“You have to be sure that everything is soft and warm and ready,” Cam agreed. “But you also don’t want to go too fast when it comes to the sticky stuff.” He removed his saucepan of chocolate from the burner and turned to the cookie crust he’d made a few minutes ago. “It’s okay to take it slow,” he said, letting his voice drop as well as he poured the chocolate over the crust. “There’s no need to rush. The firm parts and the soft parts need to come together easy.”

Max, on the other hand, did snort, the sound loud in his mic. The crowd laughed.

“I’m with you,” Max said. “Sometimes slow is the way to go. But if you get things firm enough before you even start the sticky stuff, you don’t have to be overly gentle.” He winked at the crowd. “Of course I mean the crust of this caramel crunch bar. You want that crust firm enough so it doesn’t fall apart when you’re… eating it.” That little pause before “eating it” definitely made those two words sound very dirty.

Cam loved it. Max was a ton of fun.

Cam nodded with a grin. “Though, honestly, things… coming apart…” He used that same pause and tone. “Once I get my hands on them isn’t that unusual.”

“So you… make a mess?” Max asked. “When you’re baking?” He said baking with a tone that clearly conveyed I-do-not-mean-baking.

“Hey, as long as the good stuff gets to my mouth, I’m absolutely okay with a little mess,” Cam returned with a grin.

Max gave him a nod. “I’m with you on that, brother.”

The crowd was completely with them. Grinning and laughing and nudging each other and whispering. Cam and Max were doing everything Whitney had asked—baking while making it fun and a little sexy but still family-appropriate since the innuendo would go over kids’ heads.

He glanced around again, trying to not seem obvious. Where the hell was she? She was missing all the fun. And why did he get the impression that was pretty usual for her?

He spotted her, and her ugly skirt, over by the alpaca pen.

She was choosing alpacas over watching him be funny and charming and kick ass at baking?

Well, she could run, but she couldn’t hide. Their conversation about getting back together—okay, he’d been the only one talking about that, but she’d been there—was not over.

“This doesn’t look right.”

Cam and Max glanced over at Ollie. Ollie wasn’t doing as well with the sexy innuendo and bro-banter. He had been far too preoccupied with following the recipe he’d been given. Piper had assured them that Ollie had practiced it prior, but he was clearly not a natural in the kitchen.

That made some sense. Ollie was a big-picture guy, much less concerned with details. Like the difference between a quarter tsp and a half tsp.

That was because the rest of them, including Piper, took care of that stuff for him.

So Ollie baking, in front of the whole town, was kind of a bad idea.

But very entertaining.

“What do you mean?” Cam asked, peering over at Ollie’s kitchen center.

Cam was in the middle—as he should be, in his opinion—and could see that the filling for the lemon bars Ollie was supposed to be putting together did, indeed, look odd.

As in, it was brown and not yellow. For one thing.

Ollie scooped up a spoonful of the brown liquid and then let it dribble back into the pan.

Yeah, that wasn’t right. It was the consistency of soup.

“Well, someone has to be the loser,” Max said, lifting one huge shoulder. “Better you than me.”

Ollie looked over at him. He was wearing his black rimmed glasses and a t-shirt that said I paused my game to be here. He didn’t always wear glasses, but Piper and Whitney had decided that Ollie should play up the “hot nerd” role—definitely their words, not Cam’s. Ollie was a nerd. In some ways, anyway. But Cam had always gotten the impression that women were drawn to his creativity and adventurous side more than his intellect. Or his glasses. Ollie was brilliant and very interesting, as long as you were talking about things he was interested in. He had the attention span of a fifth grader. But he was a hell of a lot of fun. And he always wanted to try new things, do more, go places. That was probably part of that short-attention-span thing, but he was always the one saying “let’s see what happens” and “no reason not to try it.”

He wasn’t quite as over the top as Dax. He also wasn’t the goofball that loved to make people laugh. He didn’t jump out of airplanes, buy a racehorse, or fly to Japan on a whim for the story or the YouTube video like Dax did. Ollie did the things he did for the experience of it.

Fortunately he’d found Dax to be there beside him so he wasn’t wandering in foreign countries alone. Or maybe unfortunately. Ollie had never had an idea that Dax hadn’t said, “hell yes, I’m in” too.

“Can we fix this?” Ollie asked Cam.

He seemed oblivious to the audience watching them.

Cam took pity on his friend though. “I think you just need to start over. You have to stir it the whole time.” Clearly the sugar had burned.

Ollie sighed. “The whole time?”

“Yep.” Cam tried not to grin.

Ollie turned to the audience. “I’ll give someone a hundred bucks to come up here and stir this for me.”

Cam rolled his eyes. He even had to make stirring a big deal?

There was a small shift in the front row toward the stage, but Aiden stepped forward and turned to face the crowd.

“That’s against the rules,” he said. “The guys each have to do all of their own baking.”

Now see? Shouldn’t Whitney be over here enforcing the rules?

Cam glanced toward the alpacas again. She was now petting one of their noses. Surely she could hear what was going on over here though. At least the stuff he and Max and Ollie were saying into the mics. Like that Ollie was trying to cheat.

“Yep, do it yourself, Caprinelli,” Cam said, focusing on toasting his coconut.

Whitney is kind of toasting my coconut right now, he thought to himself.

“If you want anyone bidding on you, you better get going too,” Max said, folding the “crunch” part of the caramel crunch bars into his own melted chocolate.

“I’ll still bid on you, Ollie!” a female voice called from the crowd.

“I don’t need cookies! Just you!” another woman called.

“Yeah, I can get cookies anywhere!” someone else added.

Cam glanced over at his friend with a grin. Ollie pushed his glasses up his nose and looked out at the crowd.

“Well, in that case…” he started.

“Just make your stupid bars!” another woman called.

This voice Cam knew though. It was Piper.

He found her standing a few people back. She was easy to spot. She was wearing bright yellow today. As always, she stood out. In a very good way. Piper Barry wasn’t like the other girls in Appleby. She was funny and smart and blunt as well as incredibly capable and organized, keeping them all in line with barely an effort. Seemingly, anyway. Yet she had this high-maintenance way of putting herself together and an I-know-who-I-am-and-what-I-want air about her that kept her just shy of being completely down to earth.