“Tell him yourself.” I stopped at the office door, turned, and looked at her. “Now he’s blaming me that you’re never stopping around at his place.”

“Well, then tell him he doesn’t pay me to be around and he doesn’t have huge bowls of homemade frosting at his house,” she returned.

This was true.

I grinned at her and disappeared into my tiny office, taking a bite of her as delicious as it looked cupcake.

Totally Tessa’s Cakes.

Once I got over the orgasmic taste sensation of chocolate cake and whipped mocha frosting with a hint of orange, I took in my tiny office.

My life was a mess because of outside factions. My home was never a mess. And this now meant that Brock’s home was never a mess.

I had to admit to one drawback. Having Brock meant having two houses to clean.

Brock didn’t clean. In fact, Brock didn’t like it when I cleaned.

When I asked, Brock informed me that, in the past, he kept his pad clean mostly by not living in it and therefore it wasn’t really clean. It was just that he wasn’t around to see the dust accumulating. Things occasionally got cleaned when his mother popped by. This, I’d realized, was something she did that was essentially taking care of a forty-five-year-old man that he didn’t mind. Then again, he didn’t care if his place was clean and he also didn’t care if his mother spent her time with him cleaning.

He did mind with me. He thought we had better things to do when we were together, like eat, watch sports on television while cuddled together, and have lots of sex.

We’d had words, not heated, just words. Several of them.

Unusually, I won.

Then I wondered why I fought for the right to clean his house. This was not fun. But it had to be done because I was not able to live in unclean and not tidy and it had to be said, Brock and I were living together. It was just that we were doing it in two houses that both had to be cleaned.

But the one thing in my life that was not tidy was my office. In the beginning, when I was busting my hump to make a go of my bakery, it got out of hand and I never got it back into hand. Now it was organized disarray. Although it looked like a cyclone hit it, I knew precisely where everything was.

I had few rules for my employees. Those being excellent hygiene, smiling faces, not being afraid to show personality, for personality was Tessa’s Cakes, and there was never an excuse to be bored.

And last, never touch anything in my office upon threat of death (or not getting to take any of the end-of-the-night-not-sold cakes home).