Chapter 16
Candace wasn’t disappointed. She was practical, and her days with Laurin were coming to an end.
On-set affairs happened all the time here.
From Jannie’s stories, it sounded like the crew was forever hooking up.
It was more toned down with the contestants, but anyone single and interested could easily find a new bed to sleep in.
Perfect Patty and Glitter Greg both had some reputation.
No one judged them for it — in fact, they were more liked for it, probably — and even the most promiscuous of contestants was just having fun.
The new environment, the short filming cycle, the adrenaline of the challenges? Of course sex happened.
That didn’t make Candace less annoyed, though, that she was the one with the bad rep.
She had never fooled around with anyone at the Bake-Off.
In the early days, the separation from her husband had still been new and in the potential reconciliation phase.
Looking back on it, she knew now she had never wanted to reconcile with a man who didn’t love anything about her except the money she didn’t have, but she’d been dumb and optimistic then.
Later, when things had gotten rough with the upcoming divorce, Candace had barely been able to get out of all his fallacious accusations.
Giving him additional ammo with an extramarital affair?
Allowing his mad-dog lawyer even a whiff of something like that? No way.
When the divorce had been finalized, she told herself she could sleep with whomever she wanted, except she couldn’t. She’d had two sexual partners her whole life: her high school boyfriend and her husband. She didn’t know how to have an affair, how to go from casual drinks to naked in bed.
So she wasn’t disappointed that she hadn’t driven Laurin to distraction.
No, she was mad at herself for being so bad at this that she hadn’t taken the opportunity when it was presented to her.
There was no way they were all staying at the cabins past the weekend; the contracts had stated December first as the max.
They’d be back the morning of Christmas Eve, but the producer had promised they’d be home in time to have Christmas dinner with their families.
She wouldn’t let the conversation bring her down.
Laurin insisted they get their cooking done together, setting himself up at the kitchen table when Candace protested that there wasn’t enough counter space.
He performed all those minor acts of chivalry — getting spices down from high shelves, carrying heavy pots, opening doors before Candace had the chance to shuffle her burdens around to free up her hand — but the way he absently did so and gave her confused looks when she thanked him too many times made her think he wasn’t doing anything to impress her. He was just doing it out of habit.
He asked her questions, too, wanting to know about everything she was making. “It’s just a soup,” she laughed.
“Okay, but how much time did we waste trying to find shallots? You nearly had a meltdown when I suggested we get onions instead.”
“They don’t taste the same!” Candace yelped, only afterward realizing how crazy that sounded.
Laurin only chuckled, though. “Exactly. Most people would find it a reasonable substitute. I’m curious what makes this soup so amazing that it’s not okay to use onions.”
Candace conceded the point and rattled off the list of ingredients, except that by the third item, she was going into the preparation as well. She rattled on for what felt like an hour before she caught herself and apologized.
“Sorry for what?”
Her cheeks warmed up. “Rambling on like that.”
“Don’t apologize for being passionate. I wish you talked more passionately on the show.
Every time you get excited about something, you cut yourself off like that.
I always wondered if they were editing it out to fit your persona, but then at Summer Bakes, Jannie asked you what you were making, and you went off on this whole origin tale of your traditional Belgian cake.
The whole time I thought, gosh, I wish she explained everything like that. ”
Candace frowned. “Right. And the way I let men reach up my skirt, a nice bonus.”
“I won’t have you deciding why I’m interested in you.”
The bite in his tone had Candace looking up at him.
He had gone still in the middle of rolling croissants.
He had the pin in his hand, and he was bent over the table, but he was looking back at her.
There was enough anger in his expression that Candace pushed herself away from him, skittering off to the fridge to retrieve the sour cream.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled into the fridge.
He started rolling again, working the laminated pastry into a fine sheet quickly and folding it into a tidy, clean-edged rectangle.
“I don’t like how much you apologize, either.
They wouldn’t keep inviting you back if you weren’t really good at what you do, and you know that.
You also know what Lucas did to you wasn’t your fault. ”
“I never said it was,” Candace countered, but that tasted an awful lot like a lie. Lucas himself had pointed out all the things she’d done to show she was interested in him, hadn’t he? Wasn’t that his defense, that she had wanted it and was only upset because they’d gotten caught?
Laurin reached her in two strides, and she instinctively recoiled, only to realize he had the croissant dough in his hand and she was blocking his path to the fridge. He wasn’t stepping up to her; he was doing his job.
He sighed, his chest rising and then sinking roughly. “Did he hit you, too? Is that why you’re flinching now?”
Candace shook her head. How had something that should have felt nice, a man taking an interest in her without pushing himself on her, turned so awful? “No, of course not. I get that you think I’m weak for not reporting what—”
“Stop deciding what I am!” Laurin barked out. She got the impression that he might punch something more than the air with his words, but he tempered it to a slamming of the fridge door.
“Whatever you think, then. I’m just trying to say if that happened, if that ass had raised a hand to me like that, I wouldn’t have needed to report it. They would have heard his screaming when I stabbed him in the eye.”
A smile teased at the corner of Laurin’s mouth, but he wasn’t pacified.
He braced himself on the edge of the counter, letting his head hang as he took heavy breaths.
“You’re going to yell about this because I’m not going to say it right, so please take this at its face value.
Why does it make any difference where his hand was?
If it was on your cheek or on your leg, why does it matter? ”
“It just does. We should be working.”
“We’re taking a break. I don’t accept that answer.”
Candace wanted to fight back, point out that the way he dominated her time like this was no different from a man who dominated her body with his hands. But she needed to settle this for them to move on. Quick conversation, brief answers that didn’t hold back, and she’d be back to her soup.
She crossed her arms, keeping herself compact and held together.
“Fine. It’s different because I say it is.
It’s different because I was taught that physical violence should not be condoned but sexual harassment has some .
. . flexibility, and I’m a product of what I’ve been taught.
” She frowned as the words poured out in one direction but her mind went another.
“I guess it doesn’t make any sense, but you spank a child and it’s .
. . not okay, but not terrible, but you mustn’t hit a woman.
And you mustn’t touch a child, but a woman?
Maybe not the worst thing you can do. I don’t know, you live in the same world I do. I shouldn’t have to explain this.”
“I don’t think it’s okay to hit anyone.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve never had to spank your daughter.”
“Vivvy? Never.”
Candace wiggled her lips out of a scowl to say, “Well, there you go. We already knew I was kind of terrible. I always have been. It’s amazing my parents kept me as long as they did.”
That was enough to get Laurin upright and looking at her. “I thought you said it was your ex they had a problem with, not you.”
Candace chuckled dryly. She couldn’t remember a time her family didn’t have a problem with her.
“That was just the last straw. They had me ruled mentally incompetent, you know. I always struggled in school. Math, I was a whiz at, but if it wasn’t numbers, I was a disaster.
I’m not saying I agreed with the ruling at all, but it wasn’t difficult when they had enough evidence, and I wasn’t fighting.
I didn’t think I needed the money I knew I was losing.
They didn’t cut me off then, either, just .
. . quietly pushed me aside. Then my husband came along, and it was the perfect time for them to disown me entirely. ”
Laurin paced through his thoughts. “So even after you ditched the ex, you never reconnected with them? Do they know?”
Candace nodded. “My aunt knows. She would have passed it along. And they were right to disown me in the end.”
“They weren’t right.”
“They were!” She couldn’t hold back a bubble of agitated laughter.
“Things might have changed between us when I got older, who knows, but I ruined it. My father told me not to marry him. He said my fiancé was a bad man, and he knew better than me. My fiancé was a bad man. My father, my whole family, was right.”
Laurin fumbled on a step, looking like he was about to fall, but then he swung back and pulled Candace into his arms. “No. Family sticks together. They help you through it. They don’t abandon you. They might have to do some tough love, but they’re there for you.”