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Not to beat Emily. That had stopped being the point somewhere around midnight when he’d been staring at the ceiling. He was going to enter because these people had shown up this morning to support him, and Gary Alders had spent seventeen years having his name attached to something he didn’t do, and the least Cole could do was show up and let his family’s dessert speak for itself.
He found an apron on the hook near the back and tied it on.
Cole looked around the room. At the cooling racks. The prep stations being claimed. The judges’ table set up along the far wall where Madison, Edith, and Mrs. C. were arranging themselves with varying degrees of ceremony. At Elsie in the corner with her phone already raised, already filming, already narrating something into the lens with the relentless cheerfulness of a woman who had been waiting for this moment all week.
His eyes finally landed on Emily.
She stood at her station with her back straight, her hair twisted into a messy knot that left the graceful line of her neck exposed. A green apron was tied neatly around her waist, the simple fabric somehow drawing his attention to every small movement she made.
It shouldn’t have been so distracting.
But then he remembered the bakery last night. The low amber light. The way her lips had parted beneath his. The quiet sound she’d made when he kissed her like he meant it.
She still hadn’t looked at him. Or maybe she had, and he’d missed it during the half second it took for heat to settle low in his stomach.
His gaze caught on the apron ties knotted at the small of her back, and he had the sudden, vivid memory of his hands at her waist, drawing her closer.
He forced himself to look away, his jaw tightening.
Mayor Bloomfield chose that moment to climb onto a step stool at the front of the room, which he had clearly brought himself, and raise his hands.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, with the gravity of a man announcing a matter of great civic importance.
In Maple Falls, of course, this was.
“The Maple Falls Christmas Bake-Off is officially underway.”
The room cheered.
Cole tightened his apron strings and looked at his station, a very determined Emily in his peripheral vision.
Let the games begin.
TWENTY-THREE
EMILY
Saturday, December 19th
Emily had been in this kitchen ten thousand times. She knew every corner of it: the copper pots hanging above the butcher-block countertop; the shelves that weren’t quite level near the back wall where the building had settled over sixty years. The spice rack her grandfather had built, every jar labeled in Nana’s careful cursive—cinnamon, cardamom, nutmeg, allspice, cloves—the glass clouded with years of steam and flour dust; the wood stained dark where vanilla had spilled and never quite come clean. She’d grown up in this kitchen when her nana owned it. Worked in it when Mrs. Myers ran things. And now it was hers.
She had never felt less at home in it.
Someone had propped the swinging door open so the audience could watch, which meant the kitchen felt exposed in a way it never did—her private space turned into a stage.
She was doing her best to block it all out. Just like she’d told herself she wasn’t going to look at Cole when he arrived. She was going to look at her recipe card, her bowls, and she was going to make her grandmother’s sugar and spice cookies better than they had ever been made, and that was all today was.
Except, then he’d walked in. And Norma started cheering. And she’d looked up at the same time as everyone else, and then he was there, and her body did the thing it had been doing since the pantry floor, which was to register him before her brain could intervene. He’d shrugged off his coat and hung it by the door, and she’d watched his shoulders move under the gray Henley he wore, watched him push his sleeves up past his forearms, watched him tie on an apron, making her mouth go dry in the process.
A man should not be sexy tying on an apron, but here she was, fantasizing about the hot firefighter who could also bake.
The world really wasn’t fair, putting together the perfect package in a man who regularly made her want to pull out her hair. Or let him pull it.
She looked back at her recipe card.
She had orange zest written in three places. The measurements she’d finally gotten right. She traced the list with her finger and reminded herself what today was about.
Nana. The City Rescue Mission. Getting it right.
