One Night: Exotic Fantasies: One Night in Paradise / Pirate Tycoon, Forbidden Baby / Prince Nadir's Secret Heir
had only started in the past year. And now Zack had lost her.
But he wasn’t devastated. Apparently. She was probably more devastated than he was. Again, cake related.
“I didn’t love her,” he said.
Clara blinked. “You didn’t … love her?”
“I cared about her. She was going to make a perfectly acceptable wife. But it wasn’t like I was passionately head over heels for her or anything.”
“Then why … why were you marrying her?”
“Because it was time for me to get married. I’m thirty. Roasted has achieved the level of success I was hoping for, and there comes a point where it’s the logical step. I reached that point, Hannah had, too.”
“Apparently she hadn’t.”
He gave her a hard glare. “Apparently.”
“Do you know why? Have you talked to her?”
“She can come and talk to me when she’s ready.”
Zack would have laughed at the expression on Clara’s face if he’d found anything remotely funny about the situation. The headlines would be unkind, and with so many media-hungry witnesses to the event, mostly on the absent bride’s side, there would be plenty of people salivating to get their name in print by offering their version of the wedding of the century that wasn’t.
Clara was too soft. Her brown eyes were all dewy looking, as though she were ready to cry on his behalf, her petite hands clasped in front of her, her shoulders slumped. She was more dressed up than he was used to seeing her. Her lush, and no he wasn’t blind so of course he’d noticed, curves complemented, though not really displayed, by a dress that could only be characterized as nice, if a bit matronly.
She did that, dressed much older than she needed to, her thick auburn hair always pulled back into a low bun. Because she had to have her hair up to bake, and it had become a habit. But sometimes he wished she’d just let her hair down. And, because he was a man, sometimes he wished she wouldn’t go to so much trouble to conceal her curves, either.
Although, in reality, her style of dress suited him. They worked together every day, and he had no business having an opinion on her physical appearance. His interest was purely for aesthetic purposes. Like opting for a room with a nice view.
That aside, Clara was all emotion and big hand gestures. There was nothing contained about her.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“I know. I believe you,” she said.
“No, you don’t. Or you don’t want to believe me because your more romantic sensibilities can’t handle the fact that my heart isn’t broken.”
“Well, you ought to love the person you’re going to marry, Zack.”
“Why? Give me a good reason why. So that I could be more broken up about today? So that I could be more suitably wounded if she had shown up, and we had said our vows, when ten years on the marriage fell on the wrong side of the divorce statistics? I don’t see the point in that.”
“Well, I don’t see the point at all.”
“And I didn’t ask.”
“You never do.”
“The secret to my success.” His tone came out a bit harsher than he intended and Clara’s expression reflected it. “You’ll survive this,” he said drily. “Breaking up is hard to do.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m worried about you.”
“Don’t be. I’m not so breakable. Tell me, any big word on the Japan location go up online while I was busy getting my photo taken?”
“All good. Some of the pictures I’ve been seeing are showing that it’s absolutely slammed. And everything seems to be going over huge.”
“Good. That means the likelihood of expanding further there is good.” He sat down in one of the vacant, linen-covered chairs. They had pink bows. Also Hannah’s choice. He put his hands on the tabletop, moving his mind away from the fiasco of a wedding day and getting it back on business. “How are things going with our designer cupcakes?”
“Um … well, I was pretty busy getting the wedding cake together.” Clara felt like her head was spinning from the abrupt subject change.
Zack was in full business mode, sitting at the trussed up wedding-party table like it was the pared-down bamboo desk he had in his office at Roasted’s corporate headquarters.
“And?”
“I have a few ideas. But these are pretty labor-intensive recipes and they really aren’t practical for the retail line, or even for most of the stores.”
“Cupcakes are labor intensive?”
She shot him a deadly look. “Why don’t you try baking a simple batch and tell me how it goes?”
“No, thanks. I stick to my strengths, and none of them happen to involve baking.”
“Then trust me, they’re labor intensive.”
“That’s fine. My goal is to start doing a few boutique-style shops in some more affluent areas. We’ll have bigger kitchens so that we’ll have the capability to do more on-site baking.”
“That could work. We’ll have to have a more highly trained staff.”
“That’s fine. I’m talking about a few locations in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, London, that sort of thing. It will be more like the flagship store. A bit more personalized.”
“I really like the idea, not that you’d care if I didn’t.”
“I am the boss.”
“I know. I’m just the Vice President of Confections,” she said, bringing up a joke they’d started in the early days of the company.
A smile touched his lips again and her heart expanded. “A big job.”
“It is,” she said. “And you don’t pay me enough.”
“Yes, I do.”
She gave him a look. One she knew was less than scary, but she tried. “Anyway, go on.”
“I had made an appointment to speak to a man who owns a large portion of farmland in Thailand. Small clusters of coffee and tea. All of his plants receive a very high level of care and that’s making for extremely good quality roasts and brews. My goal is to set up a deal with him so we can get some limited-editions blends. We’ll sell them in select locations, and have them available for order online.”
Her mind skipped over all the details he’d just laid out, latching on to just one thing. “Weren’t you going to Thailand on your honeymoon?”
“That was the plan.”
Clara couldn’t stop her mouth from dropping open. “You were going to do business on your honeymoon?”
“Hannah had some work to do, as well. Time doesn’t stop just because you get married.”
“No wonder she left you at the altar.” She regretted the words the moment they left her mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”
“You did, and that’s fine. Unlike you, Hannah had no romantic illusions, you can trust me on that. Her reasons for not showing up today may very well have had something to do with a Wall Street crisis. There’s actually a good chance she’s at her apartment, in her wedding gown, screaming obscenities at her computer screen watching the cost of grain go down.”
She had to concede that the scenario was almost plausible. Hannah was all icy cool composure, and generally nice and polite, until someone crossed her in the corporate world. Clara had overheard the other woman’s phone conversations become seriously cutthroat in tense business