5
When he walked into the bakery at noon Saturday, it smelled like butter cream and roses, which struck Reno as the most accurate possible reason for naming this place Buns ’N’ Roses.
The kitchen was set as a staging area for packing up everything that needed to be driven around the lake to the McAllister wedding, which was being held at the Valhalla Ski Resort’s very fancy hotel.
The five tiers of the wedding cake each sat on their own board for transport. Grace would assemble the cake on site, rather than try to drive the tall, tippy cake around and carry it into the venue without falling over.
The two largest layers already had thin wooden boards installed a bare millimeter above their frosted tops. The boards rested on dowels poked down through the layer of cake. Reno assumed these were necessary for the top tiers of the cake not to smush the bottom layers with their weight.
“Hey Grace,” he asked as she paused for a moment to study everything laid out on the cake table. “What do you call it when the top layers of a cake are too heavy and smush the bottom layers?”
She glanced up at him. “Technically, it’s called a structural failure. Lots of bakers call it a cake blowout, but that makes me think of a diaper disaster, so I usually go with something else, like catastrophic smushing.” She smiled at him, and he smiled back. She was so beautiful when her face lit up like that his brain couldn’t form words. He just stared, transfixed.
She turned to the flower table to inventory everything there. She handed him a clipboard and told him to read down through the list one item at a time.
“Guest table centerpieces: 35,” he read.
Grace counted the rows of low bowls filled with red roses and white baby’s breath, and responded, “I made 36 just in case. Check.”
“Head table flowers,” he read off.
She quickly inspected three low, oblong arrangements of red roses, white hydrangeas, sprigs of lavender and eucalyptus. “Check.”
“Those are stunning, by the way,” he interjected.
She looked up surprised. “Thanks! The lavender was a last minute addition to give them a more delicate texture. And I added eucalyptus to balance the scent of the flowers. All three smell divine together.”
Her enthusiasm was contagious, and he strode over to sniff one of the arrangements. “Whoa. That’s incredible.” The woody, slightly minty scent of the eucalyptus perfectly offset the sweetness of the roses and dusty warmth of the lavender. “I didn’t know florists think about how a bouquet smells when they make it. I thought you’d only concentrate on how it looks.”
She shrugged. “A good florist makes a pretty bouquet. A great one makes a pretty bouquet that smells great, too.”
“Fair enough.” He looked down at the clipboard. “Cake table bouquet?”
“Check.”
“Groomsmen’s boutonnieres?”
“Check.”
“Bridesmaid bouquets?”
Grace scowled as she counted out eight bouquets standing in upside down cardboard boxes, their ribbon wrapped handles poked down through the box tops. “Check.”
“Don’t you like those?” he queried, catching her frown.
“They’re lovely. I just had to make an emergency extra one this week, and I had a dickens of a time getting extra white gardenias for it. They’re not in season at this time of year and I had already special ordered just enough for seven bouquets. Mary had to drive all the way to Bozeman to pick up a half-dozen more white gardenias on short notice.”
“Brides. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em,” he commented dryly.
She laughed, and it sounded like silvery bells in a soft breeze. The sweet sound sent a thrill of delight down his spine that only stopped in the vicinity of his toes. How come he’d never heard her laugh like that before? Thinking back, he realized he’d heard her chuckle fairly often, but never a startled, full-blown burst of laughter. Clearly, he needed to make her do that again more often.
“Bridal bouquet?”
“Check.”
“Mothers’ corsages?”
“Check and check.”
