Page 85 of The Sugar and Spice Kitchen

“And the bakery was apparently busier than usual.”

“Busy enough that your nana wouldn’t have had eyes on them the whole time.”

“Exactly.” Emily looked at the bracket. “Douglas Merritt was in and out all morning. But was he there in the afternoon?”

Cole put a question mark inside the bracket. “That’s what we need to find out.”

“Mrs. C. didn’t remember seeing him in the afternoon, but she also wasn’t sure she would’ve noticed.”

“We need to talk to someone who was there the whole day.” Cole stepped back and looked at the board. “Who worked in the bakery with your grandmother?”

Emily was quiet for a moment.

“My mom,” she said. “Sometimes. But she would have been picking me up from school.” She paused. “And Nana had someone who helped her on busy days. I don’t know who.”

Cole wrote: bakery assistant—identify, on a blue sticky note.

They worked like that for the better part of an hour—Emily narrating from her notepad, Cole organizing on the board, both of them stopping to argue when they disagreed about what a piece of evidence actually proved. Emily thought the timing of Douglas’s departure from Maple Falls was significant. Cole thought it was suggestive but not conclusive. Emily said suggestive was enough to follow up. Cole said following up was exactly what they were doing and she could stop making it sound like he was being obstructive.

“Can we just agree to follow up with the mayor about his brother?” Emily asked.

Cole added another blue sticky note. “I’ll call him in the morning.”

Their shoulders had been almost touching for the last twenty minutes. At some point during the argument about Douglas’s departure date, they had stopped almost touching and started actually touching, and neither of them had moved to change that.

“The question,” Emily was saying, tapping her pen against her notepad, “is whether anyone saw him that afternoon. Because if we can place him in the bakery between two and four⁠—”

Cole turned his head.

She was close. Too close, making rational thought impossible. Her scent wrapped around him—coffee, warm vanilla, and that soft, addictive note that was purely Emily. Her eyes were focused on the whiteboard, pen still moving, lips slightly parted as she made her point, and all he could think about was how those lips would feel against his.

He stopped thinking.

He kissed her.

Emily froze mid-sentence, a tiny sound of surprise slipping into his mouth. Then she melted. She kissed him back like she’d been waiting for permission, fierce and hungry, her notepad clattering onto the table as her hands came up to fist in his flannel shirt.

Cole groaned low in his throat and pulled her closer, one hand sliding into her hair, the other gripping her waist. She turned toward him fully, and he helped her the rest of the way, lifting her effortlessly onto the edge of the table.

Her thighs parted for him, and he stepped between them, pressing his body flush against hers.

This wasn’t a gentle kiss anymore.

He tilted his head and dipped into her mouth, tasting her, claiming her, one hand in her hair and the other flat against the small of her back, pulling her closer in a way that had nothing to do with the investigation or the whiteboard or Douglas Merritt, and everything to do with the fact that she was here and she was his and he was still, two days in, slightly amazed by both of those things.

Emily moaned softly, the sound vibrating through him as she arched into his chest. Her legs wrapped around his hips, ankles locking behind his back, pulling him even closer until he could feel the heat of her core through their clothes.

He pulled back just enough to look at her. Her lips were swollen, cheeks flushed, eyes dark with want. She looked wrecked already.

She leaned in to kiss him again, slower this time, teasing his bottom lip with her tongue before sucking on it gently. Cole’s grip on her tightened, a low growl rumbling in his chest.

The door opened.

“Hey, we still on to watch the⁠—”

Jackson stopped dead in the doorway.

Cole didn’t let her go right away. He kept Emily pressed against him for half a second longer, forehead resting against hers as they both tried to steady their breathing.