Cupid's Cupcake (3 page)

“What?” The word was out of her
mouth before she could catch it. Belle felt the heat rising in her cheeks. Things weren’t off to the most auspicious start. She felt slightly drunk, and she couldn’t get out of her own head even though a gorgeous guy was sitting two feet away from her.

“I asked you where the recipe came from.
On the phone, you alluded to the fact that it was a family recipe.” Brian put a small notebook on the counter next to the recorder. She could see a list of questions written down the page in a small, neat scrawl.

“It started out as my Grandma’s recipe,”
she said. She decided that she needed to keep her hands busy. Belle went to the refrigerator and pulled out the ingredients that she would need. Talking and baking at the same time felt easier. She didn’t have time to agonize over every word. “But I modified it a few times before landing on the current recipe.”

“You must be quite the baker.”

“Not really, or I mean, it didn’t start out that way. I used to bake every weekend when I went to my Grandma’s house. My mom worked two jobs to support me and my brother, and she shipped us over there so that Grandma could keep an eye on us while she was working. I don’t think Grandma knew what else to do with us. I’m amazed that I didn’t end up being five hundred pounds. She taught me everything she knew, but I didn’t appreciate it at the time. As soon as I hit junior high I talked my mom into letting me stay home by myself. It just wasn’t cool to hang out with Grandma anymore.”

She looked up at Brian and found he was watching her closely. “That sounds really sweet
and totally normal.”

Belle
shifted uncomfortably. It had been a long time since she had a man’s undivided attention. “Grandma only made this one cupcake at Valentine’s Day. I was the one who started calling it Cupid’s Cupcake. When I tweaked the recipe later, I kind of made it my own. It’s perfect, and it would be hard to top it, even though I am currently working on expanding the line.” Tiffany would be so proud that she managed to work the plug in so seamlessly.

“There’s more to
the story, I’m sure.” Brian’s eyes twinkled. “I want you to tell me the whole thing. Start at the beginning.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms as if daring her.

Belle
couldn’t keep the groan from emerging. “It is so lame.”

Brian laughed. “Let me be the judge of that. You bake and talk, and I promise
I’ll try hard not to interrupt.”

“It starts with a boy,” she
finally said. She couldn’t look at him. That part of the story was so humiliating when she said it out loud.

He nodded
sympathetically. “It always does, doesn’t it?”

“He broke up with me right before Valent
ine’s Day.” Belle kept her attention on the work her hands were doing. She tried to forget that he was even there. “My friends tried so hard to cheer me up, but at the time, I felt like I was losing the love of my life. I was inconsolable.” Belle still regretted that she and Danny Pickens broke up. Last she heard, he moved to Los Angeles to go to grad school. Danny had ambitious plans for his life, and it had always frustrated him that Belle had none.

“And this was when?”

“Five years ago. It was my senior year of college. So I was up to my elbows in the throes of a post-break-up cleaning frenzy when I came across a box with a bunch of stuff my mom gave me when I moved out after high school. One of the things in the box was an old cookbook my grandma made for me during one of my weekend visits. I just started flipping through it, and there was the recipe for Cupid’s Cupcake. She had crossed out the name on the page and written in the name that I gave it. For some reason, it made me feel better. So then I didn’t want to clean anymore. I decided to bake instead.”

“Can I help with a
nything?” Brian’s offer threw her off for a second.

“Nope, I’m good. I’m just making one
cupcake anyway.”

“One?” Brian looked pointedly at all of the utensils and bakeware spread around him
on the island. “You need all of this to make just one cupcake?”

“
It’s not Valentine’s Day yet,” Belle said with a grin. “I don’t make them except the day before Valentine’s Day. Consider yourself lucky that I’m breaking tradition for you.”

Brian threw up his hands
in mock surrender. “Okay. Unusual, but okay.”

“You want me to keep going?” She
took another sip of wine and waggled a spatula under his nose. She couldn’t believe it, but she was starting to enjoy herself. Brian was easy to talk to, and he didn’t seem to think her story was silly at all.

“Please.”

It took a moment for Belle to pick back up the thread of the story. She covered it by turning on the mixer. “So I made the first batch, and they were good. They were close to what I remembered. But they weren’t great. I happened to be taking a chemistry class at the time, and I became obsessed with the idea of making the perfect Valentine cupcake and turning Cupid’s Cupcake into this extraordinary dessert that would someday make me famous. I made probably a dozen more batches going through several variations of the recipe before I hit on what I was missing.”

“Which was?”

Belle shook her finger at him. “I’m not giving up my trade secret. Nobody knows the secret ingredient, not even my best friend.” She had the batter all prepared and then she put a single wrapper into the pan. She carefully poured the mixture into the cup.

“So you’ve managed to perfect a cupcake recipe. That’s cool,” Brian said. “But let’s get to the good stuff. You gave your perfect cupcakes away, and they were so good that
, for some reason, they spurred men to drop to their knees and propose in fits of sugary goodness.”

“You make it sound like I’m
some kind of fairy godmother,” Belle scoffed. She wiped her hands against her apron after putting the pan into the oven. Then she grabbed her glass of wine again. She knew that she should sit down, but with nothing to occupy her hands, she was now nervous again.

Brian glanced at his notebook.
“Fifteen couples say that a proposal occurred the very night they had one of your cupcakes. You have to admit, that sounds like a pretty big coincidence. That’s not a fairy godmother. That’s an honest to goodness Cupid in my book.”

“
If you say fifteen then I guess I have to believe you. I gave cupcakes to my friends. Every year after that, my friends, their friends, and their friends’ friends are asking for cupcakes. So there are people I’ve never even met who have received one. I can’t say what happens after they leave my kitchen, so I guess it’s possible.” Belle felt warm. She couldn’t tell if the reason was the heat in the kitchen, the wine, or Brian’s intense stare.

“With the growing popularity of your cupcake, I’m surprised that you haven’t gone into business for yourself
yet.”

“Now y
ou just sound like my friend,” Belle said. She slumped onto the stool next to him. “Like I said earlier, I’m looking into expanding the line, but I haven’t had time to do that yet. This year will be the most I’ve ever made. I’ve gotten enough orders to send out ten dozen cupcakes. But really, I make one perfect cupcake one time per year. That does not a business make.”

Brian shrugged. “With that kind of attitude, you
aren’t going to get anywhere.”

Now
Belle was annoyed. Someone that she didn’t even know was making judgments about her life. She slammed the last few ounces of wine down and pulled the bottle toward her to pour another glass. “I’m a realist.”

“That surprises me. A woman who bakes Valentine’s Day cupcakes
that seem to prompt spontaneous proposals doesn’t want to buy into the romantic notion that life could bring unexpected surprises?”

“How about we keep things focused less on me and more on the
cupcake?” Belle was saved by the ding of the oven. Her cupcake was done. She hurried over the oven, eager for the distraction. “I just need to let this cool, and then I can decorate it.”

“So what do we do in the mean
time?” Brian asked expectantly.

Suddenly
Belle found that couldn’t draw her eyes away from his lips. She could think of all sorts of things that they could do, but none of them were appropriate. She grabbed the wine bottle. “Let’s go sit outside for a few minutes. It’s feeling a little warm in here.”

She led Brian out onto the concrete patio
in the backyard and slid into one of the seats around the wicker table. Brian sat down across from her. The trees lining the backyard blocked the descending sun, and she could hear the insects just starting their evening songs.

“You seem nervous,” Brian said. He sat back in the chair, b
ut he was watching her closely.

“It’s not every
day I have an interview for the paper,” she said honestly. “You must run into that all the time.”

Brian sh
ook his head. “Usually I can’t get people to shut up when I’m interviewing them. They see me and the story I’m writing about them as a means to some end. You aren’t so easy to read.”

“I don’t like talking about myself,”
Belle said. “I don’t think I’m that interesting.”

“Everyone has a story. In my work, you find out that everyone is interesting. It’s just what is the interesting part of their lives is different depending on who you are talking to. Give yourself some credi
t.”

Belle
refused to believe him. “You’re just being nice.” Brian looked perplexed. Belle took another sip of wine.

“So what caused the breakup? The break-up that led
to this miraculous discovery.”

“I don’t want you to write about that,”
Belle said, looking everywhere but at Brian.

“Scout’s honor that I’m just ma
king conversation,” Brian said.

Belle
sighed. “We wanted different things.”

“Obviously you loved him.”

“I did,” Belle said. “But love doesn’t solve every problem. Danny was going places, and he didn’t want to be held back.”

“He thought yo
u were going to hold him back?”

Danny’s hurtful words
during their break-up floated through her mind. “I was having a kind of existential crisis at the time. I was a senior in college, but I didn’t have any idea of what I really wanted to be. So I was floating through life. We had been dating for two years. I was such an idiot. I thought that he was going to propose on Valentine’s Day. But instead, he broke my heart two days beforehand. Danny said a rudderless girlfriend would make a dead weight wife.”

“He a sailor or something?”

A laugh escaped Belle’s lips. “He was in the school rowing club.”

“
He sounds like an ass,” Brian said.

Belle thought it was sweet that Brian seemed so concerned about her feelings.
“Thanks, but he was right. I needed a plan.”

“So
Cupid’s Cupcake is your plan?”

Belle
had no idea what her plan was. She finished her glass and then stood. “We should probably go inside. It should be ready now.”

Over the ne
xt ten minutes, Brian watched her decorate her cupcake. Belle tried to ignore him as he took pictures from all angles and asked an incessant amount of questions about what she was doing. Finally, it was done. She set it on a plate and put it in front of him.

“It’s a very nice looking
cupcake,” he said. Belle could tell that he was trying to be serious, but the corners of his lips were twitching.

Belle wondered if she had been wrong about him. He had been so nice throughout the interview, but now she felt like he wasn’t taking
her seriously. “Why are you here?” The wine had gone to her head. Her filter was quickly disappearing.

“I’m pretty sure we established that I was d
oing an interview,” Brian said.

“You
hardly ever do stories like this anymore. This is a fluff story for a fluff holiday that I am pretty sure that you, being a guy, probably doesn’t even care about. Why are you really here?”

“So you read my stuff.” Brian
said, clearly trying to change the subject. He seemed perplexed.

“Everyone reads your stuff,”
Belle said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve been writing that kind of hard hitting investigative kind of stuff probably trying to win some kind of fancy journalistic prize. You won’t be winning any of those writing about cupcakes, by the way.”

She
had his attention, but not in a good way. He was frowning. That couldn’t be a good thing.

“
You know what? I actually need to go. I forgot I have another appointment. If you don’t mind, I’ll just take this with me,” Brian said. He took the plate and stood.

“That’s my friend’s plate,”
Belle sputtered. She realized that she had probably crossed a line. Insulting the person writing a story about her was a stupid move. She couldn’t let him leave on that note.

“I’ll return it.”
Brian was already moving toward the front door before she could say anything else.