Sugared (Misfit Brides #4)

K
immie Elias didn’t need
a superpower to ward off men. She had her mother.

Her mother, known in certain circles in Bliss as the Queen General, was currently dragging a large, tattooed bouncer across the rich patterned carpet of the Rose and Dove country club, cutting a straight path to Kimmie while the well-dressed, semi-famous wedding guests between them scattered out of the way. Or, more likely, were repelled by the sheer force of her mother’s personality as much as the bouncer was being dragged along by it.

If ever there was a wedding with the potential to have a guest brave enough to stand up to her mother, this one was it. But so far, every man General Mom had forcibly introduced to Kimmie had been less white knight and more yellow-bellied.

Not that Kimmie had room to talk.

“Kimberly.”

Kimmie’s shoulders hunched in. The live country music did nothing to mask her mother’s tone. It was the
I have a man who is being forced to meet you because it is your duty to get married so that one day you will have children who become the umpteenth generation to own Heaven’s Bakery
tone. Kimmie knew the tone well, as she’d been hearing it since her mother first introduced her to boys in preschool. Slowly—but not slowly enough to incur her mother’s wrath—Kimmie stood from her chair at a linen-draped table near the wall. “Hi, Mom.”

“Kimberly, this is Bruno.”

Bruno was tall, pierced, bearded, and broad-shouldered, with a studded leather jacket and pocket chain over his tuxedo pants. Obviously, General Mom was getting desperate. The wariness in Bruno’s squint reflected the likelihood that he’d rather sacrifice a goat in the middle of a fireball hailstorm than displease the woman who had rightfully earned the nickname
Queen General
, and he wasn’t certain how he’d ended up in her sights, but he knew he might not make it out alive.

Kimmie could relate.

“Bruno is a bodyguard, and he dabbles in guitar in his spare time,” General Mom said. “He’s also an excellent dancer.”

Yep, there it was.

The subtle
my daughter would love to bear the fruit of your loins
suggestion.

No matter how many men her mother introduced her to, Kimmie’s heart rate always spiked, nerves melted her brain, and her verbal filter switched into
off
mode. “I had a dream that whales invaded Bliss and tried to take over Heaven’s Bakery, but their fins were too slippery to handle the frosting bags, so they decided to teach belly-dancing lessons instead,” she blurted.

General Mom’s left eyelid twitched. Bruno’s uncertainty morphed to the usual
they’re
both
one stick short of a pound of butter
unease.

He wasn’t wrong.

“Kimberly made the wedding cake,” General Mom told Bruno. “Isn’t it lovely?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Bruno tugged at his collar.

“Kimmie!” Natalie Blue stepped into their group. “Excuse me, Marilyn, we need Kimmie for a minute. There’s a question about the cake and a nut allergy. Oh, and my dad was looking for you.”

Nat was dark-haired, strong-willed, and almost a head shorter than Kimmie. When she yanked on Kimmie’s arm, Kimmie went. “All these rock stars,” Nat said over her shoulder to General Mom. “So high maintenance.”

“Thanks,” Kimmie whispered.

Nat flashed a mischievous grin. “My absolute pleasure. And I have a schedule worked out with the guys so you have dance partners and buffers from your mother for the rest of the night. CJ’s up first.”

“Nat, you didn’t have to—”

“You deserve a chance to enjoy a wedding once in a while.
Without
hiding behind trees.”

Kimmie put her hands to her cheeks. Hiding behind Christmas trees was exactly how she had spent half of Natalie and CJ’s wedding in late December. “You weren’t supposed to know that.”

“C’mon. Have fun. Relax and be
you
for a while.”

The ballroom was packed with rich, fancy musicians who were here in Bliss to toast Mikey Diamond, a bad-boy country music drummer who had fallen hard for a local Bliss girl. Dahlia, the bride, was a good friend, but overall, these people weren’t Kimmie’s crowd.

Not that she had a crowd.

She had people who liked that she said funny things and who kept watch over her as if she were a three-year-old who couldn’t stand up to the hot stove. Or her mother.

“They’ll be cutting the cake soon,” Kimmie said. “I need to make sure everything’s ready.”

“Kimmie.”

Right. The caterers could handle the cake-slicing.

But cake didn’t set her up with men who smelled desperate enough to take her. Cake didn’t laugh at her dreams. Cake also didn’t think she needed a babysitter at a wedding. “It’ll just take a minute. I owe Dahlia that much.”

A loud squeal echoed through the room. “Nice, Billy!” somebody shouted.

Lots of laughter followed, and Nat turned toward the source of the sound.

Up on the small stage in the corner of the ballroom, Nat’s soon-to-be brother-in-law, Will—known to the rest of the world as country music sensation Billy Brenton—had snagged the microphone. “Evenin’, y’all.” He was the best man tonight, and he was doing a black tux the favor of making it look
amazing
. Though he’d gone without his signature brown ball cap during the wedding, now that he was on stage, the hat covered his curly hair, the bill pointed backwards. But it was his heart-stopping grin that made Kimmie sigh.

Kimmie, and half the women in North America.

“Dahlia, darlin’,” Will said into the microphone to the dark-haired bride, “welcome to the family. This one’s for you. And that big ol’ lughead you married too.” He grabbed a guitar, and the locals in attendance whooped with glee when he strummed the first chords.

Kimmie, though, took advantage of Nat’s distraction to slip quietly to the cake table.

It was the first naked wedding cake she had decorated. General Mom had been appalled at anything naked coming from Heaven’s Bakery, but nobody expected less of Mikey than to have a naked wedding cake. But when he asked for a groom’s cake that looked like a boob, Dahlia had put her foot down.

Kimmie had embraced the challenge of making the cake look beautiful without frosting or fondant on the outside. It was a simple three-tiered round cake, with two layers of frosting between three layers of Heaven’s Bakery’s signature white cake in each tier. Chocolate fudge buttercream on the bottom, cherry almond in the middle, and caramel hazelnut on top. She’d sprinkled the sides with powdered sugar to give them the right amount of texture, and then added fresh cherries and chocolate chunks for decoration.

For everything else in her life that was awkward, Kimmie loved baking cakes.

She straightened the silver cake knife and server, then the cake napkins. When she checked to make sure her mother was adequately distracted, though, she found herself facing a nightmare.

“Nice party,” said Josh Kincaid, aka the nightmare, aka Problem Playboy Number One, aka Half the Stick Up General Mom’s Butt.

Kimmie ducked.

She couldn’t help herself. She’d been ducking Josh for over a year. Except usually she ducked him before he’d seen her, or when she was surrounded by friends, or when she actually had a place to retreat to.

But he’d seen her, none of her friends were nearby to help, and hiding under the cake table wasn’t an option.

She never shook cake tables.

Under any circumstances.

“Drop something?” Josh said.

“I had a dream that wallabies were swinging from the sky, except the sky was this big underground tavern lined with wedding invitations made out of butterfly wings.”

Kimmie winced at herself. Not the time to get nervous.

His shoes—fancy leather wingtips—didn’t move. Nor did the undoubtedly expensive fabric in his suit pants.

Hallelujah for the music masking her words.

“I mean, yes,” Kimmie said, louder. “Yes. I dropped something. A—a button.” She duckwalked around him until she was closer to the dance floor, and closer to escape, peering intently at the floor. The air moved behind her.

Josh was squatting between her and the cake table.

His sandy hair was short but stylishly disheveled, his suit jacket hung open, and his deep-set blue eyes were trained on her with a spark of mischief quirking his otherwise straight brow and ridiculously perfect lips. “Those wallabies always were trouble.”

Kimmie’s feet tingled. Her inner elbows felt sweaty, and her belly fluttered.

He was the most handsome nightmare she had ever met.

Not that she was the only woman to ever think so. Nor would she be the last. And the Josh Juan—a step above Don Juan—had his pick of sophisticated, elegant, presentable,
normal
ladies.

Kimmie bolted upright. Her mother would crush Kimmie’s coriander if she knew how much time Kimmie had spent thinking about the Josh Juan. “Never mind. It’s not important.”

Josh ambled to his feet. “Depends on which button you lost.” His gaze rose with him—slow and captivating with a hooded laziness that made something pulse between her legs. The fabric of her simple blue dress felt invisible. Lava erupted in Kimmie’s cheeks. She had her fair share of inexperience when it came to men and nudity, but it seemed the Josh Juan was talking about her dress falling off.

A rare burst of irritation flared in her veins.

He
, after all, was the reason General Mom had stepped up her efforts to marry Kimmie off to the highest bidder.

Or, failing that, whoever would take her.

And that
whoever
wouldn’t be Josh. Whatever his reasons for looking at her like he wanted her naked couldn’t be good.

“I—you—who invited you?” she said.

Josh angled his head toward the dance floor. “Serenity.”

Kimmie studied the dancing women. She knew half of them—mostly Bliss natives—but none of the guests popped out at her as a
Serenity
.

“The flexible one,” he said.

The flexible—oh.
Oh
.

Kimmie tilted her head.

A short bottle-blonde in cowboy boots and a flesh-colored, rhinestoned minidress was dancing a half-limbo without a stick, pelvis out, shoulders shimmying.

Josh tucked his hands in his pockets and treated Kimmie to a slow grin. “Friend of the groom’s, I hear. She needed a last-minute date. And I needed a last-minute invite.”

Serenity
swung her body around and did the grind against another guest.

Kimmie sucked her lips into her mouth. She wasn’t the type of girl Josh went for. And it made her madder than her mother in a vat of sour frosting that she cared what kind of girls Josh liked.

He was
that
guy
who always had a supermodel—or four—on his arm. He never recognized anything unique in a woman. Or curvy. Or weird. Or less than perfect. His family owned the Sweet Dreams Snack Cake empire. He got to wear fancy Italian suits and date supermodels because of mass-produced cupcake-wannabes. No art. No beauty. Just the bottom line.

But the biggest reason Josh should’ve been off-limits in Kimmie’s romantic daydreams? He’d accidentally inherited half of Heaven’s Bakery last year. Then he’d committed the grievous sin of keeping his share instead of taking the buyout General Mom had commanded him to accept.

He was sort of Kimmie’s boss. And he wasn’t just a thorn in General Mom’s side—he was a whole stinking rosebush. If the rosebush were six feet of hunky, cake-blaspheming, rich playboy.

“Does my mother know you’re here?” Kimmie said.

“Does it matter?”

There were exactly three people in Bliss willing to cross Kimmie’s mother. Everyone else cowered before her, awaiting their instructions so they could scurry off to do the bridal bidding of the legendary Queen General of the bridal capital of the Midwest.

Kimmie generally joined the cowerers, mostly because it made her life easier. Josh didn’t, but then, he wasn’t a resident of Bliss. He lived in Chicago and only came here to yank General Mom’s frosting bags.

“There are two wonderful people getting married today,” Kimmie said. “If my mom sees you here, she’ll—”

“Paper the walls with my innards while the innocents watch?”

“Powder your sugar,” Kimmie replied. “And when she powders someone’s sugar,
everyone
gets dusted.”

His cheeks split into creases. “Your mother isn’t God.”

“In the absence of another person standing up as God, I prefer not to take any chances.” Technically, he was right. General Mom
wasn’t
God. But she was a nightmare to live with when she was displeased. “It would be nice of you to leave.”

His grin widened to show off a full set of perfect pearly whites, and something naughty danced in his eyes. He leaned back and perched on the edge of the cake table.

Kimmie squeaked. “Get off.
Get off!
” She grabbed his arm and tugged him off the table, but the buttery feel of his suit jacket and the subtle scent of undoubtedly expensive aftershave sent more lava shooting through her cheeks.

Not to mention what it did to her belly.

“Were you raised in a dog food factory?” she choked out.

“That almost sounded like your mother.”

She wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a compliment. “
Please
go,” she whispered.

“Went to a lot of trouble to talk to you. Don’t think leaving is in the cards until we’re done.”

Forget butterflies fluttering in her stomach.

Kimmie had a whole crew of sugared-up toddlers bouncing on trampolines in there. She gulped. Then her tongue got stuck at the back of her throat, and she almost choked on it.

“Okay there?” Josh asked, as natural as if women choked on their own tongues around him all the time.

They probably did, come to think of it.

Kimmie gripped the neck of her cotton dress and tried to fan herself with it. “Talk to
me
?” she finally squeaked out.

“I know where the magic comes from at Heaven’s Bakery. And it’s not your mother.” He winked at her. “You bake a mean cupcake.”

Oh,
pumplegunker
.

He knew.

He knew what she’d been up to with Dahlia in her spare time.