Sweet Deception

Chapter 5-Flour on Your face

By the second week, we'd settled into something that almost resembled peace—if peace could be measured in shared flour bins, overlapping playlists neither of us admitted to enjoying, and the easy, unspoken ritual of him pouring my coffee the exact way I liked it without ever being told how.

"You remembered," I said the first morning he did it, staring at the mug like it might reveal some hidden trick.

"I remember everything, Hart. Thought we covered this." He didn't look up from the pastry case, but the corner of his mouth gave him away.

The town, predictably, had opinions about all of it. Mrs. Rosemary from the flower shop two doors down had taken to lingering outside our window every morning, watching us work with the unguarded delight of a woman witnessing the resolution of a fifteen-year soap opera. The harbor grapevine moved fast; by the end of our second week, half of Harborne seemed to know Mila Hart and Jace Monroe were sharing more than just a storefront.

"They think we're together," I said, nodding toward the window, where Mrs. Rosemary had just been joined by two more onlookers.

"Are we not?" Jace asked, deadpan, not missing a beat as he pulled a tray of muffins from the oven.

"We're business partners. Legally obligated ones, at that."

"Right. Business partners who hold hands on the back steps at dawn." He set the tray down, finally looking at me with something warm and teasing dancing behind his eyes. "Very standard professional conduct, Hart. I'll be sure to note it in the partnership agreement."

Heat crawled up my neck, equal parts embarrassment and something far more dangerous—the particular, giddy warmth of being gently, affectionately teased by someone whose teasing used to feel like a weapon and now felt like something closer to a gift.

"Get back to work," I said, throwing a dish towel at him, laughing despite myself for what felt like the first time in years.

The Harborne Summer Festival announcement went up on the town bulletin board that Thursday, and I felt the old competitive instinct flare up in my chest before I could stop it—fifteen years gone, and some things, apparently, never fully left you.

"Best of the Harbor," Jace read aloud, standing beside me at the board, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine. "Same category. Same judges' panel, probably, give or take a decade."

"You planning to enter against me?" I asked. "Seems a little complicated, given we now share an oven."

"We could enter together." He said it casually, though something in his tone suggested the idea hadn't been casual at all. "One bakery. One entry. End this rivalry properly, instead of dragging it out for one more summer."

I turned to look at him, searching his face for the old competitive gleam and finding, instead, something gentler—an actual question, not a challenge.

"Together," I repeated slowly, testing how the word felt. "Fifteen years of trying to beat each other, and you want to just... stop."

"I don't want to beat you anymore, Mila." His voice had gone quiet, serious in a way that made my chest tighten. "Haven't wanted that in a long time, if I'm honest. I think I just didn't know how to want anything else from you instead."

The bulletin board, the harbor, the whole ordinary Thursday morning around us seemed to soften and blur at the edges, narrowing down to just the two of us standing there, fifteen years of rivalry quietly dissolving into something neither of us had a name for yet.

"Okay," I said softly. "Together."

His smile, when it broke loose, was unguarded in a way I hadn't seen since we were kids—before trophies and competition and fifteen years of distance had taught him to keep something back.

We spent that evening testing recipes long after closing, flour dusting both our aprons, a half-eaten tray of failed croissant experiments between us on the counter. At some point, laughing over his third ruined attempt at a lavender shortbread, he reached over and brushed a smear of flour off my cheek, his hand lingering just a beat longer than the gesture required.

The kitchen went very quiet.

"You've got some on your face too," I said, voice barely above a whisper, though neither of us moved to fix it.

"Do I?" He wasn't looking at the flour. He was looking at me, steady and warm, something unspoken but unmistakably present in the space between us.

I didn't move away. Neither did he. We stood there in the quiet, flour-dusted kitchen, the harbor dark and glittering through the windows behind him, fifteen years of careful distance narrowing down to the width of a single breath.

Then the oven timer went off, sharp and sudden, and the moment scattered like sugar spilled across the counter—not gone, just interrupted, both of us laughing a little breathlessly as we stepped back to rescue a batch of cookies neither of us particularly cared about anymore.

"To be continued," Jace said softly, something promising and unhurried in his voice, and for once, I didn't mind the wait at all.