She grabbed a spoon and dipped it into the pot, then tasted. “Oh my God.”
Ava’s head snapped around from the sink, an expression of panic in her eyes. “What? Did I forget something? Not enough sugar? Too much sugar? Should we have filtered out the seeds? What?”
Regan tipped her head with a grin. “How about you take a breath, Stressy McWorryson? It’s fantastic. The perfect amount of sweetness, very smooth, I like the seeds. It’s fantastic.”
Ava’s relief was almost comically apparent as she let out a huge breath. “Oh. Okay. Good. Whew.”
Regan recalled the Ava Prescott she had worked with as calm, cool, and collected. Rarely stressed. Never raised her voice. Never seemed panicked about anything. So this version of her, this bundle of nerves, was new, and Regan wasn’t sure what to make of it. Ava hadalso seemed very stoic and regulated during the past week of bakes. The only difference between then and now was…
Oooohhhh.
The difference was Regan.
Ava didn’t have 100 percent control over her project. She had to share decisions and labor with Regan, something she hadn’t had to do before, and it was stressing her out.
Well, wasn’t that interesting?
She supposed it made sense that a control freak wouldn’t enjoy having to share their control, so she was going to try not to take it personally, snippy comment about her being messy aside.
“And how’s it going over here?” Liza Bennett-Schmidt was suddenly standing next to Regan, who gave a slight flinch of surprise. Before she could answer, Liza had grabbed a spoon and tasted the compote. She tipped her head one way, then the other. “You left the seeds in.”
Regan couldn’t tell if the statement was accusatory, amused, or neutral, so she simply nodded.
“Mm.” Liza nodded, then headed to the ovens where she squatted down and peeked through the windows. “Mm,” she said again.
Regan and Ava held a silent conversation over her head that essentially had one of them asking what “Mm” meant and the other shrugging, “I have no freaking idea.”
Liza stood up and headed toward Madison and Paige.
Regan was pretty sure her own face matched Ava’s wide-eyed expression. What the hell had Liza thought? It was a mystery.
There was a beat and then Ava returned to the sink and the dishes Regan had dirtied.
The cakes were going to need a good thirty minutes before Regan even risked opening the oven doors, so she looked around for ways to busy herself. Really, the only things left to do were make the frosting, put the cake together, and frost and decorate it. She went to the sink and gently hip-bumped Ava out of the way.
“Go. Make the frosting. I can clean up my own mess.”
Ava nodded and reached for a dish towel to wipe her hands.
Regan was no cake decorator. She excelled at many things when it came to baking. Actually, no. She excelled atmostthings when itcame to baking. Unfortunately, cake decorating was not one of them. She had no trouble envisioning what she wanted the finished product to look like, but getting from point A to point B always proved more difficult than she’d expected. And at Sweet Temptations, there was an official cake decorator, so she didn’t have to worry about it. Today, she kind of did.
Decorating their two-tier wedding cake was in Ava’s hands. Ava, who was also not a cake decorator.
As she washed the remaining dishes, she glanced around the workspace. Because there were six workstations but only three teams, each team had two stations at their disposal. Regan was at one station but using the ovens at both, and Ava was mixing frosting across the aisle at the other station, out of the way of Regan’s mess, she figured. Vienna and Maia seemed to be working like the proverbial well-oiled machine, one of them whipping something in a bowl while the other measured sugar. Behind them Madison looked slightly ill while Paige held her arm and seemed to be quietly pep-talking her. Regan wondered what was going on there but didn’t want to interrupt to ask. She hoped nothing bad had happened.
By the time she got all the dishes washed, badly missing the industrial-sized dishwasher at the bakery, she crossed the aisle and sidled up next to Ava.
“How can I help?”
Ava used her chin to point toward the bowl of lemons. “I need about three tablespoons of lemon juice. I also need zest. Couple of teaspoons’ll do it.”
“You got it.”
Liza was wandering some more, and while Regan understood that was part of why she was here—to learn from Liza—this wasn’t learning. This was scrutiny, and it made her nervous.
“Going with lemon buttercream?” she asked as she took in their counter and its ingredients.
Ava and Regan both nodded.
