The Icing on the Cake Read online

  The Icing on the Cake

  An Otter Bluff Romance

  Linda Seed

  This is a work of fiction. Any characters, organizations, places, or events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  THE ICING ON THE CAKE

  Copyright © 2020 by Linda Seed

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  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite e-book retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

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  The author is available for book signings, book club discussions, conferences, and other appearances.

  Linda Seed may be contacted via e-mail at [email protected] or on Facebook at www.facebook.com/LindaSeedAuthor. Learn more about Linda Seed’s novels at www.lindaseed.com.

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  Cover design by Kari March.

  Created with Vellum

  By Linda Seed

  The Main Street Merchants

  Moonstone Beach

  Cambria Sky

  Nearly Wild

  Fire and Glass

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  The Delaneys of Cambria

  A Long, Cool Rain

  The Promise of Lightning

  Loving the Storm

  Searching for Sunshine

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  The Russo Sisters

  Saving Sofia

  First Crush

  Fixer-Upper

  Loving Benny

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  Otter Bluff

  The Icing on the Cake

  Christmas in Cambria

  Love and Joy

  Then, Now, and Always

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Read more by Linda Seed

  Chapter 1

  Cassie Jordan appreciated the merits of a good kitchen, and the one in which she stood was top-notch: acres of granite countertop, a double convection oven, a layout that made it easy to pivot from refrigerator to sink to stove, and a refrigerator big enough to accommodate a small restaurant.

  She gloried in the luxury of it as she laid out flour, butter, sugar, and all of the other ingredients for her famous champagne cake.

  Okay, maybe the cake wasn’t famous.

  And maybe she’d lose her job if anyone knew she was here.

  The cake would be famous someday—she was sure of it. And nobody had to know about her illicit use of the kitchen at Otter Bluff.

  Cassie preheated the oven and used the big KitchenAid mixer—another thing offered at Otter Bluff that she didn’t have at home—and creamed together butter and sugar. She added three eggs, one at a time, then a teaspoon of vanilla. The batter whirred and blended in the stainless steel bowl.

  Cassie usually wasn’t one to flout the rules, especially when it threatened her livelihood. But she needed to get this cake done, and she was desperate.

  It wasn’t like she could bake, assemble, and decorate a three-tiered wedding cake in her Airstream trailer, and she didn’t have anywhere else to do it. Her parents’ kitchen was small, and worse than that, it was always packed with people—her siblings, her nieces and nephews, her mother’s book group, and her father, who always seemed to be puttering around looking for snacks. That was fine when she was just whipping up a batch of cookies, but this cake was important.

  This cake was going to launch her career as a baker.

  At least, that was the plan.

  She’d gotten the idea to use the kitchen at Otter Bluff when the family who’d been planning to rent the house for the month of April had canceled at the last minute. Cassie’s boss, who ran Central Coast Escapes, was scrambling to find another renter, but until he did, the house was going to be empty.

  Cassie had been in the house to clean it after the last guests had gone, and she’d had the idea of borrowing the place just long enough to get the cake done. Who would it harm? She would leave the house spotless, and no one would ever know she’d been here.

  She’d done plenty of wedding cakes as favors for friends and family, but this was the first one she was actually being paid to bake. If all went well, the bride and groom’s guests would be impressed, and they’d ask for referrals for their own events.

  Wedding cakes weren’t going to pay enough for her to quit her job cleaning and maintaining vacation rentals—at least, not at first—but eventually, who knew?

  Carefully, Cassie combined flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and added them to the mixture. While the mixer whirred, she thought about Otter Bluff.

  In the plus column were the location—perched atop a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, with breathtaking views and the sounds of barking sea lions—and the newly renovated kitchen. In the minus column was the fact that only the kitchen had been renovated before the owner had either run out of money or had lost interest. The rest of the house hadn’t been updated since it was built in the 1970s.

  The harvest gold bathroom fixtures had been installed well before Cassie was born, and there they still were, like some kind of museum exhibit of an earlier, more innocent America.

  Then there was the shag carpeting in the master bedroom. Who knew what microbes lived there, even after a good shampooing?

  The overall result was that Otter Bluff was a popular rental among people who were willing to put up with the shabby bathrooms, bedrooms, and living room in order to get the spectacular view at a relative bargain.

  Cassie was mixing buttermilk and champagne in another bowl, preparing to add them to the batter, when her cell phone rang on the counter.

  Her boss.

  “Hi, Elliot.” Cassie attempted to sound both perky and honest, like someone who would never use a house that wasn’t hers.

  “Cassie. Where are you?”

  “Oh. I’m at my parents’ place. Did you need something?” The lie fell out of her mouth with disturbing ease.

  “Yes. The Taylors left D
olphin Dreams early, and I wondered if you could get over there and clean it.”

  Dolphin Dreams was a ridiculously named house in the Seaclift Estates neighborhood—four bedrooms, three bathrooms, partial ocean view. It was a nice place, but Cassie imagined some clients were put off by the name alone.

  “But I have this afternoon off,” Cassie protested.

  “I know that, and I’m sorry, but the incoming renters want to arrive early, and now that the Taylors have left, there’s no reason they can’t—except that the house hasn’t been cleaned yet.”

  Cassie had forgotten to turn off the mixer, and it was still whirring away in the background.

  “What’s that sound?” Elliot wanted to know.

  Cassie switched off the machine. “Oh … it’s a mixer. I’m baking a cake.”

  “Weren’t you just complaining yesterday that your mixer is broken?”

  Oh, shit. Yes, she’d done that.

  “I … got a new one.” She closed her eyes tightly and prayed silently for forgiveness of her misdeeds.

  “Ah. Well. Be that as it may.” It was Elliot’s favorite phrase: Be that as it may. She’d heard it from him so many times that it ceased to have any meaning—if it ever had meaning in the first place.

  “It’s my afternoon off, Elliot,” she said again. Not that it would do any good. Elliot didn’t respect days off, and he didn’t respect people’s personal lives. Come to think of it, he didn’t seem to respect Cassie, either.

  “If I have to call Rebecca in, I might just let her continue on full-time.”

  And there it was. The threat. Rebecca was their backup housecleaner, and she’d been wanting to take over Cassie’s job for months.

  Cassie spent a happy moment imagining herself pushing Elliot down a flight of stairs, or perhaps off a cliff.

  “Okay. I’ll do it,” she said.

  “Wonderful. I’ve already told the new tenants they can check in at four.”

  Cassie looked at the time. It was just past one p.m. She could finish the batter, put it in the refrigerator, then go over to Seaclift Estates and clean Dolphin Dreams in time to get back here and finish baking the cake. She’d freeze the layers and begin decorating tomorrow. She still had three days until the wedding.

  Irritated, she told Elliot, “You could at least thank me.”

  “I would think your paycheck is reward enough,” Elliot said, and hung up.

  Brian Cavanaugh peered into the hole that had been cut into the drywall in his master bathroom, already certain that nothing inside there was going to be good. His black lab, Thor, sat at his side and whined in sympathy.

  “See that?” Ray, his contractor, pointed a finger into the hole, his hand roughened by manual labor. “You’ve got a mold problem.”

  Brian squinted through his thick-framed glasses at the black substance that had been growing within his walls. “That doesn’t look good.”

  “It’s not. You want to know what else isn’t good? You’ve also got termites.”

  “I do?”

  Ray drew a cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up a photo of a wooden beam full of long, ragged holes. “I took this in the crawl space under your house. I figured you wouldn’t want to go down there to see for yourself.”

  “Very thoughtful.”

  Brian had hired Ray to do some renovations in his bathroom because he was planning to sell the house, and his Realtor said he’d be leaving money on the table if he didn’t fix it up a little. That was the Realtor’s exact phrase: leaving money on the table.

  Brian was getting the sense that he might have neither money nor a table when all of this played out.

  “I assume neither of those things is going to be cheap,” Brian said.

  “You assume right,” Ray said, then laughed. The bastard actually laughed.

  At least somebody here was having a good time.

  By the time Ray left, Brian had the general outline of his situation. Not only were the repairs on his house going to be expensive, they were also going to take time. The place would have to be tented, the termite-damaged beams would have to be replaced, the leaky pipe that had caused the mold would have to be fixed, and it was likely the mold couldn’t just be cleaned away—Ray would have to cut out and replace drywall, studs, and flooring.

  Add to that the fact that Ray wasn’t going to be able to start the job for another two weeks.

  “Oh, my goodness, no. You can’t just sell the house as is.” Barbara, Brian’s Realtor, scoffed at the very thought when he called and told her about Ray’s findings. “Any offer that’s made on your house is going to rescinded when they get the inspection. And I’ll tell you something else: You can’t stay there in the meantime. Black mold is no joke.”

  Yeah, Ray had said. So now Brian and Thor were facing temporary homelessness on top of the huge expense of making his house livable—and sellable.

  He had savings. He wasn’t broke. But he couldn’t throw his money around like there would be an endless supply of it. His YouTube income was pretty good right now, but he couldn’t count on that continuing forever. It wasn’t as though he had job security. And he would need a healthy bank account to qualify for a mortgage on a new house.

  Paying for the repairs would be bad enough. Now he had to pay rent on a temporary place to live, too.

  Unless …

  He could always ask his mother for help.

  Brian had a vicious argument with himself after Ray had gone as he stared into the hole at the black mold.

  I’m not going to call her. I am NOT going to call her.

  Of course I’m going to call her. Why wouldn’t I call her?

  In the end, he called her.

  “Otter Bluff?” Lisa asked, as though she owned dozens of beachside rental houses and couldn’t quite place the one Brian was talking about. “Well, yes, it’s vacant at the moment. But I was hoping the rental agency would find me a tenant, because I rely on the income from that property.”

  Lisa Barlow did not rely on the income from Otter Bluff—she just wanted Brian to grovel and pledge his eternal gratitude if she let him use it. He weighed the pros and cons. Living in his car with his dog would be cramped and inconvenient, but the idea took on a certain appeal when he considered the hoops his mother was going to force him to jump through before she would agree to help him.

  Screw it. He could crash on somebody’s couch. He could take shelter under an overpass.

  “Never mind then, Mom. I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “Well, now, not so fast.”

  Brian closed his eyes and prayed for patience. “But you just said—”

  “I said I was hoping the rental company could find a tenant. But they haven’t yet, have they? I suppose you could use the house, just for the time being,” Lisa said.

  “Mom, thank you. I—”

  “Of course, if they find someone, I’ll need you to move out.”

  “But—”

  “And maybe you can do some small repairs while you’re there.”

  “Okay, but—”

  “Though I don’t know why I should do this for you at all, considering how seldom you call me or visit.”

  “Maybe because I’m your son and I have nowhere to live?” he suggested.

  “Oh, Brian, dear, don’t be dramatic,” Lisa said. “You know where I keep the spare key.”

  Chapter 2

  By the time Cassie finished cleaning Dolphin Dreams, she was dirty and sweaty. She weighed the idea of going home to shower and change her clothes before returning to Otter Bluff to finish baking the cake, but that presented a number of problems.

  For one thing, there was no way she’d be able to go into her Airstream in her parents’ backyard, shower, change her clothes, and get out again without being noticed. Her mother would see her from the kitchen window, and once that happened, Cassie would get drawn into any number of conversations, household chores, bits of family drama, and obligations.

  Her aunt and uncle were visiti
ng from the Bay Area, and that meant even more peril than usual. Cassie’s mother would insist that she go into the house, join them for dinner, then recount the details of her life for her relatives over olallieberry pie and ice cream.

  The pie and ice cream had a certain appeal—as did spending time with her aunt and uncle, whom Cassie loved—but it would mean she would not get back to Otter Bluff that evening, and that meant the cake wouldn’t get baked in time for her to begin decorating it tomorrow.

  There was no way she would be able to apply hundreds of buttercream roses before Saturday if she didn’t stay on track.

  With that in mind, she opted to return to Otter Bluff and shower later.

  But once she was there, Cassie lifted her arms over her head to get something out of a high cupboard in the kitchen, and she offended herself with her own aroma.

  Okay, the shower wasn’t optional.

  She didn’t have any spare clothes here, but that was okay. She could wrap herself in a towel and put her things into the washing machine while the cake was baking.

  Cassie felt a twinge of guilt as she went into the master bathroom, stripped down, and got into the circa-1970s shower with its powder blue fixtures and cracked grout. It was one thing to use the kitchen in a house where she didn’t belong—it was another to be naked in that house. But no one would ever know, would they? She would scrub the shower before she left. She would mop the water off the floor. She would leave things better than she’d found them, just as she always did as an employee of Central Coast Escapes.