CHAPTER ONE

      CLARA Davis looked at the uneaten cake, still as pristine and pink as the bride had demanded, sitting on its pedestal. A very precarious pedestal that had taken a whole lot of skill to balance and get set up. Not to mention have delivered to the coast-side hotel that sat twenty miles away from her San Francisco kitchen.

      Everything would have been perfect. The cake, the setting, the groom, well, he was beyond perfect, as usual. And everyone who had been invited had come.

      There had been one key person missing, though. The bride had decided to skip the event. And without her, it made it sort of tricky to continue.

      Clara eyed the cake and considered taking a slice for herself. She’d worked hard on it. No sense letting it go to waste.

      She sighed. The cake wouldn’t make the knot in her stomach go away. It wouldn’t ease any of the sadness she felt. Nothing had been able to shake that feeling, not since the groom, who was now officially jilted, had announced the engagement in the first place.

      Though, ironically, watching him get stood up at the altar hadn’t made her feel any better. But how could it? She didn’t like seeing Zack hurt. He was her business partner—more than that, he was her best friend. And also, yeah, the man who kept her awake some nights with the kinds of fantasies that did not bear rehashing in the light of day.

      But secret fantasies aside, she hadn’t really wanted the wedding to fall apart. Well, not this close to the actual ceremony. Or maybe she had wanted it. Maybe a small part of her had hoped this would be the outcome.

      Maybe that was why she’d agreed to bake the cake. To stand by and watch Zack bind himself to another woman for the rest of his life. There wasn’t really another sane reason for it.

      She blew out a breath and walked out of the kitchen and into the massive, empty reception hall. Her heart hit hard against her breastbone when she saw Zack Parsons, coffee mogul, business genius and abandoned groom, standing near the window, looking out at the beach, the sun casting an orange glow on his face and bleeding onto the pristine white of his tuxedo shirt.

      He looked different, for just a moment. Leaner. Harder than she was used to seeing him. His tie was draped over his shoulders, his jacket a black puddle by his feet. He was leaning against the window, bracing himself on his forearm.

      It shouldn’t really shock her that after being left at the altar he looked stronger in a strange way.

      “Hey,” she said, her voice sounding too loud. Stupid in the empty room.

      He turned, his gray eyes locking with hers, and she stopped breathing for a moment. He truly was the most beautiful man on the planet. Seven years of working with him on a daily basis should have taken some of the impact away. And some days she was able to ignore it, or at least sublimate it. But then there were other days when it hit her with the force of ten tons of bricks.

      Today was one of those days.

      “What kind of cake did I buy, Clara?” he asked, pushing off from the window and stuffing his hand into his pocket.

      She forced herself to breathe. “The bottom tier was vanilla, with raspberry filling, per Hannah’s instructions. And there was pink fondant. Which I hand-painted, by the way. But the vanilla cake in the middle was soaked in bourbon and honey. And not a single walnut on the whole cake. Because I know what you like.”

      “Good. Have someone wrap up the middle tier and send it to my house. And they can send Hannah her tier, too.”

      “You don’t have to do that. You can throw it out.”

      “It’s edible. Why would I throw it out?”

      “Uh … because it was your wedding cake. For a wedding that didn’t happen. For most people it might … take the sweet out of it.”

      He shrugged one shoulder. “Cake is cake.”

      She put her hand on her hip and affected a haughty expression, hoping to force a slight smile. “My cake is more than mere cake, but I get your point.”

      “We’ve made a fortune off your cakes, I’m aware of how spectacular they are.”

      “I know. But I can make a new cake. I can make a cake that says Condolences on Your Canceled Nuptials. We could put a man on top of it sitting in a recliner, watching sports on his flat-screen television, with no bride in sight.”

      The corner of his mouth lifted slightly and she felt a small bubbly sensation in her chest. As though a weight had just been removed.

      “That won’t be necessary.”

      “That could be a new thing we offer in the shops, Zack,” she said, knowing business was his favorite topic, aborted wedding or no. “Little cupcakes for sad occasions.”

      “I’m not all that sad.”

      “You aren’t?”

      “I’m not heartbroken, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

      Clara frowned. “But you got left at the altar. Public humiliation is … well, it’s never fun. I had something like that happen in high school when I got stood up by my date at a dance. People pointed and laughed. I was humiliated. It was all very Carrie. Without the pig’s blood or the mass murder.”

      “Not the highlight of my life, Clara, I’ll admit.” He swallowed. “Not the lowest point, either. I would have preferred for her to leave me before I was standing at the altar, with the preacher, in a tux, in front of nearly a thousand people, but I’m not exactly devastated.”

      “That’s … well, that’s good.” Except it was sort of scary to know that he could be abandoned just before taking his vows and respond to it with an eerie calm. She reacted more strongly to a recipe that didn’t pan out the way she wanted it to.

      But then, Zack was always the one with the zenlike composure. When they’d first met, over a cupcake of all things, she’d been impressed by that right away. That and his beautiful eyes, but that was a different story.

      She’d been working at a small bakery in the Mission 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