Page 77 of The Sugar and Spice Kitchen

Apparently, spectacular sex was excellent for productivity.

If Emily had known it could be like that, she would have stopped hating Cole years ago.

That was simply the truth of the matter, and she was not going to torture herself about the lost time. She was going to focus on the present, which was considerably more interesting.

She’d dated. She’d had relationships, perfectly adequate ones, with perfectly adequate men who had not driven her to fury or kept her awake at night or made her burn an entire batch of shortbread just by existing. She’d thought, privately, that perhaps she was simply someone who felt things less intensely in that department.

She understood that the problem had not been her.

The problem had been the absence of Cole Alders, which was a sentence she never thought would come out of her mouth.

She spread butter across the dough in an even layer—softened, with a generous amount of brown sugar and cinnamon underneath—the way Nana had taught her. She added orange zest, because she was adding orange zest to everything now and she refused to apologize for it. She started rolling the dough into a tight log, the filling pressing close, the whole thing smelling like Christmas in the best possible way.

She’d wanted to have a batch ready for Cole when he stopped in with breakfast. He’d texted her twenty minutes ago and said he’d be on his way.

While the rolls baked, she started on the glaze—cream cheese, vanilla, powdered sugar, a splash of the good maple syrup she kept in the fridge for special occasions. She whisked it smooth, set it aside, refilled her coffee, and tried very hard not to watch the back door.

Instead, she thought about Christmas. She couldn’t believe it was only five days away. She’d been so focused on the blizzard recovery and then the bake-off that she was woefully unprepared for the holiday. She was going to have to do a lot of online shopping and pay for overnight delivery if she had any hope of buying for everyone on her list.

She was thinking about what she could get Cole. He definitely deserved more than a lump of coal in his stocking. She’d have to get Captain a gift too. He seemed like the type of pup who would go mad for a squeaky toy.

Cole came in shortly after carrying a large paper bag from the café, the same smile on his face that Emily had worn all morning.

“Your mother says good morning,” Cole said, setting the bag on the counter. “And that you never eat enough breakfast.”

“My mother says that to everyone.”

“She also said”—he unfolded the top of the bag—“that she put in extra of the good stuff.”

Emily looked into the bag.

There was a container of the café’s scrambled eggs with chives and cream cheese, still warm. A stack of thick-cut bacon, crispy, the way Emily liked it. Two gingerbread pancakes with a little tub of maple butter. There was a square of eggnog French toast bake dusted with nutmeg and powdered sugar, and two of the café’s cinnamon scones, which were technically Emily’s recipe, but she wasn’t about to remind her mother of that.

Emily looked at the bag. Looked at Cole.

“She knows, doesn’t she,” Emily said.

“Her words: ‘I heard you stayed and helped Emily clean up the bakery last night. Stayed for a while.’ And then she hugged me. Tight.”

“What did you do?”

“I hugged her back.” He looked slightly pained. “And then I’m fairly certain I—” He stopped.

Emily waited.

“I may have gone a little red,” he said.

Emily put her hand over her mouth.

“I’m a grown man,” Cole said. “I run a fire station, I have walked into burning buildings, and I could not help it.”

“Cole Alders blushed,” Emily said, into her hand.

“We’re moving on,” he said, and reached for the bacon.

They ate at the prep counter while the cinnamon rolls finished baking and the smell of them filled the bakery.

“So, is it as good as the breakfast in New York? I hear the bagels there are to die for,” Emily said, licking a bit of syrup off her thumb.