Cream of the Crop Read online

  Praise for Alice Clayton’s hilariously fun

  USA Today bestselling Hudson Valley Series

  NUTS

  “Small towns are filled with different personalities and Nuts is simply that, chock-full of so many special nuts you won’t want to leave.”

  —Heroes and Heartbreakers

  “I cannot think of a better writer of contemporary romance that pulls you into the story so well it seems like you are watching everything unfold in real life. Alice Clayton is a true master of the written word and creator of books you simply cannot put down.”

  —Two Classy Chics

  “At this point I can safely say that Alice Clayton can do no wrong in my eyes. Be ready to swoon, laugh and even get a little hungry while reading Nuts.”

  —Wrapped Up in Reading

  “With the right blend of humor, romance, sexy chemistry, steamy moments, and lots and lots of food and cakes and farm goodies, Nuts will capture your heart and will leave you with a huge smile.”

  —Literati Literature Lovers

  Praise for Alice Clayton’s laugh-out-loud sexy

  New York Times bestselling Cocktail Series

  “I haven’t laughed out loud this much since I read Wallbanger—­Clayton’s done it again!”

  —Samantha Young, New York Times bestselling author

  “Alice Clayton’s stories are my go-to happy land. And Leo is divine! I’m off to find a hot farmer immediately. I quite love this book!”

  —Jodi Ellen Malpas, New York Times bestselling author of the

  One Night Series

  LAST CALL

  “Witty dialogue, engaging scenes and the ever-present smoking-hot chemistry once again prove that Clayton is a master at her trade.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “The hilarious conclusion to a series that made me laugh until I cried, swoon until I sighed, and reminded us all that there’s always time for one Last Call.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover

  MAI TAI’D UP

  “Clayton’s trademark charm and comical wit saturate the storyline, which features engaging dialogue, eccentric characters and a couple who defines the word ‘adorable.’ ”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Alice Clayton is a genius! Mai Tai’d Up is sexy, steamy, and totally hilarious! A must read that I didn’t want to end.”

  —New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Emma Chase

  SCREWDRIVERED

  “Cheers to Alice Clayton! Screwdrivered is a hilarious cocktail of crackling banter, heady sexual tension, and pop-your-cork love scenes. The heroine is brisk and lively (can we be friends, Viv?) and the hot librarian hero seduced me with his barely restrained sensuality. I’ve never wanted a nerd more.”

  —New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Kresley Cole

  “Screwdrivered has sexual tension, romantic longing, and fantastic chemistry.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  RUSTY NAILED

  “We want to bask in the afterglow: giddy, blushing, and utterly in love with this book.”

  —New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Christina Lauren

  “Clayton’s trademark wit and general zaniness shine through in abundance as readers get an intimate view of the insecurities one faces while in a serious relationship. Steamy playful sex scenes and incorrigible friends make this a wonderful continuation of Wallbanger and Nightie Girl’s journey to their happily ever after.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “For fun, sex, and strudel, make sure to spend some time with these wallbangers.”

  —Heroes and Heartbreakers

  “A great follow up to Wallbanger . . . just as funny and HOT as the first!”

  —Schmexy Girl Book Blog

  “Humorous, sizzling hot, romantic, and not missing dramatics. If you weren’t a fan before, you certainly will be after reading Rusty Nailed.”

  —Love Between the Sheets

  “Excuse me, I need to catch my breath. Either from panting or cracking up. Because I was always doing one of the two while reading Rusty Nailed. Alice Clayton, you never disappoint.”

  —Book Bumblings

  WALLBANGER

  “Sultry, seXXXy, super-awesome . . . we LOVE it!”

  —Perez Hilton

  “An instant classic, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments and riveting characters.”

  —Jennifer Probst, New York Times bestselling author of

  Searching for Perfect

  “Fun and frothy, with a bawdy undercurrent and a hero guaranteed to make your knees wobbly . . . The perfect blend of sex, romance, and baked goods.”

  —Ruthie Knox, bestselling author of

  About Last Night

  “Alice Clayton strikes again, seducing me with her real-woman sex appeal, unparalleled wit and addicting snark; leaving me laughing, blushing, and craving knock-all-the-paintings-off-the-wall sex of my very own.”

  —Humor blogger Brittany Gibbons

  “A funny, madcap, smexy romantic contemporary. . . . Fast pacing and a smooth-flowing storyline will keep you in stitches. . . .”

  —Smexy Books

  And for her acclaimed Redhead Series

  “Zany and smoking-hot romance [that] will keep readers in stitches. . . .”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “I adore Grace and Jack. They have such amazing chemistry. The love that flows between them scorches the pages.”

  —Smexy Books

  “Steamy romance, witty characters and a barrel full of laughs. . . .”

  —The Book Vixen

  “Laugh out loud funny.”

  —Smokin Hot Books

  Thank you for downloading this Gallery Books eBook.

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  To Neens, Lolo, and PQ.

  I’ll meet you at Tower of Terror.

  Acknowledgments

  So many people go into bringing these books to life. The usual suspects like Nina Bocci, Jessica Royer-Ocken, Kristin Dwyer, Christina Hogrebe . . . these are the gals that make this possible. You the Reader and me the Writer, we decide together what we like and what we love, and hopefully that’ll happen within these pages all over again.

  This book specifically was important to me because I’ve always wanted to write a story with a truly plus-size heroine. And plus-size in All Ways. Not just the thighs and the bum, but in personality, in lifestyle, in mannerisms . . . BUT the key is here that her being plus-size is not the central point of the story. I just wanted a beautiful woman, who just happened to be a little rounder than the normal romance novel heroine, to get hers. Natalie is Too Much and Not Enough wrapped up together and set down in her city of Manhattan. I love her, and I hope you do too.

  This story also has special meaning to me now because it marks the end of a little era in The Story of Alice. A little over three years ago a wonderful woman dropped out of the sky and changed my life: Micki Nuding, senior editor at Gallery Books. Somewhere in the universe, tiny things shifted in exactly the right way at exactly the right time and a copy of Wallbanger made its way onto her desk, and poof . . . here we are today. She is sassy and clever, smart and witty, hopeless with a cell phone, and will sell her soul for a glass of good red wine.

  Micki ha
s literally walked through fire to help craft my new trajectory, from patiently waiting through deadline after deadline, to sitting with me in stolen conference rooms to wrangle plotlines out of my stuffy head, to letting me cry on the phone when I’d lost all confidence in my ability to tell my ridiculous. She’s been with me every step of the way the last few years, even flying to St. Louis and being there when I walked down the aisle to my very own Prince Awesome.

  She’s the best cheerleader I’ve ever had, she’s made me a better writer in a thousand ways, and I will miss her telling me every single time I turn in a new manuscript (always around 11:57 p.m.) that THIS book is her new favorite.

  Micki Nuding is my favorite. Big fat sloppy kisses.

  Alice

  XOXO

  Chapter 1

  “Can you raise the blinds a little bit? The sun is setting; it makes for a nice view,” I directed.

  “While you reel them in?” Liz teased, letting the soft afternoon sun into the conference room.

  Forty-seven floors up, you got a helluva nice sunset across the Hudson River. It made the room seem warm and inviting, and with the powerful backdrop of Manhattan behind me, what client would dream of saying no? Especially when a ray of sunlight landed directly on my cleavage like some divine sign.

  I heard the gasp of a guy crushing on me; the intern was clearly looking at my boobs again.

  “Hey, junior, eyes up here,” I instructed. I felt the teeniest bit sorry for him as he blushed and stammered his way out of the room, promising to return with the bound copies of the proposal I’d asked for. He was mostly able to keep his eyes redirected. Mostly.

  “Poor pup, he’s totally enamored.” Liz chuckled, adjusting one of the pie charts that were propped up along the wall. Even in the days of easy-to-use PowerPoint presentations and glossy, slick color printouts, there was nothing like a giant pie chart hung on the wall to make a client feel like you’d done your homework.

  And I had. I was pitching a new ad campaign to T&T Sanitation, one of the biggest distributors of Porta-Potties in the Northeast. Make all the jokes you want, but this business was incredibly lucrative. And incredibly competitive. T&T sanitation was the second-largest distributor; they’d been chasing Mr. John’s Portaloo for years, always coming in second in sales. They were determined to outdo them this year. That’s where I came in.

  I started unpacking twenty-by-twenty-four-inch pictures mounted on foam core and kept the images facedown as I arranged easel stands all around the conference room. Once they were distributed, I began to flip them over. Liz came back in with an armful of handouts, and nearly tripped right out of her Jimmy Choos.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Exactly,” I replied, grinning broadly. I’d literally covered the entire room in pictures of T&T potties, stationed around some of the toniest locations in town. The Bronx Zoo, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, even one on the lawn of Gracie Mansion.

  “Wow, their outhouses certainly have gotten around,” Liz said, walking the room and taking in all the images. “Has Dan seen these?”

  “Dan has not seen these,” an incredulous voice boomed from just inside the door. “Dan has not seen these, but would love to know why his walls are covered in Porta-Potties.” My boss stood in the doorway, jaw ticking as he realized his conference room had been taken over by something most unusual.

  “You knew I was leading off with this, Dan,” I said, quickly walking to his side and handing him one of the proposals. “The cornerstone of this new campaign is bringing up the one thing no one wants to talk about when discussing their product, and the one thing people really want to know about.”

  “Pictures of portable toilets,” he stated, eyes widened. He had faith in me, sure, but this much faith?

  I nodded reassuringly. “Pictures of their product placed all around town, pictures of exactly what you get when you hire T&T: a high-quality portable sanitation unit that’s not nearly as tacky as you might think. It’s designed to make the customer think about all the different reasons you might need one of these, and how much nicer they look than the ones we typically think of. These are updated, clean, pretty, even. This”—I pointed to a particularly fetching picture of a mint-green one juxtaposed against the skyline of Central Park West—“is what you want for your daughter’s wedding, for the Fourth of July picnic. Even the mayor uses this one when they’re doing renovations on the official residence.”

  Rob, the intern, hurried back in, eyes steadfastly fixed on the exact spot in between my eyes. “They’re here,” he said in a hushed tone, then realized what he was surrounded by. “Wow, that’s a lot of Porta-Potties.”

  “It most assuredly is,” Dan replied, his tone measured as he met my eyes across the room. This had better work, they said to me.

  Message received and acknowledged, my own look sent back to him.

  Liz tried unsuccessfully to suppress a giggle, and we gathered around each other in the conference room.

  At least no one was looking at my boobs anymore. Which, to be fair, was a first.

  In the end, it was the pictures that did the trick. Mr. Caldwell, president of T&T Sanitation, walked into the conference room, and while his marketing team stared in horrified silence, he walked up to a picture taken outside the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue featuring a prominently displayed unit and burst out laughing. “I’m already in love with this idea,” he pronounced on his way to the seat with his name on it. He and I were already on the same wavelength. It was time to bring the rest of them around.

  I spent the better part of an hour describing in detail exactly the campaign I was proposing, buying ad space on television, radio, and the Internet. I’d put together a plan that made his product something people would be talking about, and would stay in a consumer’s mind long after the initial promotional push had ended. Every question asked by his team was answered efficiently, either by myself or by a member of my own team. We’d covered every base, we’d thought around every corner, and we were confident that we were presenting something very different from what any other advertising firm had created to sell portable outhouses.

  Dan sat in on the pitch as he always did, occasionally commenting, but letting me take the lead as usual. He’d been surprised to see the display I’d created, sure, but once the clients were in the room he was 100 percent supportive. And now he watched me bring it on home with a secret smile on his face, a smile that told me I’d nailed it.

  “In the end, I think you’ll see that no one else will be able to deliver such a unique, specifically crafted campaign as we can here at Manhattan Creative Group.” I leaned across the table a little bit with a twinkle in my eye, looking straight at Mr. Caldwell. “This is the one occasion where we here at MCG think it makes perfect sense to talk shit about the competition.”

  The room was silent and still. I could feel every set of eyes on me, including Intern Rob. His were about ten inches below my eyeballs. Eh.

  Mr. Caldwell leaned across the table, mimicking my posture. “I do love a pie chart.” His eyes twinkled back.

  The call came in two hours later. T&T Sanitation could now officially be counted as a client of MCG.

  There is nothing more glorious in the entire world than Manhattan in October. I sighed happily to myself as I walked up the steps of the Fourteenth Street station along with everyone else heading downtown on a Friday afternoon, anxious to get the weekend started. After the smell of stale air and countless bodies, when I emerged into the sunlight and the crisp autumn air, it felt like a little bit of heaven. With only a six-block walk to my apartment, I slowed my pace a bit, lingering as I often did at the windows along the shops, nodding to some of the shopkeepers I’d come to know. Some by face, but more than a few names in the shops I frequented often.

  I didn’t understand people being scared to come to New York. Being born and raised here, I tried to see my city as others might. Loud, n
oisy, brash, full of concrete. I saw excitement, lively, vibrant, architecturally magnificent. A college friend had once asked me, “It’s only thirteen miles long, two miles wide. Don’t you get bored of seeing the same things every single day?”

  I’d drawn myself up and told him, “It’s 13.4 miles long, and 2.3 miles at its widest part near Fourteenth Street. And anyone who could get bored in Manhattan doesn’t deserve Manhattan.” I’m not friends with fools.

  I walked along the street, noticing for the thousandth time how charming my neighborhood was. Anyone who thought New York was endless blocks of cement and concrete high-rises had never spent any time downtown. Or in Midtown for that matter. Or the Upper West Side. Or the Upper East Side. Regardless of where you plunk yourself down on my island, I can guarantee you that you’re within a few blocks of a park. A green space. An old beautiful brownstone. A hundred-year-old pub. There are pocket neighborhoods and incredible history literally around every single corner. And in a city made up of corners and right angles and hard turns, I lived in the pocket that was all wonky angles and soft turns, winding streets and impossible-to-follow street signs. Off the city grid, in a neighborhood built before the city laid out its easy-on-the-eyes pattern. The West Village.

  And it was in this Village that my favorite cheese shop on the entire planet lived, this cheese shop that I walked three blocks south of my normal route to stare at. And quite possibly drool at.

  Cheese. Cheeeeeese. What a thin, flat, nasal-sounding word for such a luscious, rich, gorgeous thing. Hard. Soft. Ripe. Grainy. Creamy. Often stinky. I’d yet to find a cheese I didn’t adore.

  My love affair with cheese went back to childhood, when I’d sit in our kitchen with a dish of ricotta sprinkled with sugar. My mother, a world-renowned artist, would work on her sketches; there were countless sketches in every room of our brownstone. I’d eat scoop after scoop of the decadent cheese, and we’d talk about anything and everything. As I got older, my palate developed further, and I continued my love of all things dairy. If I ever developed lactose intolerance, I’d throw myself into the East River.