“Still no name?” he asked.

“Definitely not.”

Huh, that was very adamant. Now he really needed to figure out who she was.

“I don’t think it will be that hard to find out in Appleby,” he told her. “Gorgeous redhead with a big sweet tooth. It will probably take me two minutes.”

“You don’t need to know. Zoe can keep your mouth full of all the sweet stuff you could possibly want.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” he said, his voice a little husky and his gaze on her mouth. Aiden would kill him for thinking the things he was thinking right now if they were about Zoe.

But the redhead started to turn, then stopped again, quickly grabbed another cake pop, and then headed for the doors.

Grinning, he just watched her go. This time.

He was going to find her again.

Later, on his way out to his car, he saw a chocolate cake ball on one of the steps leading from the main doors to the sidewalk. He stopped and picked it up.

It had to be hers.

He smiled as he studied the little bite taken out of it.

Well, it wasn’t midnight, and this wasn’t a glass slipper, but he was feeling the urge to comb the town to find this girl.

He could probably even rent a white horse.

Move over, Prince Charming.

Of course, he didn’t need the ladies of the village “trying on” any cake pops. He’d recognize her immediately. He’d never mistake another woman for the redhead with the flashing blue eyes and the full lips he wanted to see curve into a sexy, mischievous smile almost as much as he wanted to taste them.

He really thought there was some mischief in her. He really thought he was the one who could bring it out.

He pulled his phone out and started to search for white horse rentals in the area. Then he sighed. Dammit, he could hear a voice in his head telling him he should probably start by asking Zoe who she was. That was a lot less fun, but it might be faster. And God forbid, more practical.

That voice definitely sounded like Grant’s. The bastard.

Still, Dax was grinning as he headed for his very impractical 1960 MGA Roadster in Old English White with black leather interior and classic silver wire wheels. It wasn’t a terrible replacement for a white horse.

He plopped his dark gray felt Frank Sinatra fedora on his head—the thing had seriously been worn by Frank in the movie The First Deadly Sin—and headed for his hotel.

Practical wasn’t his strong suit, it was true. But maybe the cake-pop goddess could use a little more impracticality in her life. In his experience, that was true for about 96 percent of the adult population in the United States.

He was just the guy to help.

 

 

1

 

 

“Is that a bouquet of cake pops?”

Jane was staring at the small silver metal bucket that had a dozen sticks poking out from it. Each stick had a red or white ball on the end. She felt a mix of resignation, amusement, and horror.

It was, indeed, a bouquet of cake pops.

Dammit.

“Seems to be,” she agreed with her friend and coworker, Max.

Max plucked one out of the bunch—they were close enough friends that he felt safe touching her sweets without permission—and bit into it. “Damn, these are good. Must be Zoe’s.” He grinned and took another. He popped the whole thing into his mouth.

“I found that putting a whole one in your mouth at once makes it hard to talk,” she said absently, thinking back to three nights ago.

She should probably be sick of cake pops by now, but she wasn’t. She so wasn’t. That was in part because her best friend was magical in the kitchen. It was also because cake balls now made her think of flirty, charming millionaires.

Max grinned around the cake. “When you’ve got a ball in your mouth, talking shouldn’t be your first priority.”

Jane snorted. She should have been expecting that. She clearly wasn’t fully focused this morning. “Well, you know more about having balls in your mouth than I do. It’s been a while.”

Max swallowed and wiped a hand over his beard to brush away any crumbs. “Yeah, well, I’ve gotta drive to find balls. You could have a set just by walking down the street.”

Being an openly gay man in a small Iowa town did have its drawbacks. Primarily that Max was in a very small minority.

Jane loved him like a brother. She did, sometimes, wish he had more of a filter though. He had an active, fun sex life he enjoyed immensely. And told her about in great detail. Which made her incredibly jealous. She loved sex. She wanted to have more of it. She just needed no-strings-attached sex and that was as hard to find in her small Iowa hometown as openly gay men.

The guys here who were her age wanted to settle down. They wanted wives and kids. Most of them already had jobs they were going to hold until they retired. They had homes. Many of them had farms and livestock, and a social life, and support network made up of family and friends they’d had since grade school. They just needed a wife to plug into the equation.

That’s what people did here. They settled down. Made lives. Raised families. Jane had no desire for that. She was plenty settled down with her father’s illness and trying to help her little sister not follow in the footsteps of their stepmother and stepsister. She didn’t need a husband. She definitely didn’t need children. She needed no more people who needed her.

But sex? Yeah, she kind of needed that.

Okay, she very much needed that.

“I want to go with you next time you drive to find balls,” she said to Max. “I need long-distance balls. The local balls, while plentiful, are way too serious.”

Max eyed the cake-pop display. “Did you send yourself this bouquet?”

Jane’s mouth dropped open. “I wouldn’t do that!” But her protest lacked conviction. She would do that. She’d just never thought of it.

“You’ve been substituting sugar for sex for a while now,” Max said. “Thought maybe you’d graduated to substituting cake balls for real balls, since we’re on the topic.”

She started to protest again but then looked at the cake pops. It wasn’t a terrible idea.

“No,” Max said. He grabbed the container of cake pops and held it out of her reach. “That’s a terrible idea.”

It was annoying how he could read her mind at times. A lot of the time, actually.

“Is it?” she asked. She started to reach for one. “I’m not so sure.”

“It is,” he said.

“You’re just afraid I’ll put on weight,” she said.

He looked her up and down. “Lady, I love your curves. Every man who meets you loves your curves. I’m not one bit worried about that.”

She smiled. She’d never been skinny. Or even thin. She had boobs and a butt and hips and, well, a deep and abiding love for baked goods. She’d never been apologetic about it either. She ran but not for her weight—though it did give her more wiggle room for treats—but because she was scared of getting sick like her dad.

The doctors assured her his progressive neurological condition, which they didn’t even have a specific name for, was most likely caused by pesticides and other environmental factors rather than genetics. But she couldn’t shake the anxiety around it. Or the idea that while she didn’t work directly with the chemicals like he had, she’d grown up in the area where they used those chemicals on the fields and knew they were in the air and probably in the water.