11. Magnolia #2
That sound fills the kitchen. Metal on metal on cream. A steady, percussive rhythm like a war drum made of sugar and cocoa butter.
I turn to the oven.
Two hours and forty-one minutes left.
The cake pans go in.
The timer screams.
I grasp the oven mitts. They're industrial grade, rated for six hundred degrees, and they barely fit my hands. The first pan comes out clean. Nine inches of golden sponge, risen perfectly despite the warped oven rack and the fact that three of the four heating elements are charred beyond repair.
The second pan sticks.
I yank. The pan shifts but doesn't release. The lip of the hot metal bites into the heel of my palm through the mitt. A line of pain sears across my thumb.
"Stuck?"
"I've got it."
I don't have it. The pan weighs twelve pounds and the residual heat from the damaged oven is pumping out at what has to be four hundred degrees. My arms shake. Sweat rolls down my temple and drops onto the oven door, where it sizzles and vanishes.
Dash reaches over my shoulder. His bare hand grabs the far pan.
"That's five hundred degrees of metal."
"Orc skin." He pulls. The pan slides free. He sets it on the cooling rack and examines his palm. A faint white mark. Not even a blister. "Proceed."
Six pans. We rotate through two functional ovens, staggering the bake times by seven minutes each.
I'm doing math in my head that would make my culinary school professors weep.
Each layer needs to cool for at least twenty minutes before I can level it, and we don't have twenty minutes, so I'm flipping pans onto wire racks and fanning them with sheet trays while Dash extracts the next round from the ovens with his bare hands like some kind of green, heavily muscled cooling rack.
Third batch. The oven groans. Something structural shifts inside it and the door drops three inches on its hinge.
"Hold that door," I bark.
He catches the oven door with one hand and braces it level while I slide both pans onto the center rack. His forearm blocks the heat exhaust. The hair on his arm singes to nothing. He doesn't flinch.
I set the timer. Wipe my face with my shoulder. Leave a streak of flour across my jaw.
"Leveling."
My serrated knife cuts through the first cooled layer. The dome comes off in a clean disc. Golden. Even crumb. No tunneling. I could cry.
I don't cry. I level the second layer.
Dash's gaze tracks the blade like he's studying swordsmanship. And maybe to him, he is.
"Rotation board." I snap my fingers.
He slides the heavy marble turntable across the counter. I set the first layer down, dead center, and reach for the vanilla buttercream.
This is the part that matters. Naked cakes don't hide behind fondant or thick coats of frosting.
Every flaw shows. Every uneven layer, every air pocket, every smear of buttercream that goes on too thick or too thin.
A naked cake is honest. Which is either its beauty or its cruelty, depending on the baker.
I spread buttercream with my offset spatula. Quarter inch. No more. The cream goes on warm and silky, filling the microscopic craters in the sponge.
"Second layer."
Dash lifts it with both hands and sets it down so gently the buttercream beneath doesn't even dimple. His fingers pull back slow. Surgeon's precision from hands that crushed a brass rod forty-eight hours ago.
Third layer. Chocolate buttercream this time. The dark and light alternate. The visual contrast will carry the rustic aesthetic without any decoration.
Fourth layer. Vanilla. His hands lower it. My spatula follows immediately behind, catching the edges, smoothing the overflow.
We don't speak.
We don't need to.
He reads my movements the way he reads a battlefield.
Anticipates. When I reach for the next bowl, it's already sliding toward me.
When I need a layer lifted, his hands are underneath it before I turn my head.
We build the cake in a rhythm that has no business existing between a pastry chef and a mercenary who met two days ago in a bar fight.
Fifth layer. Sixth. The cake climbs. A towering, gorgeous stack of alternating gold and chocolate, the thin smears of buttercream visible between each tier, the raw edges of sponge exposed and golden and perfect.
I step back.
My hands tremble. Adrenaline, heat exhaustion, the fact that I haven't eaten since yesterday. But the cake stands. Six layers. Fourteen inches tall. Rustic and elegant and completely, impossibly beautiful.
"Berries," I breathe. "I need the fresh berries for the top cascade. They should be in the walk-in cooler."
Dash wipes his forearm across his face. Flour streaks through the sweat, white against green, and chocolate buttercream smears across his collarbone where he leaned too close during the fourth layer.
His eyes drop to me. I'm no better. Frosting on my neck.
Flour in my hair. Sweat plastering my vintage dress to my spine.
He grabs my wrist. His grip is firm and warm and coated in powdered sugar. He walks me backward across the kitchen, past the ruined mixers, past the broadsword propped against the wall, past the pile of chocolate shrapnel, straight to the walk-in cooler door.
He pulls the handle.
Cold air hits my flushed skin like a wall of ice. Goosebumps erupt down my arms, my front, the backs of my knees. The cooler is dim, lit by a single blue bulb. Shelves of produce and dairy and, yes, three perfect flats of fresh raspberries and blackberries gleaming like jewels on the middle rack.
Dash steps in behind me.
The heavy door swings shut.