Better Than Chocolate (Sweet Somethings Book 1) Read online

  Chapter 2

  Past History

  On Monday morning, I flip through the events calendar on my boss’s desk, fingers crossed. The next three weeks are booked solid, but the last week of July—the week of Sadie’s wedding—is wide open. No events scheduled.

  “Crap.” I tap the eraser-end of my pencil against the planner.

  The whir of the commercial-grade mixer filters through the kitchen door, signaling the start of Tess’s famous buttercream icing. The bakery is closed on Mondays, except by appointment, and we have one hundred and fifty cupcakes to decorate for an event at the Telfair Academy tonight.

  My boss and friend, Tess Gardiner, pokes her head into the office. Even swathed in that ugly pink apron, her hair wrapped in a matching pink kerchief, she’s one of the most striking women I know. With her mocha-colored skin, caramel eyes, and fit-and-flare figure, she belongs in beauty ads, not mixing frosting and cake batter. But she loves owning and operating her bakery, and it’s a perfect match for her business-savvy, outgoing personality.

  I’ve known Tess almost as long as I’ve known Sadie. We met during our undergrad years at the University of Georgia, working concessions at Sanford Stadium, brought together by our mutual love for finer culinary delights. Whenever Sadie was busy with cheerleading or her sorority, Tess and I experimented with flour and flavoring in the dorm kitchen. After graduation, she moved back home to Savannah to open this bakery. She’s the reason I moved here in the first place, offering me the job at ‘Tess to Impress’. She said I was doing her a favor, but in reality, she did one for me.

  There aren’t many jobs out there for history majors. Especially history majors with a penchant for baking.

  “Let’s move it, Sannarelli. This buttercream won’t wait all day.” She notices the slump in my shoulders and steps into the small room. “What’s with you?”

  I glance at her and shake my head. “Oh, I’m just checking for a scheduling conflict.”

  She looks over my shoulder at the blank week on the calendar. “And you’re bummed because there isn’t one?”

  “Sadie’s getting married at the end of July.”

  Tess leans her hip against the desk and folds her arms. “Is she, now?”

  “In St. Croix.”

  She raises one eyebrow. “Okay . . .”

  “Not to Ryan.”

  The other eyebrow shoots up. Tess beckons me out of the office so she can monitor her buttercream, but judging by the squint of her left eye, she wants the whole story.

  “Apparently, they broke up three weeks ago,” I explain as I follow her into the kitchen, “and Sadie flew off to the Caribbean, met this rich guy, and decided after, like, a week that he’s the only one for her. And now they’re getting married on a beach in St. Croix. I’m supposed to go down in three weeks to take on the maid of honor duties.”

  “Has the girl gone crazy?” Switching off the mixer, Tess grabs a rubber spatula and scrapes the sides of the bowl. “I never have figured out why you’re friends with her.”

  “I have no idea what happened between her and Ryan.” I take the spatula and start folding in gel food coloring, turning the buttercream a soft shade of violet. “But she’s my best friend. She’s counting on me, Tess. I can’t say no.”

  “Sure you can. It’s easy . . . no.”

  She disappears into the cooler, returning a moment later with the first tray of vanilla bean cupcakes. Her defined biceps remind me to break out the resistance bands when I get home tonight. Good thing her brother helps with deliveries, because I suck at lifting.

  Transferring the icing to a pastry bag, I wait for Tess to decide on a decorative tip. She hands me one intended for large drop flowers, which will create a lacy mound of icing reminiscent of a carnation.

  I fit the decorative tip onto the coupler and pipe icing onto a cupcake. “It’s easy for you to tell me to say no. You don’t like Sadie.”

  Tess lifts the cupcake and examines my work. “This isn’t about my feelings for Miss Georgia Peach. It’s about why you can’t stand up to her.” She signals her approval before filling a pastry bag of her own. “Think about it for a sec, Carmella. Sadie broke up with Ryan, who she’s been with, what, six years now? And she didn’t even call you about it?”

  “Tess . . .”

  “And then when she does call, she up and tells you that you’re coming to her beachfront wedding in three weeks. Tells you, doesn’t ask if you want to or can even make it.” She covers a cupcake with icing. “Some best friend.”

  I take a deep breath. “It’s not that simple. Sadie’s not thinking clearly.”

  “Sounds to me like she’s not thinking at all.” She sets her pastry bag on the counter and faces me, hands on her hips. “If you want to go, that’s one thing. But just because Sadie Miller says jump, doesn’t mean you have to dance a jig for her.”

  “I do want to go, sort of,” I admit. “I’m worried about her. Yeah, she didn’t call me, but neither did Ryan. One of them should have called me about something this big. Sadie completely bypassed the breakup story. And now she’s ready to marry this rich guy she met three weeks ago, and she sounded so happy on the phone and—Ugh! I don’t know what to do.”

  Tess extracts the pastry bag from my hands. “Don’t take it out on the buttercream.” She gently scrapes the icing off my last cupcake with the spatula and checks it for crumbs before plopping it back into the mixing bowl. “I know you want to get to the bottom of this. But why’s it so hard for you to stand up to her?”

  I confront my next cupcake and pipe a neat mound of icing, back in control. “You know me. I don’t like letting people down when they ask me to do something for them. Even when I was a kid, people knew they could get just about anything from me. Didn’t help that my dad was, like, everybody’s dentist. He got me more unpaid afterschool jobs than I had days of the week. Ask my daughter to help you weed your flower bed. She’d be happy to help!”

  “You’re a people pleaser. Nothing wrong with that.”

  “Everybody I went to school with knew I could be pretty-pleased into just about anything. Carmella, I need you to cover my shift this weekend. Or, There’s no way I’m going to finish my half of the history project by Wednesday. Can you pick up the slack?” I set down the pastry bag before I commit baked-goods homicide. “By the time I graduated high school, please and thank you had become optional.”

  Tess shakes her head. “So you’re a pushover.” She pipes icing onto five cupcakes in quick succession. “You don’t like saying no to people because you don’t want them to feel bad. Fine. But how often do you call in those favors?”

  “I don’t.” My own cupcakes look pretty good. I have a rhythm going now. “I think of it more as a pay it forward kind of thing. I do something to help you, you do something to help the next person.” An air bubble splurts through my decorative tip, so I scrape the cupcake clean and start again. “And I can say no to people.”

  “Just not to Sadie. Or the rest of the planet, for that matter.”

  I don’t reply, mostly because she’s right. I start the next batch of buttercream, while Tess transfers the iced cupcakes to a delivery box and gets the tray of chocolate cupcakes.

  “Yellow.” I hand over the bottle of gel food coloring. “It’ll pop against the chocolate cake.”

  We work in silence for a while, filling pastry bags and piping buttercream.

  “So why don’t you want to go to the wedding?” Tess asks.

  “For one thing, Sadie plans on setting me up with the best man. And for another, I can’t take the time off. Can’t afford it.”

  “That your sneaky Yankee way of asking for a raise?” She swats my arm, but grins. “Don’t give me that bullshit about the time off. You know we don’t have anything booked the week you’d be gone.”

  “Yea
h, why is that?”

  “Maybe I need a vacation, too.” Tess wipes a smear of powdered sugar off the counter. “Family thing out on Tybee Island. Grandma’s turning ninety.”

  “The same grandma who made these God-awful pink aprons?”

  One icing-coated fingertip pokes my cheek, leaving a glob of yellow buttercream behind. “Don’t you sass me about my grandma’s aprons. At least I only make you wear one on our decorating day, and not during business hours.”

  “Thankfully.” The yellow frosting improves the stiff linen of my apron when I use it to wipe my face. “Okay, so I can afford to take this trip, but it’ll make an awfully big dent in my wallet. You’re my friend, but you’re also my boss, and a day I don’t work is a day you don’t pay me. And I need to eat and pay my rent.”

  She reaches over the counter, tapping her finger on the order tacked to the bulletin board as she checks the cupcake flavors. “Maybe you should be a park ranger out at Fort Pulaski instead of just a tour guide. I bet they pay the park rangers.” She starts moving cupcakes into another box. “And volunteering to give tours at the Davenport House hasn’t made your bank account any fatter either.”

  Bringing the two dirty mixing bowls and beaters to the sink, I plug the drains and start the hot water. “I’ll never get to be a curator at any of the historic homes without putting in my time as a docent. And there haven’t been any ranger openings at Fort Pulaski for a few years now, so it’s just for fun.”

  “Girl, you need to get out more. You named your cat after Moxley Sorrel.”

  “Savannah’s Civil War hometown hero. Naming him Bobby Lee seemed a bit overdone.”

  “You are such a geek.”

  I shake my head over the steaming water, dumping in a measuring cup of detergent, and Tess gets the last tray of cupcakes—strawberry cream—from the cooler. She mixes the whipped icing by hand in a huge copper bowl while I wash the stainless steel giants.

  “You said Sadie’s new fiancé is paying for airfare and hotel reservations, right?”

  “That’s the gist of it.” Rinsing the bowls and setting them on the rack to dry, I return to her side. “I’m supposed to get my flight and hotel info in a few days.”

  She fills two pastry bags with her lightly sweetened, whipped cream icing. “So let me get this straight. You’re basically getting an all-expenses paid trip to the Caribbean, complete with a new one-of-a-kind handmade dress, and all it’s gonna cost you is time spent listening to Sadie Miller be her usual airhead self?”

  I frown. Tess may be right on the nose about Sadie, but that’s beside the point. “Yes.”

  “Well, in spite of the crazy in the situation, you’d be stupid not to go.” The office phone rings. Tess hurries to answer, wiping her hands on her apron. “Hell, I’d skip Grandma’s birthday to be a fly on the wall at that wedding. Especially if I’d get to spend some time on the beach drinking margaritas and ogling lifeguards.”

  “You can do that on Tybee.”

  “Not the margarita part.”

  My ten-year plan had never involved moving to Georgia. In fact, neither did my ten-month plan. But that was the decision my dad made when it was time for me to start college. And because I’m a pushover, as Tess puts it, I went along without a fuss.

  I spent most of high school trying to make everybody happy, and that put some pretty popular kids in my debt. I wasn’t their scapegoat, just the girl who covered their butts with homework assignments so they could spend their free time partying. Being popular, even being liked by the popular people, was never my goal. But they were nice to me. Though, to be honest, I think part of it had to do with their fear of my dad. The last thing any of them wanted was for Doc Sannarelli to insist on a root canal three days before senior prom—or worse, send them for an orthodontia consult.

  The day after high school graduation, the police busted up a huge party that involved underage drinking and, reportedly, a few instances of drug use. Just about every kid I knew had gone to the party, and most were slapped with misdemeanors. Three football players and the class salutatorian were arrested outright.

  I did not go to this party. I went to none of their parties, usually because I was stuck at home editing their term papers. Not that I was invited, or even wanted to go. But somebody, probably somebody high on weed, mentioned that I’d been there, and the police knocked on our front door.

  “Carmella’s been here all night,” my dad told them. “Sitting right on that couch since she got home from work.” And because it was true, and because people didn’t doubt Doc Sannarelli’s word in dentistry or anything else, the police backed off.

  Dad never said anything about me covering for my classmates with their schoolwork, but after the party incident he was more than a little worried. Our Upstate New York community was too small for an innocent eighteen-year-old who had escaped the fate of almost every other eighteen-year-old in town. He and my mom decided I needed a change, and that change would be an out-of-state college. I can’t remember how the University of Georgia entered the conversation, but Dad made some phone calls, tapped into some favors, and expedited my admission.

  We’d visited the campus when I was in eighth grade as part of a family trip. Dad, as much a history buff as I turned out to be, dragged us from Atlanta to Savannah, tracing the steps of Sherman’s infamous ‘March to the Sea’. I was awed by the campus, even at thirteen.

  “Oldest university in Georgia, Carmel-cakes,” Dad had said. “Oldest state university in the country, matter of fact.”

  I think he wanted me to go to UGA for that reason alone.

  Regardless of how or why I ended up in Athens, Georgia, naive and all alone, I had to make do. I learned to deal with being hundreds of miles from home, explaining to people, “Yes, there are trees in New York City, but I’m not from Manhattan, I’m from―. Do you have a map app on your phone so I can just show you?”

  Having grown up a half-mile away from campus, Sadie knew everything about UGA, the city, and the rest of Athens-Clarke County. She bounced into line behind me at registration, bent those sparkling blue eyes on me, her golden ponytail swinging as she turned to point out people she knew. She effervesced cheer. By the time we had our class schedules in hand, we were laughing like we’d known each other all our lives.

  And the rest, as they say, is history.

  By the time Tess returns from the office, the cupcakes are iced and snug in their delivery boxes, back inside the cooler.

  “That was the event coordinator from the Telfair Academy,” she says. “They want to add to the dessert bar for tonight.”

  “Anything specific?” Baking under pressure works for me, but only to a certain point.

  “Just whatever we feel like, and I quote. But it’ll need to be something quick.”

  She pulls two binders off the shelf above the counter. Shoving the grimy recipe book my way, she flips open the second binder and thumbs through the alphabetical tabs until she finds her Telfair Academy event cheat sheet. It lists all the desserts she’s made for their events in the past two years, with green stars inked in beside the items the coordinators and guests complimented her on.

  “I think we’ll add three batches of coconut macaroons, one big sheet of the raspberry oat bars, and . . .” She sidles over to me, bumping my hip. “They love your lemon squares.”

  I blink, shaking my head. “They’ve never had my lemon squares.”

  “That’s what you think.” She slides the cheat sheet binder onto the shelf again. “When they came in at Easter for a tasting appointment, I gave them some samples from your test batch.”

  “Tess Gardiner, you did not!”

  She winks at me and hands over a pastry cutter. “Raved about them. Double batch, but we’ll cut them small.” She looks in the cabinet for clean bowls, then straightens. “Oh, almost forgot. Before
we get started, I need you to try something for me.”

  I gather measuring cups and dry-ingredient canisters while she rummages in the big French door refrigerator, where we keep our perishables. Flatware rattles as she grabs a spoon.

  “Here.”

  This is the routine whenever Tess experiments with a new recipe. She waits till I’m distracted with a task, then launches a surprise attack, with no information about what I’m about to taste. I just have to face her and accept the spoon or fork. The first few times we did this, I wasn’t quick enough on the uptake and got facefulls of her latest concoctions instead.

  Today, it’s another version of chocolate custard for a cream pie.

  “Still too much sugar. It overwhelms the chocolate.”

  Tess throws the spoon into the sink, sticking her tongue out at me. “You and chocolate. I think you’d eat a cocoa bean if I had one. You can’t make chocolate cream pie without sugar.”

  “True, but . . .” I head for the fridge myself, looking for lemons and butter. “It’s all about proportions. The chocolate needs to shine. If it’s too sweet, well . . . It’d be good enough for some, but not for all.”

  “How am I supposed to keep a leg up on my competition if you won’t share your trade secrets?”

  “Tess, nobody in Savannah compares to you.”

  “For now, until you decide to open your own bakery.”

  Unwrapping a stick of butter and holding it in the paper, I run it over a coarse cheese grater. Butter curls sprinkle into my mixing bowl—a hill of lacy, yellow-tinted goodness. “Well, good thing that won’t happen. Besides, starting a business takes three things. Capital, business savvy, and—”