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Chapter27
HARPER
“Welcome to the secondCelebrity Bake or Bustchallenge, brought to you by Cupid Bakeries and LookyLoo,” Donna Diamond announced in her buttery southern accent.
Harper caught her husband’s eye as they waited backstage in the shadows alongside a set of pleated red velvet stage curtains, waiting for the hosts to invite them on stage.
“We’ve got this,” he said under his breath, looking cocky as hell as he tossed her a wink.
She bit her lip. Be still her beating heart.
Cocky Landon in a button-up with the sleeves rolled just enough to incite drooling over his sexy as hell forearms was a sight to see.
And yeah, the man was right. They totally had this challenge.
She held a tray of skillfully prepared cocoa-licious macarons with chocolate ganache filling.
Fancy-pants baking, for sure!
Thanks to her ability to refrain from gorging on hallucinogenic lollipops and Schuman’s capacity to remain conscious during their bake time, under the man’s watchful eye, she and Landon had baked their asses off.
In her not-so-humble opinion, they’d knocked this macaron challenge out of the confectionary park.
And if she thought that she and Landon were on fire in the kitchen, to her delight, Mr. Sweet brought his own brand of heat.
The baker had guided her as she whipped up the macaron batter and baked up the delicate cookies while Landon filmed for the livestream. They’d changed places, and Landon had stepped in to rock the filling. With Schuman by his side, he prepared the ganache like a chocolate cream-making machine. And heaven help her, her husband was a phenom with the filling. Who would have thought Landon Paige could bang out a masterpiece with a few cups of cream and some chopped-up dark chocolate? Now, thanks to the LookyLoo livestream, the world would see Landon wasn’t only a velvet-voiced crooner but a fancy cookie-making connoisseur.
When the cookies and filling were ready to be assembled into bite-sized masterpieces, Schuman had taken over filming as she and Landon sandwiched the dainty chocolate shells with the creamy filling, constructing French delicacy after French delicacy. They’d done a hell of a job preparing the best macarons ever made in the history of mankind—or baking-kind, if that was a thing, which it should be.
Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration.
But she’d had an inkling things were going well when Schuman’s handlebar mustache seemed to smile along with the man. When she’d pulled the tray of sinfully scrumptious smelling cookie shells from the oven with no cracks, no bumps, or tiny air bubbles rippling on the surface, she could feel the pride coming off the old baker in cocoa-scented waves as he nodded approvingly at the cookies’ toasty-brown coloring and smooth as silk finish. Mr. Sweet had been so impressed, he’d said he might consider hiring her to work for him if he wasn’t so worried she’d bulldoze through the bonbons and eat herself into a sugar coma on her first day, which was a legitimate concern. She couldn’t deny it. No bonbon was safe when she was nearby.
But it wasn’t only her quasi-homicidal penchant for devouring chocolate delights that kept her from taking the man up on his comical offer.
Besides baking for the contest, she didn’t have a moment to spare.
She and Landon had turned a corner in their double-dog dare of a marriage.
Had they talked specifics?
No.
But there had been a shift.
The night they’d made love after the first challenge had ushered in an age of bliss like she’d never known, which was scary but exhilarating. From an early age, she’d learned to keep her guard up and protect her heart. She’d made a mistake with Vance, but Landon wasn’t the scheming, conniving thief Vance Viberenski was. Landon was…
Her silly heart skipped a beat.
Landon was someone she believed in.
And he believed in her.
Was it love?
Neither had mentioned thefour-letterLword.
She shied away from it because she’d wasted it on Vance and she didn’t want to jinx the magic she and Landon had created over the past three weeks by giving it a label.
