Fading To Embers

Chapter One

As promised, I'm back with a brand new book! Super excited for this one and hope you guys enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The holiday season was always my favorite time of the year. It was as if the last three months of the year collectively (and mercifully, thank God) decided to come together in a swirl of Halloween candy, stuffed turkeys, and Christmas decorations, to try and make us forget the shit show that was the other nine months of our lives. It was just something about this time of year that put even the Eeyore's of our society in the best of moods.

It just so happened that the holiday season was also the busiest time of the year at Sugar & Spice, my bakery and for all other intents and purposes, my baby that I'd put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into building from the ground up and watching flourish over the last two years.

Halloween had just ended the week before and we were already up to our necks in orders from people requesting desserts for Thanksgiving. Knowing how busy we were at the end of the year, a lot of our regulars placed orders months in advance to ensure they got their baked goods in time, which I found to be both a blessing and a curse.

The shop had closed for the day hours ago, night having already draped her navy blanket across the sky with a dusting of stars for a little extra razzle dazzle, a rare sight given that usually the light pollution from the city usually blocked them out.

The rest of the staff were long gone, which only left me to burn the midnight oil in the kitchen at the back of the bakery. I was currently working on the finishing touches of a batch of pumpkin spice cookies with cream cheese frosting and brown sugar crumbles that a customer had placed at the beginning of October.

Looking around, you'd have thought a bomb had gone off back here. Several mixing bowls lay strewn across the silver tabletop, each with a different batter and frosting dripping down the sides and onto the cold surface of the table. A bag of chocolate chips lay open to my right, several of the small pieces spilling out of the bag.

What was I even using those for again?

To my left lay a number of mixing spoons, whisks, and a half-melted stick of butter. There was also a measuring cup that looked the same as it did the day I bought it. I pulled it out every time I baked thinking one day, I would finally find a recipe that would force me to use it but, that day hadn't come yet. When it came to measuring ingredients...I didn't.

I simply felt. I knew by holding it in my hand how much salt to add or how much milk to pour in.

Call it a baker's intuition if you will.

Stepping slightly to the left to finish mixing the last batch of batter, I cringed as my shoe landed in something that looked suspiciously like a deformed gingerbread man. (I may or may not have been playing around with a new recipe for Christmas.) And to add insult to injury, I currently had flour in places flour should never be.

I had agreed to let Kimberly, the woman who'd placed the order, pick up her cookies a few hours before we opened tomorrow because she needed to bring them to her office for an "uber-important business meeting".

She had placed an order for the same exact cookies a few months ago and apparently her boss and the entire office had fallen in love with them. A fact that seemed to go a long way for her as she was in the running for a promotion at work and she'd be damned if she let "that scheming bitch Amy" take it from her.

At least that's what she told me when she was begging me to let her come in at the ass crack of dawn to pick up these damn cookies. Me being the pushover that I was, it only took two "pretty pleases" before I had agreed.