For the Love of Cake by Erin Dutton

beautiful lips. “It’s too late to play hard to get. I’ve seen you looking at me. And I want very much to kiss you right now. What point could be more important than that?”
    Shannon laughed, trying to diffuse the arousal that threatened to cloud her judgment and somehow kept her from looking away from Maya’s lips. God, she wanted that kiss. She closed her eyes briefly and reminded herself she didn’t have the luxury of giving in to such base sensations. And Maya’s insistence that nothing else mattered only highlighted the differences between them. “You’re so young.”
    “That’s not an answer.”
    “You said yourself that I needed to focus on the show. That’s what I intend to do. I should go. I don’t think we’re supposed to socialize outside of taping, anyway.”
    Maya shrugged, seemingly unconcerned with both Shannon’s abrupt subject change and their possible violation of the rules.
    Shannon let her hand fall away, immediately missing the contact. “Of the two of us, you’re obviously more serious about being in the gym than I am. So I’m leaving.”
    “The camera adds ten pounds.” Maya’s voice didn’t carry the teasing tone it had earlier. She sounded serious.
    Shannon wanted to say that she’d seen her on television and she looked gorgeous, that no extra pound, or ten, could change that. Not to mention, she was even more stunning in person. Instead, she said, “I guess I’ll head back and try to go to sleep.” She backed toward the door.
    “You should. You have an early morning tomorrow.”
    “You don’t?”
    “Nope. We don’t have to be there until the afternoon.”
    “No challenge judging?”
    Maya shrugged. “We don’t know much more than you do.”
    “Damn.”
    “Why? Were you scheming to extract details of the show from me?” Amusement colored Maya’s voice, but the already present spark of heat flared brighter.
    “And if I were?” She took another step back, as if she could retreat from the answering flame in her own body. But Maya moved forward, keeping near her.
    “I would be interested in your methods.”
    “Chef Vaughn,” she whispered, surprised she wasn’t trembling with the effort of holding back.
    “If you’re going to look at me like that, you’d better call me Maya.”
    Standing close in the quiet of the gym, Shannon no longer saw the put-on bravado and charisma that Maya displayed around the set. Instead, now, her eyes were full of sincerity and emotion.
    Maya held her gaze and pulled in a deep breath, caution infiltrating her expression as if she had to will it there. “You should go.”
    Shannon nodded slowly and leaned back into the push bar on the door. She made her way to her room with Maya’s sexy face still floating in her head. So much for going to sleep. Her mind and body were racing much too fast to settle down now.
    *
    Maya picked up a small ceramic bell with the words M USIC C ITY written in fancy script around it. She shook it gently, disappointed in its dull tenor. She returned it to the shelf and meandered through the rest of the store. She’d traveled a lot in the last seven years and had a strange obsession with tacky souvenir shops. She rarely made a purchase, but she loved walking among the shelves lined with coffee mugs, T-shirts, flyswatters, figurines of animals wearing clothes and doing people-things, and those weird tiny spoons. The staples in these shops didn’t change, only the names and slogans imprinted on them. Interspersed among them were regional items, as well. In the South, she found a lot of barbeque sauce and various meat rubs, items featuring the word “redneck,” and, so far in Nashville, stuff with guitars, boots, and cowboy hats on it.
    She pushed through the shop door onto the street, thinking that the tinkling bell hanging from the door sounded better than the ones inside. She’d spent her morning exploring the several blocks that Nashvillians called “downtown.” Wandering more than exploring, she