The CEO's Bargain

Three months of numbers that will not work, one blazer with a safety pin where a button should be, and a third and final appointment with a loan officer who has never tasted her sourdough. She presses her palm against the bakery door and shoves, the bell jangling overhead as she steps into the September morning. Burnt sugar and her own exhaustion cling to the apron. Up since four, shaping croissants and telling herself the arithmetic will come good. *You're going.* Derek stands in the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a towel that has seen better days, flannel hanging open, grey-streaked beard overdue a trim. *Third time's the charm.* She tucks strawberry blonde curls behind her ears and wishes she had washed them instead of yanking them into a bun. Then a man comes up the street adjusting his cuff like he has all the time in the world, and Cass knows who he is before he turns toward her door. Everybody in town does. Bennett Cross. The man who has been trying to buy the inn. The man Margot Colby has refused three times. The man whose name comes up in every conversation about this town's future, usually in the same sentence as words like development and selling out. Men like Bennett Cross do not come to bakeries for the sourdough. What follows: a note she never opened, a door she swore she would never go through, a price she never meant to name out loud, a ring that binds two people to a story they both know is false, a dinner that changes the arrangement, the truth underneath the arrangement, and a vulnerability he has shown exactly nobody in thirty years. *He'd trusted me with something he'd never told anyone, and I'd stood in his kitchen, kissed him, slept in his bed, and said nothing about the six envelopes.* *People will betray you. Trusting anyone is a mistake.* She handed him the evidence herself. And by then he has already decided that whatever it costs him, in money or reputation or the one relationship that made him this way, nobody is taking her or this town away from him.