Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 407(@200wpm)___ 326(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 407(@200wpm)___ 326(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
He was my dad’s best friend…
The man I grew up hearing stories about—the legend who could turn food into magic.
The one who vanished after betraying my family.
Now my family’s bakery is dying, and my dad has one impossible
Find Luca Carson.
And bring him home.
Except Luca isn’t the man I imagined.
He’s scarred, brooding, and hiding away in a lakefront mansion where secrets go to rot.
And I didn’t expect him to make me laugh.
To make me feel.
To make me forget every reason I came here in the first place.
He thinks I’m someone else.
And when he finds out who I really am…
I’ll lose the one man I never meant to fall for.
✔️ Dad’s Best Friend
✔️ Forbidden Age Gap
✔️ Grumpy x Sunshine
✔️ Beauty & the Beast vibes
✔️ Small Town Bakery
✔️ Foodie Romance
✔️ Forced Proximity
✔️ Found Family
✔️ Explosive Chemistry
A forbidden, age-gap, steamy romance served warm with a side of pie and heartbreak.
ALL BOOKS IN THIS SERIES IS A STANDALONE AND CAN BE READ IN ANY ORDER
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter one
Dulcie
My life is pie, and my family is pie. Pie is our legacy. For three generations, Marietta, Ohio, has known the Piedales for our bakery. Our fortunes were first founded on pie, our present is pie, and our legacy is meant to be successfully crossbreeding a new mix of pie.
The entirety of my being, knowledge, and history centers around pie. At the heart of me, it’s who I am. I wouldn’t even be overly surprised if I were put in for an MRI and the doctors discovered that instead of a normal heart, I was brewing up the perfect apple pie with just the right amount of cinnamon and the perfect ratio of blackberries. It’s my grandpa’s secret recipe, and combined with the most delicious crust known to man, and the perfect crosshatch pattern on the top, it’s my favorite.
They’d probably also find that I have pie on the brain so often that there’s one up there in my head too.
Currently, that one is moldering.
My dad stares at me with tears on his creased cheeks, the salty liquid spilling down a channel of deeply carved wrinkles. He just dropped the bomb that for us, the pie is in fact not the limit. Of course it’s the sky, but in this family, we have a habit of talking in the worst pie puns. As a kid, I loved the weird humor. As an adult? I’ve always found it berry nice.
It’s not berry nice at all that the person I love and trust most in the whole world just sat me down in the back of the bakery, with the mouthwatering, almost overwhelmingly sweet scents of pies baking in the ovens all around us, and told me that if we don’t find a way to get our Pie Masters title back, we’re finished.
I do all the financials for the bakery, and I knew we were in a trend of steady decline, but I had no idea Dad borrowed money, remortgaged the house, and owes personal back taxes. He never let me file those for him, but apparently, he wasn’t filing them for himself either.
Unless something happens, our life as we know it, and as my family has known it since the time of my great-grandfather, is over.
The fact is, people have lost faith in us. Ain’t that a slice of humble pie?
Dad swipes at his cheeks, pulling himself back together after giving me that devastating news. He’s the kind of person who refuses to stay down once he’s been kicked. “I have a plan. This year is our year, I know it. We’ll take that blue ribbon back.”
He’s talking about the Pi and Pie Science and Food Fair. It sounds ridiculous, but around here, it’s a big deal. It’s kind of like that program where they give out stars to restaurants, which is how people choose and decide where they’re going to eat and buy from.
“I don’t want to put anyone out of business, but if we could just draw some of the attention back to our pies, that would mean more orders, and more orders always mean more cash flow, and more cash means we might not have to close.”
“We’re not closing. I can’t let that happen.” I brush away more than a few of my own tears, sniffling loudly and trying to dig down and find my dad’s same enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, I’m quite a logical person. My mom always made it clear to me that she didn’t want me to take over the family business. She’s always supported my dad, loved him, and worked tirelessly at the bakery, often for long and gruelling hours. This is our life, and she’s lived it, throwing her whole self behind it. I don’t know why she wouldn’t let me do the same. When I begged my dad to send me to culinary school, he refused. My parents were the ones paying for school, and it turned my crank right the heck over that they basically forced me to go into business, but after I got there and found out that my love of math and science wouldn’t be totally wasted, I stopped giving them a hard time, and we struck a sort of bargain.
I’d do the four years of school and get my degree, but when I was finished, I wanted to come home and work at the bakery again. Obviously, all my breaks and summers were spent there. I resumed the same duties I had as a teenager working with my dad, but in addition to that, I started getting paid to do all the bakery’s financials.
That’s how I found out that my parents were not in a position to hire anyone to replace me. My going to college meant longer hours for my mom working beside my dad, and my dad doubling down on the already crazy amount of time, effort, and love he gave to the place. Even if he could have hired someone, though, I don’t think he would have.