The Cupcake Diaries: Sweet On You (3 page)

BOOK: The Cupcake Diaries: Sweet On You
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“This is not insane. We can do this.”

“I never expected you to take me seriously,” Rachel whispered as they approached the
financing desk.

Andi looked from Rachel to Kim. “Why shouldn’t we open a cupcake company? If no one
will hire us, we’ll create our own jobs. We’ll be entrepreneurs. Did you know that
the first chocolate cake was baked in the year 1674?”

“I see you did your research, but we’ll need a shop,” Rachel persisted.

“Yes, and in the meantime we can rent an approved kitchen and bake our cupcakes there.
I downloaded an application for a small business license from the internet and as
soon as we get a bank loan for supplies and start taking orders—we’ll be in business.
We can also sell cupcakes at fairs, festivals, and the Farmer’s Market.” Andi frowned
at her sister. “Kim, you haven’t said a word. What do you think?”

Kim’s face paled, making her green eyes and dark hair stand out in vivid contrast.
“I . . . I don’t know. We’ve never done anything like this before.”

“I have to do something,” Andi said, pinning each of them with a direct look. “When
I got home last night, I was handed an eviction notice.”

Rachel gasped. “Can you trade your car for cash at one of the local dealers?”

“I can lend you a couple hundred dollars,” Kim offered.

“Thanks,” Andi said, “but what about rent the following month? And the month after
that? A cupcake shop will allow me to do what I love and support my daughter at the
same time.”

“I’m with you,” Rachel agreed, her voice soft but resolute. “You’re right. We can
do this. And it’ll be fun. A fun adventure with my two best friends.”

Andi looked at Kim. “Are you in?”

Kim hesitated, then smiled. “Aren’t I always?”

T
HE LOAN OFFICER
adjusted his thick, black-framed glasses and motioned toward the plate of cupcakes
and three-ring binder Andi placed on the desk in front of him. “What’s this?”

“Our business plan.”

He flipped open the binder. “It looks like a cookbook.”

Andi nodded. “It’s meant to be a do-it-yourself cookbook where you add your own recipes
to the blank pages. I liked the colorful photos of baked goods on the cover and thought
it would be perfect for our new cupcake business. I call it
The Cupcake Diary
, our record of everything cupcake related.”

“Isn’t it pretty?” Rachel asked.

The loan officer frowned. “A better question is if it’s practical.”

“After calculating how many cupcakes we’ll need to sell each month to cover expenses,”
Andi said, pointing to one of her many hand drawn graphs, “I put together a budget
that includes the rent at the community kitchen on Shipwreck Avenue. I’ve also researched
the cost of equipment for our own shop in the future and ran comparisons between different
retailers for supplies.”

He barely looked at her or the business plan. His gaze rested on Kim. “And what is
your role in this venture?”

Kim’s focus was directed toward the other customers in the bank lobby, and when she
didn’t respond, Rachel elbowed her.

“What?” Kim asked.

Andi hastily answered for her. “She would help bake and be a cupcake artist.”

“What exactly does a ‘cupcake artist’ do?”

“I can paint using food gels,” Kim said, glancing back at him, “create sculptures
out of icing, and decorate the cupcakes to be as eye-catching as I can to cultivate
more sales.”

The loan officer nodded. “Any prior experience working in or running a bakery?”

When Kim shook her head, Andi replied, “No, but I’ve been baking cupcakes for years.
We both have. And Rachel knows every program on the computer and how to advertise
online.”

The stiff-necked loan officer narrowed his eyes as he took another look at their loan
application. “Andrea Leanne Burke. Aren’t you that girl who nearly burned down—”

“We can bake,” Andi assured him. “All we need is the start-up money to open our business.”

O
UTSIDE,
R
ACHEL GAVE
Andi a swift, compassionate look and said, “I’m sorry, Andi. It was worth a try.”

“We can’t give up,” Andi insisted, her tone adamant.

She had to admit she was disappointed when the loan officer listed the reasons for
declining a loan. The unpaid bills her deadbeat ex had accrued before the divorce
ruined her credit score, Rachel’s credit cards were too high, and Kim had no credit
at all since she worked under the table through college.

“Did you see the tattoo on the arm of that old guy with the white-haired ponytail,
black leather pants, and gray T-shirt?” Kim asked. “It was a flying squirrel. I went
up to him in the lobby after you two went out the door, and he says he has a shop
on Marine Drive.”

“The tattoo guy can’t help us get a loan,” Rachel complained. “The bank manager was
interested in you, and you ignored him. You didn’t even try to flirt.”

“I’m not going to flirt with the financial manager to get a bank loan. If you like
flirting so much, why didn’t you flirt with him?”

Rachel sniffed. “He wasn’t my type.”

“He wasn’t Kim’s type either,” Andi said, putting her arm around her sister’s shoulders
and giving her a side hug. “You know she hasn’t been interested in anyone since Gavin
ditched her and ran off to Europe.”

“He didn’t ditch me.” Kim spun around, her eyes wide. “He’d always planned to leave
after we graduated college. He asked me to go with him, and I declined. End of story.”

“You haven’t dated anyone since.”

“That’s my business.”

Rachel pursed her lips. “Speaking of business, how are we going to get the money we
need to open a cupcake shop?”

Acquiring financial assistance wasn’t as easy as Andi had hoped. They’d have to pursue
a more difficult course of action, one that tightened her gut and threatened to squeeze
the life right out of her soul. “We’ll ask Dad.”

Rachel and Kim stared at her for several seconds before Rachel broke the silence.
“Is there any hope there?”

“We won’t know until we try.” Andi stepped off the sidewalk to let a skateboarder
pass, and turning her head, she spotted a dented, red Mustang parked in the no parking
zone in front of the Zumba Dance Studio. A police officer stood beside the car, an
e-citation device in hand. “Rachel, isn’t that—”

“No!” Rachel squealed, taking off at a run. “I can’t afford a parking ticket!”

“It might help if you flirt with him,” Kim teased.

Rachel scowled and waved her hands in an irate fashion that was anything but flirtatious
as she tried to persuade the cop to tear the ticket in two.

Andi smiled. “Do you think he’s her type?”

“No,” Kim said and laughed. “She only likes guys who are interested in her.”

“Makes sense. No one wants to waste time with someone who doesn’t show a spark of
interest.”

Andi’s thoughts drifted to Jake Hartman, the fine-looking cupcake man. Did Jake have
a certain type of woman he was interested in?

Could
she
be his type?

J
AKE WAS A
thousand times more pleasant to think about than her upcoming meeting with her father.
But as much as she detested having to ask her father for a small business loan, she
knew it would be better than having to move in with him.

Rachel and Kim agreed to accompany her. But when they arrived at the house, her father
quickly singled her out and told them to wait in the other room with Mia.

Andi could smell the negativity in the air the moment she walked in. Her father’s
opinion of her bounced off the walls and burrowed deep into her heart. She didn’t
think it was from anything she’d done, but from all the things he thought she should
have done and didn’t.

He’d expected her to grow up and be a triumphant success. Bring praise to the family
name like every Burke listed in the ancestry records before her. Instead, well . . .
she hadn’t accomplished much.

Andi hoped she was on the cusp of changing that. Profits from a cupcake shop could
pay her rent, bring financial independence for herself and her child, and finally
allow her to succeed.

She sat down in the small, black leather seat opposite his grandiose, winged-back
chair with the gulf of his large formidable, dark mahogany desk positioned between
them.

She locked her hands on her knees and prayed for a measure of control over her wavering
vocal cords. Then she spilled out her ideas for the cupcake shop, her heart behind
each word.

“I suppose you expect me to hand over the money you need for Mia’s sake, or the sake
of your sister?” he asked.

She’d rehearsed her speech a million times, but none of the words seemed to come out
of her mouth the way she’d planned. No, as often occurred on these rare interactions
with the man she called Father, her wounded heart regurgitated the past and twisted
her tongue.

“Would it be too much to ask you to approve the loan for my sake? I
am
your daughter, too.”

“I know exactly who you are, and you don’t have the commitment it takes to run a small
business.”

“If you loan us the money, I’ll work days, evenings, weekends, whatever it takes.
I’ve wanted to open some sort of bakery my whole life.”

“You don’t know what you want. First you want one thing then another. You can’t seem
to make up your mind. And who would trust you as a baker? You burned cupcakes in your
tenth-grade home economics class and set the whole school on fire.”

“That was fifteen years ago,” Andi said, lifting her chin. “And they weren’t cupcakes,
they were cinnamon buns.”

“To this day everybody in Astoria talks about it.”

Andi didn’t believe him.
Everybody?
The only person she knew who still talked about the incident was her father. He’d
never let her forget how the newspapers had referred to her as ‘Pyro-Andi’ and ‘Burnt
Buns Burke.’

“I’m OCD when it comes to kitchen safety now,” she said, curling her fingers into
a tight squeeze. “I took a food safety test when I applied for the job at the school
cafeteria last month, and I passed with flying colors.”

“You didn’t get the job though, did you? Probably because you never finished college.”

“You don’t need a degree to work in the school cafeteria,” Andi informed him. “And
you know why I dropped out of college.”

In her third year, her mom had passed away in a small engine plane crash while visiting
her aunt and uncle in Idaho. She’d been devastated by the loss. Still was.

“You never went back.”

“I decided to do something different.”

Her father grimaced. “Yeah, you got married and didn’t stay committed to that either.”

Andi swallowed hard. “Stuart was the one who didn’t stay committed. He cheated on
me.”

“Every marriage has problems,” her father continued. “Your mother and I didn’t have
a perfect relationship, but we worked it out and remained committed to each other
till the day she died. You could have forgiven him and worked to save your marriage.”

Andi choked back a sob. “He wouldn’t let me! Stuart’s the one who filed for the divorce.
He
didn’t want to work it out.”

She’d never revealed that piece of information to her father before. She’d been too
proud. Her eyes stung and her throat ached, burning from the inside. How was it her
father was always able to sink his hooks into her and affect her this way?

William Burke shook his head. “You dropped out of college and have had a series of
failed jobs, a failed marriage . . .”

Andi waited for him to say it—
failed mom
. Just let him dare say she’d failed as a mom, and she’d leave. Her daughter meant
everything to her. She’d do anything to support and protect her.

Only once had she been late to pick Mia up from preschool. She’d been in the bathroom
with an upset stomach but to her father it didn’t matter. The school had called
him
to come get his granddaughter, and it was yet another incident he’d never let her
forget.

“Mom used to say, ‘You aren’t a failure until you stop trying,’” Andi reminded him.

“Your mother didn’t have a wit of sense to save her soul. Did you know she once dreamed
of opening a bakery?”

“No, I did not know that,” Andi replied in a small voice. “I remember she loved to
bake. What happened?”

“I talked some sense into her, that’s what happened; convinced her not to make a fool
of herself. Baking is one thing, running a business is another. Your mother could
never have run a bakery. She had as much business experience as you do.”

Andi recalled the happiness on her mother’s face when she was in the kitchen, baking
cakes and cookies, with flour on her apron. Her heart pined for her mother, to see
her one more time. Her mother would have offered encouragement and support and given
her the loan. She was sure of it.

“I can do this,” Andi said, steeling her resolve. “I will open and run a successful
cupcake shop.”

“You say you can, but you won’t. Right now you’ve got this big fancy dream—”

“I’ll do more than dream.” She pushed her chair away from his desk and stood up.

Her father had killed her mother’s dream, but she wouldn’t let him kill hers. She’d
open and run a cupcake shop, not just for herself, or Mia, or her sister and Rachel,
but also for her mother and anyone else who said dreams couldn’t come true.

He called after her as she walked away, but she couldn’t turn back. If she did, she’d
break down and cry.

 

Chapter Four

  • Recipe for CUPCAKE SURPRISE
  • 2 scoops of attraction
  • Several heart-stopping grins
  • A couple of semi-sweet confessions
  • A deep layer of “I Must Be Dreaming” intrigue
  • * Garnish with laughter and unexpected promise.

O
N
M
ONDAY
R
ACHEL
called, excited, and asked Andi to meet her at the Fish ‘N Nets Cafe to discuss a
possible new lead for financing the cupcake shop.

BOOK: The Cupcake Diaries: Sweet On You
10.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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