“I’m telling you, Jeremy, no one can know.” That was Amelia’s first and most important rule. It couldn’t get out.
“Okay,” Jeremy said. “It’s safe with me, but when Mom finds out, she’s going to kill you.”
Tyler hung up the phone and shook his head. That hadn’t been how he’d wanted that conversation to go, but it actually felt good to get that news off his chest. At least he had one semireliable person to talk to about all this. If all went well, when the rest of his family found out, it would be good news and no blood would be shed.
His phone rang again, and this time it was the moving company. There was no time to dwell on this. The clock was ticking.
* * *
The next few days were a blur of activity that made Amelia dizzy just thinking about it. Tyler signed a short-term lease on the house, and his moving companies went to work packing up both their apartments. The real estate agent referred them to an agency that provided domestic contract work, and they hired a part-time housekeeper named Janet, much to Amelia’s relief.
After they left the agency, Tyler took Amelia to brunch, and they went furniture shopping to pick out the few things they needed in the interim, including a king-size bed and a desk where Tyler could work.
It was a good thing Tyler had the money to make all this happen, because Amelia certainly didn’t have time to do it all. She’d spent all day Thursday baking, filling and crumb-coating a five-tiered wedding cake. Although chefs tended to specialize in culinary arts or in pastry arts, Amelia had studied both. That came in handy when she and her partners had decided to open From This Moment and did pretty much everything themselves.
By Friday afternoon, the cakes were iced, covered in her famous marshmallow fondant and stacked high on the cart she would use to move the cake into the reception hall. Today’s cake was a simple design, despite being large in size. All she needed to do was load a pastry bag with buttercream and pipe alternating tiers of Swiss dots and cornelli lace. The florist was bringing fresh flowers for the cake Saturday afternoon.
Leaning back against the stainless-steel countertop to eye her accomplishment of the day, she came to the sad realization that soon she would have to let the cakes go. Cakes took hours. There were some days when Amelia was in the kitchen working on a cake until two in the morning. On more than one occasion, she’d just stayed over and slept on the chaise in the bridal suite.
Those days were coming to an end. They’d need to bring in help anyway to assist her late in the pregnancy when she couldn’t power through a sixteen-hour day on her feet in the kitchen, and to bridge the gap of her maternity leave. That would be much easier if they started contracting out the wedding cakes.
Reaching for her tablet, she brushed away a dusting of powdered sugar from the screen and made a note to talk to Natalie about that. W
hen that was done, she loaded her piping bag and started working on the final cake decorations.
“That’s a big cake.”
Amelia looked up from her work to see Tyler standing in the doorway of the kitchen. She was surprised to see he’d shed his suit today and was wearing a snug-fitting green T-shirt and a pair of worn jeans. It was a good look for him, reminding her of the boy she knew in school. “That’s an understatement. It weighs over a hundred pounds.”
He whistled, strolling into the kitchen to stand beside her and admire her handiwork. “Pretty impressive. Does it taste good?”
She frowned at him. “Of course it does. It’s my special lemon–sour cream cake with a fresh raspberry-and-white-chocolate buttercream filling.”
“No real chocolate?”
“This is the South,” she said. “Chocolate is for the groom’s cake, which, fortunately, I do not have to make. The groom’s aunt is making him one that looks like Neyland Stadium at the University of Tennessee.”
Tyler nodded thoughtfully and eyeballed the bowl with leftover raspberry filling. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked.
Amelia sighed and went to the other side of the kitchen to retrieve a plastic spoon. “Knock yourself out,” she said, holding it out to him. She waited until he’d inhaled a few spoonfuls of icing. “What brings you by today, Tyler? I really need to get this finished. I’ve got several hours of prep work ahead of me for tomorrow when I’m done with this.”
He swallowed and set the bowl aside. “By all means, continue working. Primarily, I came by because I haven’t seen you yet today.”
Amelia smiled and climbed up onto her stepladder to pipe the top tier. “Once we’re living in the same place, that won’t be a problem any longer.”
“Speaking of which, I also needed to let you know that you have a new address.” He reached into his pocket and dangled a set of keys. “These are yours. I also have a gate opener for your car.”
“Wow, your people move quickly. Is everything really out of my apartment?”
“Yep. I even had Janet go by and clean once everything was gone.”
Amelia nodded thoughtfully and went back to piping the cake. She was keeping her apartment for another month, but the odds were that she wouldn’t move back. As they’d discussed, she would either stay with Tyler, or she would get a new place big enough for her and the baby. He’d been right—her apartment was too small. It was easier to just get everything out now instead of having to go back and get the rest later.
“Janet also went to the store with the list you put together and stocked the pantry and refrigerator with food. And she got all the necessary cleaning supplies to keep the house shipshape.”
Amelia was going to like this Janet. While she loved to cook, cleaning was at the bottom of her list. The industrial washing machine in the kitchen made it easier to clean up here, but keeping up with cleaning her apartment had always been a burden. She’d developed a process of immediately cleaning up anything she did as she did it to avoid having to deal with it later. She’d never lived with anyone else, but she assumed that would make it exponentially harder to manage.
“Sounds great. Hopefully I’ll get to see what the house looks like before I collapse facedown in the mattress tonight.” She had a long list of things that had to be done before she went home today.