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Cole closed the hood.

“That’s it?” Emily said.

“That’s it.”

She stared at the running car for a moment. “I almost walked home and back for a loose battery cable.”

“You did.”

She looked at him. He was doing the almost-smile, the one that didn’t quite make it to his face but was there in his eyes. She wanted to be irritated. It was difficult to justify.

“Come inside,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”

The bakery was dark except for the pendant lights Emily always left on when she locked up, casting everything in a soft amber glow. Cole held the door while she went in ahead of him, and Captain pranced in after them—yes, pranced—which Emily was convinced she’d never seen a dog do before, but Captain knew that he was a handsome fella.

He also knew that a cat had recently been there, as he began sniffing frantically around the window seat for Nutmeg.

“He’s not here. I left him at home today,” she told Captain while Cole followed her back through to the kitchen to where the coffee pot was.

The kitchen felt different at night. Smaller, somehow, or maybe just more itself. The warmth from the day’s baking still lingered: browned butter, cinnamon, vanilla, and the faint citrus sweetness of the orange zest she’d grated earlier. A few sugar crystals sparkled on the counter. The old wooden cabinets gave the occasional familiar creak as they settled, and the refrigerator hummed softly in the silence.

She’d been there alone at night a hundred times, long after everyone had gone home. She knew this room at every hour.

It felt different with Cole in it.

She was aware of him the way she was aware of weather, okay, bad analogy because she had not been aware of the weather that night, but she knew when he was there, the atmosphere felt different.

He’d taken off his coat and draped it over a stool. He leaned against the counter with his arms folded, the thin fabric of his Henley doing nothing to hide the breadth of his shoulders, the line of muscle in his forearms where the sleeves were pushed back. The amber light caught the angle of his jaw, the dark crop of his hair, and Emily turned back to the coffee machine and concentrated on the buttons.

She thought about the night of the storm. The pantry floor, the cold, the fury that had somehow become something else entirely. How she’d convinced herself it was just anger finding a physical outlet. Just proximity and adrenaline and a very bad decision.

She thought about what it would feel like if it weren’t like that.

The thought arrived without permission and refused to leave. What it would be like to cross this kitchen, not because she was furious with him, but because she wanted to. To have him touch her slowly, deliberately, without the blizzard and the accusations and the whole weight of seventeen years of history pushing them together.

To have him take his time—his hands moving the way they moved when he was doing something he wanted to get right, careful and thorough and completely unhurried. To find out what Cole Alders was like when he wasn’t fighting her.

She pressed the button on the coffee machine and watched it fill.

She didn’t hear him move. She just became aware, by degrees, that he was closer than he’d been. He was beside her, at the edge of the counter, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him in the cool air of the bakery.

She didn’t turn around.

“Emily.”

His voice was softer. The professional register was gone and underneath it was something she hadn’t heard before. Or hadn’t let herself hear.

She turned.

He was right there. Close enough that she had to tilt her chin up to look at him. His expression was open in a way that Cole’s expressions almost never were—the careful mask lowered, leaving them both exposed in a way Emily hadn’t expected.

He lifted his hand and tucked a strand of hair back from her face.

Then he leaned in and kissed her.

And it was nothing like the pantry floor.

There was no fury in it, no collision, no two people falling into something without meaning to. This was deliberate. This was Cole, deciding to kiss her—gently, carefully—his hand cupping her face, treating her like something to be treasured. She felt it move through her differently than anger did, slower and deeper, settling into places she hadn’t known were waiting.