"Keep Those Messy Little Monsters Fifty Feet Away From My Sixteen-Thousand-Dollar Imported French Confection!" My Billionaire Mother-in-Law Barked Into the Microphone at Our Grand Ballroom Reception
A work of fiction. The characters and events are invented; any resemblance to real people is coincidental.
Two hundred guests. Six crystal chandeliers. A five-tier, four-foot cake crowned with three hundred hand-sculpted sugar peonies and dusted with 24-karat gold leaf.
It cost sixteen thousand four hundred dollars, and Diane Sterling paid for every petal of it out of her own account.
She also wrote one rule in bold red ink across the bakery contract: ABSOLUTELY NO MINORS OR UNATTENDED CHILDREN WITHIN A TEN-FOOT RADIUS OF THE CONFECTION UNTIL FORMAL CUTTING AT 9:00 PM.
Forty feet away stood Lily. One year old. Twenty-six inches tall. White tulle, a pearl barrette, and two hours of sitting politely on a velvet folding chair behind her.
Lily could not read contracts.
What Lily knew was that right in the middle of the room sat a mountain that smelled overwhelmingly of sweet butter and sugar, and that nobody had told her no.