Proof of Winter

She came home to sell the bakery. He's the reason she can't.

Pastry chef Tessa Marlowe has fourteen years of reasons never to return to Juniper Harbor, Michigan, and one very good reason to go back: her grandmother's will. Odile Marlowe has left the family bakery jointly to Tessa and to Gideon Hale, the brewpub owner next door, the one man in town Tessa has never forgiven. To keep the building, they must reopen the shop, turn a profit, and place in the Midwinter Festival bake-off before the last Saturday of January. Fourteen weeks. One frozen kitchen. One oven that runs hot on the left.

Gideon has spent eleven years being useful: running his father's taproom, fixing what breaks, never asking for anything. He does not want a second building. He certainly doesn't want Tessa back in town, stirring up a past he has never explained. But the bread is rising, the whole town is betting on them, and the line between rivals and something warmer gets thinner every night the lights go out on Main Street.

Then a bottom drawer is opened, a job offer arrives from Chicago, and each of them is hiding a secret the other may never forgive.

Proof of Winter is a slow-burn, small-town, enemies-to-lovers romance about credit, second chances, and the terrifying, ordinary act of asking for what you want. Steamy, with the door mostly closed. Happily ever after guaranteed.