Harvey was dropping everything he knew to do this.
Because he loved me.
I wasn’t sure anyone had ever been as lucky as I was.
I bent down to kiss Harvey again, long, slow, and lazy, taking my time with him.
We had all the time in the world, but that didn’t mean I wanted to waste a single second of it.
Harvey made a happy little grunt, smiling as I let him pause for breath, our noses still touching, his fingers in my hair. “Let’s keep doing this a while longer,” he said.
“How much longer?” I asked, grinning right back at him. I couldn’tstopsmiling, but I didn’t want to, either.
I had a whole lot to smile about.
“Just for the rest of our lives.”
* * *
“Sweetheart,”I said, poking my head into the coffee shop kitchen, the smell of baked goods hanging heavy in the air. “Baby. Darling. Light of my life, keeper of my heart…”
“Mm?” Harvey responded, not looking up from the dough he was rolling out.
I stared at his forearms a heartbeat or so longer than I meant to.
“You got an ETA on those brownies?” I asked, glancing back at the line in the shop.
The line that went straight out the door and disappeared past the window. Even in the crisp fall air that made me want to curl up in front of a warm fire, with a warm fiancé and a warm dog, people were lining up for brownies.
“Uhhh,” Harvey looked up, blinking as though I’d just woken him from a trance.
I loved seeing him like this. Contentedly focused in his own little world. Covered in flour and powdered sugar and cocoa.
Happy.
Sometimes I looked in on him and he didn’t even notice I was there, and I got to watch him work for a few minutes in peace before he turned and smiled at me. The uncomplicated smile of a man who was perfectly happy.
He always looked the tiniest bit happier when he noticed me watching.
Today, though, I didn’t have the luxury of Harvey-watching.
“The line goes all the way to the corner,” Dante said, coming back through the door flushed and with a few hairs out of place.
I’d barely ever seen him with even a single one not where it was meant to be, which underlined the gravity of the situation.
“My timer says two minutes. But then they’ve gotta cool for a couple, if I cut them while they’re hot they’ll just fall apart.”
“There’s a mob out there,” I pleaded. “Can’t you… speed it up?”
Harvey pursed his lips, clearly not grasping the urgency.
It had all started with one batch of espresso shot brownies as an experiment when Harvey had first declared himself my new baker and started showing up for work every day. I’d told him he didn’thaveto, that I could manage the place by myself, that he could do remote work for Reggie or even just take some time off while he figured things out, but no.
No, Harvey was in Harvey heaven. He loved it here.
It was just that his brownies had started a revolution. I didn’t normally hurt for customers, but I’d also never had linesout the door, let alone down the street. Not even on the first day I put out the pumpkin spice latte sign for the year.
Harvey was a superstar right now. Any minute, people were going to start flinging their panties at him.
