“We’re not going to piece it together if you eat it,” Damon scolded me. “How do you suggest we transport the cakes?”
“In the hotel van,” I told Damon. “I have the keys to that as well.”
“What if something happens to the back-up cake before the wedding?” Damon asked. “Don’t you think Todd is going to notice this?”
“He should have spares for each layer.” I raised my eyebrows. “Todd is worse than me. He has OCD, remember? He makes backup plans for his backup plans.”
We heard the door to the room open and quickly peaked. The lover birds sneaked out.
“It’s time to get this cake out of here and get the other cake,” I told Damon.
We snuck out of the room and took the stairs up to our floor. We made sure there was no one in the hallway as we snuck into my room. Damon washed his sticky hands while I got the keys we needed.
“We’ll have to go out through the marquee way,” Damon plotted out the route in which to take the cakes. “We can leave that door unlocked so we can bring the other cake back in.”
“That makes sense,” I agreed with his plan. “That side of the hotel is secluded so no one will see us go in or out.”
“As we are taking the hotel van, no one will suspect it’s us leaving the hotel,” Damon agreed.
“We are scarily good at this criminal stuff,” I looked at Damon.
“It’s not criminal, it’s resourceful,” Damon shrugged. “Are you ready?”
I nodded and we sneaked out of my room and back down to the small kitchen. I looked at my watch. It was midnight. There should hardly be anyone around at this time, so it should be a breeze swapping out the cakes.
We covered the big cake with the large box it came in and quietly pushed it out to the van that Damon had backed up near the large marquee tent. The one wheel of the trolley had a bit of a squeak if you pushed it too fast, making the journey to the van a rather slow one. Plus, for that time of the night, the hotel was pretty busy.
After a few near misses of the cake nearly falling over, we finally managed to load the cake into the van. I sat at the back to make sure the cake didn’t topple while Damon drove at a snail’s pace to Todd’s restaurant. When we pulled up, Todd was just closing up so we drove around the block until we saw Todd drive off.
“That was close” I rolled my eyes.
CHAPTER 22
Damon
I couldn’t believe what Carla and I were doing as we snuck into Todd’s restaurant. The smell of the evening’s cooking still lingered in the air in the kitchen. My stomach growled.
“I feel the same way as your stomach does,” Carla smiled at me as we wheeled the cake to Todd’s cake fridge.
“It has a coded keypad,” I whispered to Carla.
“Try seven, seven, one, one,” Carla shared with me
I punched the number into the keypad and the door popped open.
“Great,” I smiled at Carla.
We pushed the ruined cake into the large temperature-controlled fridge. Carla and I gently pulled the big cake box off the cake, only to have two more layers slid off.
“Crap,” Carla hissed before bursting into laughter, which was contagious.
“What are we going to do now?” I asked her.
“We are going to box up that replica, clean up this mess, and then use those spares in those cake tins over there to rebuild this one,” Carla planned it all out for us. “Then we are going to stop at a greasy takeaway to get something to eat before I polish off all these cakes.”
“That sounds like a great idea.”
We got to work restructuring the ruined cake and cleaning up the mess we’d made on the floor. By the time we’d finished restructuring the cake we’d ruined, we’d used a few of the spare layers Todd had all iced and ready. Carla had insisted it didn’t need to be one hundred percent as the spare cake was being divided and dished out to the guests. There was a heck of a lot of cake, so she didn’t see Todd using all his spare parts.
Before we left the restaurant, we had a few of the ganache cupcakes Todd had left over from the wedding batch. They were really good. We managed to get the replica cake back into the hotel fridge without incident. As we snuck up to our rooms, we were busted by one of the groomsmen who’d been waiting for us with a note from Hayley. She was disappointed in us. We felt guilty so we allowed him to handcuff us and we went to sleep in Carla’s room.
We finished eating our takeout and had a good laugh about our day. I could see that Carla was exhausted. I was also feeling tired so we climbed into Carla’s bed and found the most comfortable position to sleep in.