One Night Of Consequences Collection. Annie West
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District in San Francisco, and he’d been scoping out a new location for his local chain of coffee shops. He’d bought one of her peanut-butter-banana cupcakes, her experiment du jour. His reaction, like all of Zack’s reactions, hadn’t been overly demonstrative. But there had been a glint in his eye, a hint of that hard steel that lay just beneath the outer calm.
And he’d come back the next day, and the next. She’d never entertained, not for a moment, the idea that he’d been coming in to see her. It had been all about the cupcakes.
And then he’d offered her twice the money to come and work in his flagship shop, making the treats of her choice in his gorgeous, state-of-the-art kitchen. It had been the start of everything for her. At eighteen it had been a major break, and had allowed her to get out of her parents’ house, something she’d been desperate to do.
In the years since, it had been a whole lot more than that.
Roasted’s ten thousandth location had just opened, their first in Japan, and it was being hailed a massive success. Conceptualizing the treats for that shop had been a fun challenge, just like every new international location had been.
She and Zack hadn’t had a life since Roasted had really started to take off, nothing that went beyond coffee and confections, anyway. Of course, Zack was the backbone of the company, the man who got it done, the man who had seen it become a worldwide phenomenon.
They had drinks, coffee beans and mass-produced versions of her cupcakes and other goodies in all the major grocery chains in the U.S. Roasted was a household name. Because Zack was willing to sacrifice everything in his personal life to see it happen.
Hannah had been his only major concession to having a personal life, and that relationship had only started in the past year. And now Zack had lost her.
But he wasn’t devastated. Apparently. She was probably more devastated than he was. Again, cake related.
“I didn’t love her,” he said.
Clara blinked. “You didn’t … love her?”
“I cared about her. She was going to make a perfectly acceptable wife. But it wasn’t like I was passionately head over heels for her or anything.”
“Then why … why were you marrying her?”
“Because it was time for me to get married. I’m thirty. Roasted has achieved the level of success I was hoping for, and there comes a point where it’s the logical step. I reached that point, Hannah had, too.”
“Apparently she hadn’t.”
He gave her a hard glare. “Apparently.”
“Do you know why? Have you talked to her?”
“She can come and talk to me when she’s ready.”
Zack would have laughed at the expression on Clara’s face if he’d found anything remotely funny about the situation. The headlines would be unkind, and with so many media-hungry witnesses to the event, mostly on the absent bride’s side, there would be plenty of people salivating to get their name in print by offering their version of the wedding of the century that wasn’t.
Clara was too soft. Her brown eyes were all dewy looking, as though she were ready to cry on his behalf, her petite hands clasped in front of her, her shoulders slumped. She was more dressed up than he was used to seeing her. Her lush, and no he wasn’t blind so of course he’d noticed, curves complemented, though not really displayed, by a dress that could only be characterized as nice, if a bit matronly.
She did that, dressed much older than she needed to, her thick auburn hair always pulled back into a low bun. Because she had to have her hair up to bake, and it had become a habit. But sometimes he wished she’d just let her hair down. And, because he was a man, sometimes he wished she wouldn’t go to so much trouble to conceal her curves, either.
Although, in reality, her style of dress suited him. They worked together every day, and he had no business having an opinion on her physical appearance. His interest was purely for aesthetic purposes. Like opting for a room with a nice view.
That aside, Clara was all emotion and big hand gestures. There was nothing contained about her.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“I know. I believe you,” she said.
“No, you don’t. Or you don’t want to believe me because your more romantic sensibilities can’t handle the fact that my heart isn’t broken.”
“Well, you ought to love the person you’re going to marry, Zack.”
“Why? Give me a good reason why. So that I could be more broken up about today? So that I could be more suitably wounded if she had shown up, and we had said our vows, when ten years on the marriage fell on the wrong side of the divorce statistics? I don’t see the point in that.”
“Well, I don’t see the point at all.”
“And I didn’t ask.”
“You never do.”
“The secret to my success.” His tone came out a bit harsher than he intended and Clara’s expression reflected it. “You’ll survive this,” he said drily. “Breaking up is hard to do.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be. I’m not so breakable. Tell me, any big word on the Japan location go up online while I was busy getting my photo taken?”
“All good. Some of the pictures I’ve been seeing are showing that it’s absolutely slammed. And everything seems to be going over huge.”
“Good. That means the likelihood of expanding further there is good.” He sat down in one of the vacant, linen-covered chairs. They had pink bows. Also Hannah’s choice. He put his hands on the tabletop, moving his mind away from the fiasco of a wedding day and getting it back on business. “How are things going with our designer cupcakes?”
“Um … well, I was pretty busy getting the wedding cake together.” Clara felt like her head was spinning from the abrupt subject change.
Zack was in full business mode, sitting at the trussed up wedding-party table like it was the pared-down bamboo desk he had in his office at Roasted’s corporate headquarters.
“And?”
“I have a few ideas. But these are pretty labor-intensive recipes and they really aren’t practical for the retail line, or even for most of the stores.”
“Cupcakes are labor intensive?”
She shot him a deadly look. “Why don’t you try baking a simple batch and tell me how it goes?”
“No, thanks. I stick to my strengths, and none of them happen to involve baking.”
“Then trust me, they’re labor intensive.”
“That’s fine. My goal is to start doing a few boutique-style shops in some more affluent areas. We’ll have bigger kitchens so that we’ll have the capability to do more on-site baking.”
“That could work. We’ll have to have a more highly trained staff.”
“That’s fine. I’m talking about a few locations in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, that sort of thing. It will be more like the flagship store. A bit more personalized.”
“I really like the idea, not that you’d care if I didn’t.”
“I am the boss.”
“I know. I’m just the Vice President of Confections,” she said, bringing up a joke they’d started in the early days of the company.
A smile touched his lips again and her heart expanded. “A big job.”
“It is,” she said. “And you don’t pay me enough.”
“Yes,