Sweet Deception

Chapter2-Four Fourty-five

I made it at four forty-five exactly, which should have felt like a victory except Jace was already there, apron on, flour dusted across one forearm, looking entirely too at home in a kitchen that was now apparently half mine.

"You're early," he said, not looking up from the dough he was folding with the kind of practiced ease that came from doing something ten thousand times. "I almost didn't believe you'd actually show."

"I said four forty-five. It's four forty-five." I dropped my bag on the nearest counter, surveying the kitchen like enemy territory, which, in a sense, it was. "Where do I start?"

"Depends." He finally looked up, something assessing in his gaze. "Can you still do the thing with the croissant lamination, or did California teach you to buy everything frozen?"

"I own a bakery in San Francisco, Jace. A real one. With real pastry, made from scratch, that wins actual awards." I grabbed an apron off the hook with more force than strictly necessary. "I didn't forget how to laminate dough just because I left Harborne."

"A bakery." Something flickered across his face—surprise, maybe, or something more complicated. "You never mentioned that."

"We haven't spoken in fifteen years. There's a lot I never mentioned."

The silence that followed wasn't comfortable, but it wasn't entirely hostile either—something newer, unfamiliar, neither of us quite sure what to do with it.

"Fine," Jace said finally, nodding toward the second workstation. "Prove it, then. Croissants for the morning rush. I've got the sourdough and the muffins covered. Let's see if San Francisco actually taught you anything useful."

"Careful," I said, rolling up my sleeves. "You're about to get upstaged in your own kitchen."

"Our kitchen," he corrected, something sharp and amused in his voice. "Try to remember that part."

By six a.m., the kitchen had fallen into an unexpected, wordless rhythm—his hands moving through sourdough with the same confidence I remembered from childhood, mine working lamination with the precision fifteen years of professional kitchens had drilled into muscle memory. We didn't talk much. We didn't need to. There was something almost unbearably intimate about working in silence beside someone, the kind of closeness that crept up on you sideways while you were busy pretending not to notice it.

"You changed your technique," Jace said eventually, watching me fold the dough with an expression I couldn't quite read.

"You noticed."

"I notice everything about the way you bake, Hart. Always have." He said it simply, almost carelessly, like it wasn't a confession at all, though the way his jaw tightened immediately afterward suggested he'd surprised even himself by saying it out loud.

I didn't have a response for that. I focused very hard on the dough instead, heat climbing up my neck that had nothing to do with the ovens.

The bell above the front door chimed, mercifully interrupting whatever that moment had been about to become, and the first customers of the day began filtering in—tourists, mostly, drawn by the smell of fresh bread and the harbor view, none of them aware they were watching the opening morning of an unlikely, reluctant truce fifteen years in the making.

"Showtime," Jace murmured, already moving toward the counter, flashing the same easy, practiced smile I remembered him using on every judge at every summer festival we'd ever competed in.

I watched him work the counter for a moment—charming, unhurried, good at this in a way that had nothing to do with rivalry and everything to do with genuine skill—and felt something shift uncomfortably in my chest, a c***k in fifteen years of carefully maintained resentment that I wasn't remotely ready to examine.

This was supposed to be a year of gritted teeth and professional distance.

Four forty-five on day one, and I was already in trouble.