Chapter 17 #2
He snagged some pillows and blankets from the den and brought them over to the foyer, where he threw them on the floor and motioned for Candace to take a seat.
He fiddled around with the remote and found the right channel.
They were currently at Harper and Mark’s, and they were just walking in, so Laurin plopped down next to Candace and passed a blanket across their shoulders.
Candace snuggled up against him, and for a few quiet minutes, they watched the video and held hands.
It was a perfect moment.
Candace’s jaw just about hit the floor when she saw the spread of food laid out in the pavilion, all stored in the best possible conditions with proper chafing dishes and heavy lids and even the domes that spun open so the breads wouldn’t become soggy in their pans.
Three turkeys. Two hams. Laurin’s roast. Potatoes five ways and three sweet potatoes.
A rainbow of veggies: tomatoes, carrots, squash, and broccoli, even some beets.
Candace had never cared for them, but Laurin insisted she try them, and darn him because he was right.
Harper could now brag about making the first beet dish — a cold salad with an array of crisp, bright vegetables tossed in a vinaigrette — that Candace had ever liked.
Candace ate everything. Too much. Ridiculously too much. She ate until she didn’t think she could move anymore. Laurin pushed half a Yorkshire pudding her way, and she ate that, too. She shuffled around in her seat, and Laurin asked if she was okay.
“Yeah, I’m just trying to figure out if I stretch myself out, will I be able to make more room?”
Laurin laughed loudly, and Candace shoved a third croissant in her mouth while he wiped a smudge of mashed potato off her cheek.
The usually deafening space quieted some, and she looked around to see if the judges had walked in. They were eating in a separate room, a trailer where all the cameras were set for optimal sound and video. No new people were joining them, though. No, everyone was staring at her and Laurin.
Harper leaned across the table and whispered, far too loudly, “Did you guys sleep together?”
“What? No!” Candace scooted her chair as far as she could from Laurin, colliding right into Belle, but the damage was done.
The glare Laurin shot Harper wasn’t even about the insinuation. No, Candace recognized male irritation over a wing man failing their job. Laurin had been playing this thing way too close to the edge all day, and it had caught up to them.
“We haven’t done anything of the sort,” Candace said firmly, “And we won’t be.
” She stared down at her plate, at the remnants of fat and scribbles of sauce, and suddenly felt very nauseous.
She wasn’t about to add to the ridiculous speculation — how had she fallen so easily for big, warm hands and an inviting smile again?
— so she speared a mustard sprout and brought it to her nose.
The smell triggered it. One second, her belly was just a little grouchy about its considerable workload; the next, it was demanding to have the evening off.
She stood as calmly as she could and made her way outside.
She heard someone following behind her, but she couldn’t run the person off, not when time was of the essence.
The moment she leaned down behind a tree, her stomach jumped at the opportunity to clock out.
An entire buffet rushed out of her, and the hand rubbing her back — the big, warm, familiar hand — wasn’t helping anything except her blush.
“I don’t normally throw up after I eat,” she said when she finally caught her breath.
“I should hope not,” Laurin said softly.
“Like, I can eat a really big meal and keep it down fine.”
“I’m sure.”
“I’m not some dumb dog that doesn’t know when to stop eating.”
“You don’t need to apologize to me.”
“I’m not apologizing. I’m just making it clear that I don’t normally drink alcohol, so that’s what happened the other day, and I’m not . . . bulimic or anything.”
“You’re just stressed. Here.” Laurin dug in his pocket and pulled out a little baggie of candy shards, extras from the centerpiece. “Figured they’d be handy as after-dinner mints. This works, too.”
Candace took the candy gratefully, swishing it around her mouth to clean things up as best as she could. Laurin took a napkin from his other pocket and brought it to her lip, but she took it from him before he could touch her. “No more of that. This thing between us, it ends now.”
“Candace, we are two single, consenting adults. I’m interested in you. I’m pretty sure you’re interested in me. Where is the harm in seeing where this goes?”
“The harm is that in another week, I’ll be back in New Jersey.
In a month, we might be fighting each other for that prize we both need.
If our paths cross again, it will only ever be as enemies.
” She finished cleaning her mouth and looked up at him.
He didn’t like hearing this, but there wasn’t any fire in his eyes, only resignation.
He knew she spoke the truth. “We’ll be friends.
We can support each other. But anything more than that .
. . will only make us hate each other in the end.
” She smiled and took his hand. “But we’ll win today together, okay? ”
The look he gave her was filled with doubt as well as a flash she’d already seen a few times when his competitive streak was rising to the surface, but he nodded. “We’ll win together.”
“You’ve all done a great job,” Roger announced to the line-up of remaining contestants, “but one team really stood apart from the rest.”
“Congratulations, Laurin and Candace!” Georgette cheered. “That was one of the nicest Christmas dinners I think I’ve ever had.”
Roger nodded in agreement. “Definitely the most creative centerpiece we’ve seen in a long time.”
Laurin wished they’d mentioned the beautiful table runner Candace had made. She needed someone to tell her she was amazing, someone who wasn’t him, who she wouldn’t think had ulterior motives. The way everyone ignored her incredible work and lauded his contribution would only work against him.
She kept her body language open and proud, beaming as though she was happy no matter how the victory was packaged. It was awful. Even when Jannie practically apologized for their prize — a phone call home, a place Candace didn’t have — she accepted it with the utmost of grace.
Candace wasn’t a gentle soul protected by a fragile, prickly shell.
She was a gentle soul protected by granite.
Oh, it took its scratches and showed its wear, but it wasn’t going to break.
That was a good thing. That meant Laurin just needed time to erode through it.
He didn’t have to worry about losing too much of his own blood.
Which was an especially good thing tonight.
Being away from his family weighed heavily on him.
If they hadn’t won, if he’d heard another team get awarded calls home, he might have been the one broken tonight.
As it was, only being able to see his family through the tablet the crew brought to the cabin was hard enough.
Manon, his sister, was in town from London. She promised to stay stateside until Laurin came home so they could have a real conversation, even when Laurin insisted she shouldn’t waste her money changing her plane ticket if he wasn’t back by Sunday.
“Even if I didn’t care if I saw you, I’d want to see you just to hear all about the show,” she said, always practical to a fault. “And I do want to see you. It’s only fifty dollars to change the ticket.”
“And work?”
“Vacation days. I’ve got some extra days I can use now . . . unless you don’t want me to stay.”
“No, please do. I’ve missed you. Is Vivvy driving you nuts?”
Manon laughed. “Of course not! She’s amazing, Laur. She’s lucky to have you. We both are. I’m gonna stay until you’re back. Maybe a little longer.”
“What about Vincenzo?” Laurin was sure that Manon’s fiancé wasn’t here or else he would have jumped on camera with Manon.
Manon just shrugged.
Laurin didn’t know what that meant, but the clock was running on his ten minutes. Mom got on screen then, and Laurin didn’t get a chance to say anything except, “English, maman. They’re gonna make me translate this if it’s in French.”
She was too excited to stop, though. Honestly, it was for the best. She mentioned Candace a lot, but it was clear only the first two episodes aired.
The words she had for Candace were not pleasant, and there wasn’t enough time to clear things up there.
Laurin was given the cue for three minutes remaining, and he gladly asked for Genevieve.
“Daddy, daddy! Did you save me all the cookies?” Vivvy asked before she even got in front of the camera.
“Vivvy, you don’t like old cookies,” Laurin reminded her. The moment her face popped up on his tablet, he felt better. No matter how unstable his life was, Genevieve was always his anchor. She was always there to remind him life was pretty good.
“You just baked them two days ago.” He could only see her face, but he could imagine her hand on her hip, mimicking her grandma. “Put bread in the bag.”
“Is that when you watched the episode? We baked those last week. Time goes different here. The next episode we watch together has already happened. I’ll be sitting next to you, and I’ll be on the screen, too.”
Vivvy’s eyes went wide, but she clinched back up in a flash. “Did you eat all the cookies?”
“I ate some of the cookies.”
“Did you eat Miss Candace’s cookies?”
He nodded. “They were very good.”
“Can you make them for me?”
He could. His wouldn’t be as good as Candace’s, but he could if she gave him the recipe.
That’s not what he wanted. He wanted Candace to bake them in his kitchen. If he could convince her to visit him, even just for a week, he thought he could prove her wrong about the impossibility here.
The week after Christmas, he thought. She’d already be down here for the finale. Would it be any inconvenience for her to stay a little longer?
“I’ll see what I can do,” he told her, and then she forgot everything about cookies and launched into a story about the field trip to the zoo they had last week.
The one-minute warning hurt a lot. “I gotta go, Vivvy. But I’ll see you soon, I promise. They’re . . .” His voice trailed off when he noticed the cameraman lurking in the corner of the kitchen flagging him with a hand sign, flashing an open hand twice. Ten minutes.
Laurin shook his head in confusion.
The cameraman mouthed the words, “Ten more minutes. Candace to you.”
It was cruel that they were limited at all, and it was cruel that he and Candace were the only ones allowed to talk to their families. Even if Candace didn’t have family to talk to, there must have been someone she missed, someone she wanted to see.
She was sacrificing for him right now.
“Make sure you thank her,” Mom said sternly when he told her about the extra time.
“I’m not a kid. You don’t need to remind me of that anymore.”
She did her trademark hand-fussing gesture. “You two are competitors. I’ve seen how rude she is with you. But that’s not an excuse to be ungrateful.”
“She’s not rude, maman. She’s hurt. And we’re okay now.”
Mom looked like she was about to ask him something, but Vivvy jumped back in to show him a picture she’d drawn and commandeered the next ten minutes.
It was good. There’d been so much pressure to say everything that needed to be said in the first ten minutes that he could relax now and give Vivvy the time she deserved.
When the video did come to an end, he felt confident that he could focus all his attention on getting through the next challenge and keeping Candace’s spirits up.
He continued to sit at the dinner table for a while, staring at the blank tablet, letting the cameraman get that sad footage they loved to play after these calls.
If he was the only one who could be broken by a call home, he had to give Mike and the rest of the higher-ups what they wanted.
After a suitable amount of time, he said, “You mind taking your dinner break now? I could use some privacy.”
The man put the camera down and nodded sympathetically. “I got two kids at home, myself. I miss them like crazy, but we work these crazy gigs for them, right?” He let himself out, and the corner of Laurin’s lip pulled up.
He wanted to thank Candace appropriately, and he’d just scored an hour to do it.