Page 52 of The Sugar and Spice Kitchen

“Ho, ho, take heart,” said Mayor Bloomfield, looking delighted. “Captain didn’t mean any trouble.”

“He never does,” Cole said, wrapping the leash twice around his hand and giving Captain a look that the dog met with unrepentant tail-wagging. “He just really likes cats.”

Cole looked past her to the plate of sugar and spice cookies.

“How’s the recipe coming?” he asked.

Emily scowled in response and pushed the platter of cookies away from him.

“Just take the delivery baskets and get out,” she said, hooking her thumb toward the kitchen.

“Ah, so you’re extra festive today. And here I thought you might be riding my snowmobile once more.” Cole smirked. She didn’t have to see it to hear it in his voice.

He was needling her. She knew it. Just like she needled him time and time again.

“Don’t you wish,” she sang back. “Have a good day, Cole,” she added, the hope to never see you again implied. As much as she’d like to head out for the deliveries, interview witnesses, and get under his skin, she didn’t have time for it. The cookie theft had been a mystery for years. A couple days more wouldn’t hurt. Not when she had her own cookie mystery to solve.

From somewhere behind her, Mayor Bloomfield let out a low, delighted chuckle.

Emily turned around.

The mayor looked thoroughly entertained and had no intention of pretending otherwise. Beside him, Edith smiled into her coffee cup, looking equally amused.

“Reminds me of someone,” Mayor Bloomfield said, looking between them with great satisfaction.

“Don’t,” Emily said.

“Us,” he said anyway, pointing between himself and Edith. “Circa 1974. Edith looked at me exactly like that.”

“Some days I still look at you like that,” Edith said.

“She does,” the mayor agreed happily.

Cole’s expression had gone flat. It was the careful neutral he wore when he was trying not to react to something. Emily suspected her own face was doing something similar.

“We are nothing like—” Emily started.

“Nothing like,” Cole said, at exactly the same moment.

They both stopped.

Bloomfield’s chuckle deepened into something more like a laugh. The mayor buttoned his coat, totally unbothered by the matching scowls being directed at him from two different angles.

“Right,” he said. “Nothing like us at all.”

He winked at Edith. Edith patted his arm and said nothing, which was its own kind of agreement.

Mayor Bloomfield was still chuckling when he left ten minutes later. Emily could hear it all the way down Oak Way.

She and Cole were nothing like an old married couple. She refused to think otherwise.

Even if they did constantly bicker and occasionally have sex.

Not occasionally. Once.

One time.

One desperate time on the pantry floor during that blizzard. Flour on her knees, his mouth hot against her throat, her nails digging into his shoulders while the wind howled outside and she came apart so hard she forgot her own name.