Baking Lessons Read online

  Do not hug him. Do not hug him. It would not be welcomed. Do not hug him, even though he is the most adorable thing in the world, and he just proudly smiled at his ladybug cookie like he’s never made sugar cookies before, which meant he was a serious little boy who never got to put jelly-bean buttons and too much sparkling sugar on his Christmas snowman cookies, and now I want to hug him and bawl my eyes out, and I just need to stop.

  “Leah?”

  Blinking rapidly and damming the torrent of emotion that was about to break free and force her to hug him and feed him numerous sugary things, Leah met his gaze. “Yes?”

  “I asked how many of each kind do you want?”

  “Oh.” She finally got her brain off the hug-Hamilton track and back on the make-cookies-without-forcing-inappropriate-advances-on-your-landlord track. “Let’s do about a dozen, and two dozen of the circles. They can be suns and happy faces.”

  Dipping his chin in a slight nod, he turned back to his ladybug cookies. Leah started pulling her scraps away from the cookies and adding them to a ball that would become her second roll-out. Don’t ask him. Don’t ask. Don’t do it, Leah. She only lasted fifteen seconds before she gave in to temptation. “You’re good at this. Have you done this before?”

  “No.” He switched his ladybug for, after serious consideration, a puppy shape.

  The urge to hug him started to rise up in her again, and Leah beat it back, focusing on placing her cookies on the parchment-lined sheet pans. “Never? Not even as a kid?”

  His hand paused for a moment before he pushed the puppy cookie cutter into the dough. “No.”

  “Oh.” Do not hug him, or you will lose your baking helper and gain a lawsuit. In self-defense, Leah started babbling. “My grandma loved baking, but she hated cooking. Growing up, I was the only kid I knew whose family would have Chinese takeout for dinner with homemade cream puffs for dessert.” As she spoke, he stopped cutting cookies and watched her with such baffled curiosity that Leah started to feel like a zoo animal. “What?”

  “That just sounds...” He turned back to his dough and was silent for so long that Leah resigned herself to never hearing the end of his sentence. “Nice.”

  “What?”

  “That sounds nice.”

  “Oh.” She studied a butterfly cookie without seeing it as grief rose inside her, missing her grandma with painful intensity. “You know, it really was.”

  Once the cookies were out of the oven, Leah, with Hamilton’s help, put them in the freezer to hurry the cooling process. She eyed the flour-covered table, but another worry was more pressing than cleanup. “I’m going to check on poor Q. Saturday mornings are crazy, and he’s on his own today.” She moved toward the door to the front. “In fact, I haven’t heard much from up front. He might very possibly be dead.”

  Hamilton made a choking sound that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. It startled Leah so much—she’d never, ever heard her landlord laugh—that she stopped abruptly. He managed to not crash into her back, but it was a close thing, and his hands landed on her shoulders as if to steady her preemptively. The contact made her skin catch fire for just a moment before he yanked his hands away, as suddenly and violently as if he’d touched a pan right out of the oven. Hamilton even took a step back, putting distance between them.

  “Sorry,” she said, flushing when she realized she’d just stopped dead for no reason and then proceeded to stare at him like an idiot. “I just...thought of something. Which I can’t remember right now, because... Uh, I should check on Q.” Completely flustered, she forgot to hold the swinging door open for Hamilton, instead letting it fly back toward him. “Sorry!” She cringed as she turned to see him holding the door braced open, his poker face firmly in place and one eyebrow lifted in his I’m-not-sure-you’re-quite-right-in-the-head expression, a look she hadn’t seen from him all morning. She hadn’t missed it.

  Squeezing her eyes closed, she tried to gather her composure. Taking a deep breath and attempting to get it together so she didn’t embarrass herself any further—or at least didn’t do any physical damage to her very helpful helper—she opened her eyes and moved to join Q at the counter.

  She waited until he handed off a latte to a waiting teenager—who looked all of fourteen—before asking Q in a low voice, “How’s it going? And is it just my imagination, or is your fan club getting younger?”

  The place was full, with people crowding all four tables, but no one was waiting in line at the counter. Q turned toward her. “It’s fine, steady but not crazy—the bakery, I mean, not the fan club thing. That’s crazy, and a little creepy. Those are seventh-graders over there.” He discreetly tilted his head toward a huddle of girls by the door.

  “They look like such babies,” Leah agreed under her breath. “Should they even be drinking caffeine? Can we get in trouble for serving kids who are still growing?”

  Q gave a low laugh. “If it helps, most of them get hot chocolate.”

  After considering it for a moment, Leah wrinkled her nose. “It helps not stunt their growth, I guess, but knowing that makes their obsession with you even more wrong.”

  He matched her grimace. “Exactly.” His voice dropped even lower. “I’m thinking about coming out at school.”

  “Yeah?” Leah kept her voice equally low as she filled a cup with coffee, leaving several inches of room at the top. “Will that make things tough for you?”

  “Yes and no.” The bell over the door jangled as three more teenagers came in. Q turned back to the register, and Leah pulled half-and-half out of the mini-fridge. After pouring in a good dollop, she added a considerable amount of sugar. As she stirred it, she turned to find Hamilton watching her.

  “Is that how you take your coffee?”

  “No.” She handed him the cup. “It’s how you take your coffee, and you deserve a little refreshment after giving up your morning to help me. Take your pick from the pastries, too.” Grabbing her water bottle from beneath the counter, she took a drink and gave the girl at the counter a little wave. “Hey, Shauna. How’s your mom?”

  Shauna grinned, showing off her multicolored braces. “Crazy, as usual. She’s decided she’s going to make our bread. Like, bake it herself.”

  “That’s great! Tell her I’m here if she has any questions.”

  “Please.” Shauna waved her hand, making the assortment of bracelets on her wrist rattle as they bumped together. “It’s so not going to last. Remember when she decided she was going to make all those cupcakes for the track fund-raiser?”

  Leah pretended to scratch her nose so she could hide her smile. “You mean that time I stayed up all night making five hundred cupcakes at the last minute?”

  “Exactly. Thanks, Q.” She took her coffee. “She’ll be in here in a couple days buying all the bread.”

  Not able to hold it in any longer, Leah laughed.

  Leaning over the counter, Shauna flicked a glance over Leah’s shoulder and asked in a whisper, “Who’s the Thor look-alike eating all of your scones?”

  Thor? Even though she knew there was just one person behind her, Leah couldn’t help but glance behind her to see Hamilton holding a half-eaten scone. Although she knew he was too hot for her own good, she hadn’t compared him to Thor before. If he grew out his hair, though, she could see it. “That is my landlord, Mr. Hamilton.”

  As she said his name, Leah felt strangely formal. Now that he was working for her, basically her cookie bitch, she should call him Anthony. Her nose wrinkled slightly. That seemed so...not right. He was Hamilton in her mind.

  “Yum,” Shauna said quietly, interrupting Leah’s mental debate. “I wish our landlord looked like that and not like the bug-man in Men in Black.” With a smirk, she joined a group of her friends crowded around one of the tables.

  Leah laughed and stored her water bottle under the counter. “You’re good up here, then?”


  “I’ve got it. If you get a chance to make more, we’re running low on gluten-free brownies.”

  “Got it, and thank you, Q.” Heading for the door to the kitchen, Leah twisted around so she could give Q a tiny bow with her hands pressed together at her heart. “You’re a dream employee.”

  “Maybe I should get a raise, then. Put your cash where your mouth is.”

  She made a mock-apologetic face. “Dream employees are actually paid in fairy kisses and unicorn tears. I don’t know about this ‘cash’ you speak of.”

  Q laughed before giving Hamilton, who was hurrying to finish off yet another scone, a stern look. “You need to stick to your guns with Leah, or you’re going to be paid in challah braids and chocolate-chip cookies.”

  “Cupcakes,” Hamilton corrected with a straight face.

  “No!” Melodramatically, Q pressed his fists to his head, making the young girls by the door dissolve into giggles. “You’ve fallen for her evil scheme!”

  “Okay, Q. Quit trying to unionize.” Leah hooked Hamilton’s elbow with her hand, pulling him along behind her as she hurried for the kitchen door. She knew Q was only teasing, but she didn’t want to give Hamilton any ideas. The bakery was starting to show a profit, but she had plans for that money, plans that involved a sheeter and possibly a new mixer. They didn’t involve putting more money in her wealthy landlord’s pockets when she could just pay him in cupcakes instead. “Yell if you need help. I’m taking my very well-paid temporary employee back to decorate cookies. Time’s a-ticking.”

  “Cash, man,” Q called after them as Leah hauled Hamilton through the swinging door into the kitchen. “Just say no to sugar payments!”

  “Sorry.” Leah realized she was still clutching Hamilton’s arm—his very, very strong arm—and released him. “That wasn’t really a relaxing break for you.”

  “It was fine.” He finished his coffee by tipping back his head and draining the cup. Leah’s attention was caught by the strong lines of his neck and jaw, and the way the vulnerable spot right above his breastbone was revealed by the movement. He tossed the cup into the trash as he headed for the hand-wash sink, breaking her trance. Leah tried to shake off her distraction. If she was going to finish those cookies by eleven that morning, she needed to stop lusting after her temporary kitchen elf, no matter how fascinating he was.

  “Good.” She dragged her brain back onto the tracks and followed him to the sink. After he’d washed his hands for about a dozen hours, she took her turn. It was a bit disconcerting to wash her hands with Hamilton’s gaze on her. She felt as if he was judging her technique and washing time, picking apart the way she used the nail brush and the amount of soap. By the time she rinsed her hands and grabbed a paper towel, she was thoroughly rattled.

  Stop it. Focus. She didn’t know what was wrong with her. Normally, baking was what soothed her. It was her meditation, and she loved the process. She also was addicted to feeding people treats, so the bakery was the perfect spot for her. Having Hamilton there, though, with his endearing perfectionism and seriousness, threw her off her game. All of her calm left her every time she looked at him or he said something or she even thought about him. It was concerning.

  Enough was enough. She needed to pull it together. They had cookies to decorate. Once they were done, Hamilton would take his cupcakes and retreat to his upstairs loft, only showing up at the bakery to complain about the door being open or worrying about her licking a utensil and then sticking it back in the frosting—as if she would ever even consider doing something so unsanitary and gross. She only licked things and reused them at home, when she was baking for herself and her roommate, and where she didn’t get unexpected visits from the health inspector and her fussy landlord.

  “Ready to decorate?” Her voice sounded strange, too high and tight, but Leah didn’t care. She was going to get through the morning, the order was going to get filled, and she wasn’t going to obsess about the Thor-like appearance of her landlord any longer. She was a professional, damn it.

  She pulled open the freezer door with a bit too much force, almost smacking herself in the face with the handle. A small sound made her look over at Hamilton suspiciously but his face was completely composed. If he’d actually laughed, which she doubted, then it was over now.

  The cookies were cool enough to work with, so she used a bench knife to scrape the flour on the table into a pile. After watching her for a few seconds, Hamilton followed her lead, creating an overly neat mound of flour. Leah knocked her flour pile into a garbage, and Hamilton’s face dropped slightly, as if he was sad to ruin all of his careful work by dumping it into the garbage.

  “Did you want to keep it?” she asked, straight-faced.

  He gave her a suspicious look, showing her that his sarcasm radar was working properly. “Of course not.” With barely a pause, he swept his tidy pile into the trash to join her discarded flour.

  “Here.” She handed him a scale and a bowl and then arranged her own equipment across the table from him. “Hold on. We need confectioner’s sugar.”

  Hurrying across the bakery to the dry pantry, she hoisted the large container full of powdered sugar. Muttering curses under her breath as she maneuvered the heavy, ungainly bin around the shelves, she reminded herself to get a larger container with wheels. With all the frosting and icing she made, she could easily go through fifty pounds of the stuff in a week.

  Just as she turned around, she stopped abruptly. Hamilton’s tall and broad form blocked her way. Before she could ask him what he was doing and if he could move his bulky self, he took the bin out of her hands and carried it effortlessly to the table. She was torn between annoyance and admiration at his ease.

  “I could’ve done that,” she muttered, rejoining him at the table.

  “It was more efficient for me to do it.”

  “I carry fifty-pound bags of flour around all day.” Apparently, her mood pendulum had swung toward annoyance. “Just because you spend a zillion hours at the gym doesn’t mean you’re stronger than me.”

  He blinked at her. “I spend an average of five hours a week at the gym, and I am stronger than you.”

  “Whatever.” Just because it was true didn’t mean she had to admit it. “Moving on. This is a sifter.” She held hers up. “We’re going to sift three hundred grams of confectioner’s sugar into our bowls. Be prepared, because powdered sugar makes the most god-awful squeaky noise when you scoop it.”

  Not looking overly concerned at the prospect—which obviously meant he’d never heard the nails-on-a-chalkboard sound powdered sugar made before—Hamilton seemed to take that advice in stride. Once again, he watched closely and then followed her lead.

  “I like that you use metric measurements,” he said as he carefully poured milk into his bowl, keeping an eye on the scale readout. “That makes more sense than staying with the imperial system.”

  “Whatever makes math easier is the measurement system for me.” Leah passed him the almond flavoring. “I already have to deal with the whole dozens thing. Why, historical baker people? Why does everything have to be counted in twelves?”

  “It probably has to do with the British monetary—”

  “That’s okay,” she interrupted, handing him the box of various shades of food coloring. “I’m fine not knowing. In fact, it’ll probably just annoy me if I don’t consider it to be a good enough reason. I’m just going to keep pretending that it was very important to start the tradition of multiplying everything by twelve and leave it at that. Pick a color.”

  “Any color?” He eyed her cautiously, as if suspecting a trick.

  “Any color.” Glancing at the various options, she reconsidered. “Any color except for something nasty, like gray. This is icing for the base coat, so it’s pretty runny. Whatever you choose, remember that it’ll be light. Red will be pink, purple will be lavender, and so on.”

  Lea
h put her own bowl aside, leaving it white, and grabbed another. With the ease of daily icing mixing, she started weighing out ingredients again. “I use yellow for the suns—I know, not very creative of me—but that’s about it for color standards. You can go as wild and crazy as you want, especially for a birthday party. The kids go nuts over pink dogs and green happy faces. They think it’s hilarious.”

  After careful consideration, Hamilton picked blue.

  “Good choice,” Leah said, catching herself before she called him Hamilton. As she whisked the icing ingredients, she surreptitiously studied him. It was silly to keep addressing him so formally as they picked colors for icing, but she hesitated to ask him if she could call him Anthony. It just didn’t fit him. “What do you usually go by?”

  “What?” He squeezed a few drops into his bowl and mixed it, giving the silky white icing swirls of bright blue before it blended together into a light robin’s-egg shade.

  “Your name. It seems weird to call you Mr. Hamilton now that you’re my cookie bi—ah, my cookie assistant.”

  His gaze caught hers, his expression severe except for what might have been the tiniest hint of humor very, very deep down. “Your cookie bitch?”

  “As if I’d ever say that.” Her best attempt at being completely aghast wasn’t very successful. “Moving on from that...term of endearment, can I call you Anthony?”

  “No.”

  It took a moment for his answer to sink in, since it was not at all what she’d expected. “I can’t? You actually want to sit here with me, both of us covered in flour and powdered sugar, picking colors like we’re finger-painting together in kindergarten, and call you Mr. Hamilton?”

  “You can call me Hamilton.” He picked up another bowl and set it on the scale. “No one who likes me calls me Anthony.”