Sugarlips (Beefcakes Book 2), Katana Collins [ebook smartphone .TXT] 📗

“You helped make those?” Neil asked, and his brows shot up higher.

“Helped being a ‘relative’ term,” I clarified, rubbing the back of my neck before glancing back at Chloe, still dangling off my shoulders.

“Why didn’t you tell him I helped!” Chloe cried.

“Neil and I, uh, didn’t really talk much that night,” I told her.

Understatement of the year. I arrived at his cabin, handed him the box of donuts. He gave me a beer, and we watched the game in silence until I went home. So much for Chloe’s brilliant plan for breakup donuts being therapeutic.

“Come on, Neil. I am jobless, fiancé-less—”

“And donut-less.” He crossed his arms, and I rolled my eyes. God, he was such a hard ass.

“Dude, go home. It’s Friday and I know you and Jude have a call scheduled to…” I glanced at Chloe, unsure how much she knew about the gig that Neil was taking out of the country. “Discuss details.” Neil had taken a job as a stunt coordinator on Jude Fisher’s latest film… happening in Budapest. He had worked in Hollywood as Jude’s stuntman for years before moving back here to help us with the bakery when Mom was diagnosed with cancer. Though I wasn’t sure, I had my suspicions that the freelance gig on a different continent likely contributed to his and Elaina’s breakup. “I’ll handle closing up tonight.”

“You sure?”

I shrugged. “As long as you come in tomorrow in a better mood and don’t care where the unsold items go today.”

Neil rolled his eyes and tugged the apron off his bare chest, shoving his head and arms into a t-shirt behind the counter. “See ya,” he said, heading toward the door.

“Well, he’s a joy.” Chloe stuck her tongue out at him from behind the closed door.

“He’s having a bad week,” I said and finished closing out the register.

“Yeah? Well, so am I! At least his breakup resulted in winning half a million dollars. My breakup, on the other hand, left me without a job. And the stupid jobs I’m interviewing for are boring and lame and stupid.”

“You said stupid twice.”

She threw her hands in the air. “Well, that’s how stupid they are!”

I set the napkin with the donut and Pop-Tart on the table, and she plopped back down in her chair, breaking off a corner of the pastry.

“I take it the interviews didn’t go well?”

She sighed. “One was … fine. Until they asked me why I was passionate about real estate marketing. And I said… Uh, um, I guess because I own a house.”

I winced. “Not exactly the answer they were looking for?”

“Shockingly, no. Owning a house with your cheating ex-fiancé is not reason enough to passionately want to sign on as the marketing manager for a real estate company.” She shook her head, dipping her finger into the chocolate frosting and licking it off. “Thing is… I did my research. I had all these adorable ideas to grow their client base. I was going to set them up to partner with a bakery—” she paused, gesturing to me. “Like yours. And mail cookies in these little boxes shaped like homes to people interested in selling or buying property. I had this idea to turn their open houses into elegant gatherings to bring higher income clients. Offer champagne and cheese to people coming in. Hire a violinist to play in the house for mood music while potential buyers walk around.” She sighed, slumping into her seat. “But when they asked me about passion, I deflated right in front of them.”

I reached over, breaking off a piece of the sugar-free Pop-Tart I made. “Which is weird… because it does sound like you’re passionate about it,” I said, gauging her expression as I spoke. Her whole face lit up when she talked about those ideas.

“I am! That’s the thing! I really had fun coming up with those ideas. But when I think about only working on real estate… only coming up with marketing ideas for one type of company… ugh. I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Maybe it’s for the best I didn’t tell them my plans for the company. There’re really no intellectual property rights on ideas like that. They could steal them and hire someone else to implement them entirely and I’d have no recourse for that. It’s a catch-22 when you work in creative fields.”

“So… now what?”

“I need to look online again. Scour the web for job openings and hope there’s one within a commutable distance.”

“And if there are no jobs around here?”

She shrugged. “I guess I’ll have to move. Or take a job I really hate.”

“Why not make your own consulting company here?”

Chloe snorted and flipped her silky blond hair over her shoulder. “My sister said the same thing. But who in Maple Grove would hire me to market for them? I mean, really.”

There were tons of businesses in Maple Grove that needed her marketing brain—Beefcakes included. We were already in over our head, and now that Neil’s reality show had ended, we could potentially see a drop off in business if we weren’t careful.

I cleared my throat and leaned back in my seat, folding my arms. “Out of curiosity, what would you do for a business like ours?”

“For Beefcakes?” Her gaze narrowed at me for a moment. “Well, you already have a huge fan base—not only because of the reality show, but because of that viral video with him and Elaina.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth, deep in thought as her gaze roamed the inside of our bakery. Her eyes slid slowly back to mine, narrowed to slits. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”

“Well, I’d start with the easy stuff… your social media.”

My brows dipped. “I thought I was doing pretty damn well with our social media.”

She snorted, a scoffing sound. “You’re doing Facebook well. But there’s a whole land outside of the book of faces to market on. Your target audience is bachelorettes—younger