I glared at all of it withthe intensity of someone who’d just been sentenced to community service.
This ridiculously cheerful town was determined to ruin my entire week.
THREE
POWELL
I’d cleaned the community-center meeting room like I was prepping for a surprise inspection. Chairs straightened. Tables organized. Even the whiteboard wiped down, despite the fact I was pretty sure no one had used it since the Great Bake-Off Debate of 2019.
And in the center of the table: my offering.
A stack of pancakes warm enough to steam up the inside of the Tupperware, plus a small glass bottle of maple syrup. The real stuff. The fancy stuff. The stuff I didn’t even take to the firehouse because the guys would dump the whole thing out and inhale it in thirty seconds, missing the whole point.
I told myself this was only hospitality.
Moose had told me it was “thirst, buddy, pure thirst.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I’d barely finished arranging the plates and napkins in a way that made me look like a man trying too hard when I heard footsteps approaching.
I had just enough time to straighten before Jess walked in, freezing in the doorway.
Her eyes went straight to the container in front of me. Then to the plates. Then, with slow suspicion, to my face.
“What is this?”
“Breakfast,” I said.
“For who?”
I blinked. “Us…?” I hated that it sounded like a question.
She looked between me and the food like she was assessing whether this was some kind of hostage negotiation. “Why?”
I popped the lid before I over thought it. Warm, fresh pancakes—light, fluffy, golden—filled the room with the scents of butter and vanilla. I wasn’t bragging, but the mayor’s wife once said my pancakes could heal a broken marriage. I needed it to heal whatever was broken between us.
Jess’s expression did something tiny and traitorous before she caught herself. Her inhale was audible. She made a sound that was half-scoff, half-sigh. “I’m not bribable.”
“It’s not a bribe.”
“It looks like a bribe.”
“I promise, it’s not.”
“It’s definitely a bribe.”
“It’s… fuel. For the planning. And also maybe an apology for the horror of the town meeting.”
Her gaze dropped to the pancakes before coming back to me. “Apology accepted. Partial credit only.”
Good enough.
She sat, professional and prickly as a porcupine, flipping open a notebook already color-coded with tabs. I slid a plate toward her. She hesitated before pulling it the rest of the way with two fingers like she was waiting for it to blow up in her face.
With surgical precision, she cut the tiniest, most cautious square of pancake I’d ever seen and dipped it in syrup. After only a moment’s hesitation, she brought it to her mouth. Her eyes fluttered. Only a little. A barely there flutter that might’ve been nothing if I hadn’t been studying her face like my life depended on it.
Her lips parted as the flavors hit her tongue, and the transformation was instant. The careful control she’d been wearing like armor cracked enough for something softer to slip through.
