced him. He was confused for a second, only to remember why they were here when it was too late. “Goddammit, not now!” he bellowed as the lens of the camera appeared around the corner.
“Just getting some dailies,” the cameraman said. “Keep going and pretend I’m not—”
“I said not now! Candace doesn’t need—!”
But it was too late. Candace had already dashed to her room.