AllFreeNovel
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Over the past three days, I’ve come to crave Fallon’s touch. How he puts his hand on my hip when he’s walking by, or the way he slings his arm over the back of every seat I’m in. For someone who’s never craved contact with anyone, enjoying his touch is…unexpected.
It’s distracting me from my ultimate goal of coming home with a hundred grand and a trophy, but I can’t quite bring myself to care.
Then the host and judges walk up, the cameras start rolling, and my nerves explode.
Especially when Carrie says we’re doing pastry.
Now, I’m good at pastry, but it’s finicky and it can be hard to get right. So when the judges tell us we have to make thirty-six perfect, flaky croissants, twenty-four of which need to be filled with two separate flavorings of our choice, my palms start to sweat.
Gus, who’s standing off-camera, meets my gaze and gives me a hidden thumbs-up. He tasted my croissants at Four Cups and was impressed—but doing the same in a competition setting is different.
Since croissants are a multi-step process, we’ll start them today, let them proof in the fridge overnight, then do the folding, shaping, final proof, and baking tomorrow—in front of a live audience.
My nerves are writhing snakes in my belly. Pain lances through my fingers as I squeeze my hands together, trying to get a grip on myself. I am not built for television. The camera lenses placed all around the room seem like big, black, looming eyes drilling into me, making my heart race so fast I might fall off my seat.
I don’t know if I can do this. What if I fail at the first hurdle? This is the first challenge that the TV audience will see—the rest of the bite-sized competition was only for online viewers, and there was no threat of elimination. What if I fall flat on my face when this is supposed to be my specialty?
What if my friends, parents, publisher, and budding fan audience all see how terribly I perform? What if I get knocked out in the first round?
Anything less than perfect just isn’t good enough.
But Fallon is a steady presence at my side, and the two of us use our allotted hour to put together the dough, the butter block that’s so important for the flakiness of the pastry, and one of the two fillings we’ve decided to use in our croissants. Fallon encourages me when I suggest a classic almond croissant, and dismisses my fears it’ll be too cliché.
“Classic is good, Jen. Trust your instincts. Hell, I trust your instincts better than my own.” His roguish grin melts my panties, which isn’t helping the whole distraction problem.
By the end of the hour, I look around at the elated faces of the other contestants and let Fallon sling an arm around my shoulders, tugging me into his massive chest.
“You did good, Jen,” he says in my ear. His thumb lifts up to brush flour off my cheek, the featherlight touch sending a spear of heat through my middle.
My arms hook around his waist, head tilting to look up at his gorgeous face. “So did you.” I glance up to his eyes, which crinkle at the corners, the laugh lines around his mouth growing deeper.
I don’t know if it’s the magic of being in this weird, intense competition environment, but I find myself thinking I could get used to that look on his face.
That evening, we have dinner with the rest of the contestants. Everyone is on edge. I sit beside Tom and David, two British bakers who met in pastry school. They seem confident, even surprised Fallon and I didn’t get both our fillings done. Across from me, a mother-and-son team from New York—Mary and Tony, who run a family bakery—are just as surprised we left our second filling until tomorrow.
“You’ll be cutting it close tomorrow,” Mary tells me.
“It’ll be fine,” Fallon says with complete confidence.
“We only got one done,” Hillary, the woman across from me, says. “If you’re behind schedule, then so are we.” She smiles at her husband, who gives her a chaste kiss. I find out they’re from a small town in Virginia and they own an at-home cake-decorating business.
Looking at all the contestants, my nerves start to build. Everyone is so competent. Some of them have been baking three times as long as I have. I only started less than a decade ago!
Before I can panic, Fallon puts his hand on my thigh and gives me a searching look. Then a commotion at the other end of the table draws me out of my own thoughts. I quickly discover that Carla is as sharp-tongued in English as I suspected she was in Spanish. Creative insults are being flung with ferocity as Emma doubles over laughing. Carla has the big Texans cowed within minutes.
Sonia and Nikki have delicate, tinkling laughs, and I find out they’ve been friends since they were three. They’re often confused for twins, even though they’re not related. When I comment that it’s probably because they dress like twins, they just laugh.
Tori and Hank, the cupcake couple from Idaho, are lovely. They have four kids—two girls, two boys—and met in pastry school thirty years ago.
To my absolute shock, after I get over the nerves, I realize I’m…enjoying myself. Fallon sits next to me, his leg warm against mine, arm slung across the back of my chair, and I end up laughing with a group of people I barely even know.
It’s completely unheard of.
By the time Fallon and I make it back to the guesthouse, I feel tired, yet happy. Fallon insists on taking the cot again, and when I wake up to him falling out of it, I just flick the covers back without even removing my eye mask. He hasn’t come back to bed with me since my first night, so for a few seconds, I hold my breath.
When I feel the bed dip beside me, my heart thumps a little bit harder.
When we return to the barn to finish the croissant challenge the next morning, all happiness and levity is gone from my mood. It’s time to compete. Time to show everyone that I can do this.
