“Because I can’t bake. I can cook, but the last time I baked something I nearly burned the house down and now I’m not allowed.”

Well, this was just great. She pulled out her phone.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Calling Cora. She’ll know what to do.”

“Yeah. She’ll know what to do. She’ll kill me!” He shook his head. “You can’t tell her.”

Lanie wasn’t one hundred percent sure where she stood on the whole divine issue, but she tilted her head up to the ceiling anyway. “Are you kidding me with this week?”

“If you’re talking to God, he’s busy saving the whales. And anyway, I don’t think he’d care that I ate the cupcakes, because I prayed for those cupcakes.”

Lanie narrowed her eyes at Jack, who cleared his throat and pulled out his wallet. “Look, here’s . . .” He counted out some bills. All ones. “I’ve got . . . uh-oh. Four bucks.”

“Forget it,” Lanie said and grabbed her purse. “I’ll handle it.” It’d be faster to go buy something new and try to pass it off as homemade anyway. Or so she assumed, but she’d never had to pull off a stunt like this before. So she did the only thing she could think of, she improvised and drove like a bat out of hell to the supermarket.

There she stood in the bakery section. No cupcakes. “Excuse me,” she called to the guy slicing bread behind the counter. “I don’t see any cupcakes.”

“They’re just about done,” he said and turned to the oven. He peered inside, nodded with satisfaction, and pulled out a huge tray of cupcakes perfectly browned.

“I’ll take them,” she said.

“Can’t sell these,” he said. “They’re not frosted yet.”

“Can’t you just frost them real quick?”

“No. They have to cool first.”

“Okay, then I’ll buy them as is.”

“Lady—”

“Please.”

He looked pained. He was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three tops, and she knew just how to reach him. “Cash,” she said.

He craned his neck, making sure they were alone. “Cash,” he said. “And this never happened.”

“Deal.”

Five minutes later she was in the car with the warm, naked cupcakes and several cans of frosting she’d picked up in the baking aisle. She was also the brand-new owner of a box of plastic knives—since they hadn’t sold just one and there’d been no one in that aisle to bribe. She’d also picked up two baking sheets and a roll of aluminum foil.

Thirty bucks poorer, she drove to the elementary school and then sat in the parking lot, where she covered the baking sheets in aluminum foil, set the cupcakes on them, and got to frosting. A few minutes later, she realized she’d made a tactical error.

Okay, so more than one.

First, she’d forgotten napkins. And second, she might be a professional cupcake eater, but she was in no way even close to a professional cupcake froster.

By the time she carried the tray into the school, she was wearing frosting all over her. She signed in at the front desk and was escorted to the classroom by an aide who kept looking at Lanie’s hair. Since that didn’t make any sense, she shrugged it off because, hello, bigger problems.

Then suddenly she was in the classroom and the twins came running up all smiles, helping her set the cupcakes on a table.

Sierra pointed to Lanie’s hair.

“Okay,” Lanie said. “What’s up with people staring at my hair?”

“You’re wearing frosting in it,” Mark said.

She turned and found him in uniform looking his usual badass self, a fact that the smile on his face only amplified.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, slapping his hand away when he tried to touch her hair.

He simply used his other hand and swiped his finger over her head, which came away smeared in chocolate frosting.

“Dammit,” she said.

“That’s a bad word,” Sam said. “Our friend Alesia gets a spanking if she says a bad word or fibs.”

Mark arched a brow at Lanie, and in a reaction that she did not approve of, her body disconnected from her brain and quivered. “No, but seriously, what are you doing here?”

“Dispatch got ahold of me,” he said. “I stopped at the bakery in Paso Robles.”

She eyeballed his perfect, bakery-made cupcakes. “Those aren’t homemade. They’re supposed to be homemade. You cheated.”

“So . . . you made yours, then?”

“Yes.” She paused. “Sort of.”

He leaned in and with his mouth against her ear said softly, “You remember what happens to fibbers, right?”

She got a hot flash.

From the front of the room, the teacher clapped her hands twice, which was apparently the sign for class to start because people started to scatter.

“You guys gotta go now,” Samantha said in a rush and both girls flung themselves at Lanie and Mark, giving hugs and wet kisses. “Thanks, Lanie,” Sam said. “Thanks, Daddy. Don’t go too hard on her, okay? Her heart’s in the right place.”

The words were Cora’s. Lanie could hear her boss saying those exact words and knew that was where Samantha had gotten them. If she hadn’t been so frazzled—and covered in chocolate—she’d have taken a beat to admire the wonderful qualities the woman was imparting to her family, and maybe even ache a little bit since she’d not gotten much of that from her own.

Mark was still chuckling as he and Lanie headed out of the school.

Lanie bit her tongue, refusing to ask him what the hell was so funny because—

She gasped when Mark pulled her around the corner and pressed her up against the wall of the building.

“What the—”

Before she could finish the sentence, his mouth came down on hers. He kissed her long and quite thoroughly before lifting his head and licking his lips. “Definitely store-bought frosting,” he chided.

She gave him a shove and he took a step back, laughing outright now. “You are so spoiled rotten,” she exclaimed. “You have no idea!”

His smile faded a little, as if maybe he suddenly remembered what had happened and all he’d learned about her, and just like that her humiliation renewed itself. She whirled around to leave, but he caught her hand and reeled her back in.

“Don’t,” she said, not sure what she was saying “don’t” to exactly. To looking at her in that way he had that both made her bones melt and her heart go squishy? To kissing her again? Because if he did, they’d end up in bed—where, granted, they did their best work—and that thought scared the hell out of her. It was getting hard to keep her heart out of the mix.

Actually, scratch that. Not just hard, but outright impossible.

Mark used his free hand to stroke her hair back from her face. Then he looked at his finger—streaked with chocolate—and licked it.

She made a sound that was half laugh, half sob and his hands tightened on her.

“You’re still avoiding talking to me,” he said quietly, no longer amused.

“No.”

“Lanie.”

She sighed. “Okay, yeah. A little. I’ve been avoiding talking to you a little.”