Chapter 34
“ F ucking hell, Charlie,” he panted, still wrecked beneath me. “I’ve never had sex like that in my life. That was...beyond a home run. Jesus . You took me to fifth base and I might never recover.”
I grinned wickedly, still straddling his hips, my hands dragging slow, lazy patterns across the taut muscles of his chest. His skin was hot, damp, still trembling under my fingertips.
“Hotter than quoting Proust, babe?” I smirked, cocking a brow.
“Who would’ve thought—Fitzgerald Whitmore’s kinks are literary quotes and a finger in the ass. ”
He blushed. Actually fucking blushed . A dusty, boyish pink bloomed across his cheekbones, and for one second, the man who could dismantle a zoning board with a stare looked sheepish.
Before I could tease him more, he growled low in his throat and grabbed me—arms banding tight around my waist—and rolled us hard, flipping me onto my back with a thud of tangled limbs and sheets.
Now he was on top, looming over me, his hair wild, his smile crooked and soft. I laughed, breathless, arching up into him. “Oh, are you gonna punish me now, Whitmore?”
He ducked his head down, mouth brushing my ear. “No,” he said, voice low and wrecked. “I’m gonna hold you here for a minute so I don’t embarrass myself by proposing marriage while my dick is still spent.”
My heart skipped and I laughed—awkwardly brushing off his comment as a joke—but he just looked at me, really looked , like he was memorizing the way my skin flushed and my hair fanned out on the sheets and how my lips parted without a single clever thing to say.
“Hush, Fitz, you shouldn’t toy with a girl like that.”
He kissed my nose. My cheeks. The corner of my mouth.
Then he pulled back just enough to look me in the eyes, his thumb brushing lazy circles along my jaw like he could smooth away the panic he must have seen flickering there.
“I’m not toying with you, Charlie.” His voice was quiet, steady, heavy with the kind of truth you can’t joke your way out of.
I swallowed hard, blinking up at him, the ceiling fan whirring behind his head like the whole world had tilted and no one bothered to warn me.
He smiled then—full and devastating—and dragged the pad of his thumb across my bottom lip.
“You think we could do all this and I’d walk away?
That there was any way I would not fall in love with you? ”
I made a wounded noise deep in my throat, like he’d cracked me open with a butter knife and didn’t even realize it.
He grinned wider. “You’re it for me, Winslow.”
The air between us felt thick and sweet like a jar of molasses—with all the feelings oozing down out of the jar and into the open. I shoved his shoulder, trying to play it cool, trying not to combust. “God, you’re so dramatic.”
He caught my wrist easily and pressed a kiss to my pulse point, right where it raced like a rabbit under my skin. “Only for you, Winslow,” he murmured.
And just when I thought I might actually lose it—might actually start crying or confessing or asking him to marry me right back like an unhinged lunatic—my phone buzzed violently against the nightstand.
Both our heads turned. Another buzz. Then another.
I reached for it blindly, dragging it toward me with two fingers.
Fitz groaned and buried his face in my neck. “Ignore it, whatever it is. I just found religion and it’s between your thighs.” But something in the way the notifications kept lighting up the screen—message after message—set my nerves on edge.
Reluctantly, Fitz rolled off me with a groan as he looked down at the screen too, noting all my text notifications. “Damn, Winslow, you’re blowing up.”
“Fitz,” I said, nudging him. “I think Maya’s article just dropped.” I sat up, pulling the sheet around my chest. The notifications blurred together, a flood of messages.
Holy shit. You’re in the news!
Are you seeing this??
Lemondrop Bakery is featured on the Bellwater Cover front page!
My stomach dropped to my knees. Fitz caught the change in my breathing instantly. He sat up, hand sliding over my thigh under the sheets. “Hey,” he said, steady. “Whatever it is, we’ll handle it. Let’s look together.”
I nodded, fingers trembling a little as I pulled up the news article. There, front and center, glowing on the screen under the Bellwater Cove Beacon, town’s local news site, was the headline that would change everything:
Historic Preservation or Dirty Profiteering? Mariner Horizons Accused of Targeting Bellwater Cove Small Businesses
And right beneath it was a photo of my bakery—with my name in bold.
“Good,” he said, brushing a kiss over my forehead. Then he grinned, slow and feral. “Thatcher and his consulting company can get fucked. They’ve been outed and, I’m willing to bet, so have the zoning board members taking bribes from them.”
I kept scrolling, pulse pounding, Fitz’s hand firm and grounding on my thigh. The article wasn’t just good; it was devastating. Maya hadn’t pulled any punches.
She had quotes from former business owners, screenshots of shady emails between Mariner Horizons executives and the zoning board committee and, the real kicker, records that Mariner Horizons had been quietly buying up downtown properties at a fraction of their value once businesses lost their use permits.
And my little bakery was the impetus for it all. She had subtitled it:
When a Bakery Became the Canary in the Coal Mine.
I let out a shaky laugh.“Holy shit,” I whispered.
“Holy shit is right,” Fitz said, his voice dark and low with satisfaction. “We just flipped the goddamn chessboard.”
I looked up at him—still shirtless, bruised with love bites, sheets tangled around his hips—and felt something warm and bright and wild bloom in my chest.
It wasn’t just relief or victory; it was hope. For the first time since that fucking letter arrived, I believed—really, truly believed—that I could keep my bakery. That I could keep my future. That maybe, just maybe, I could keep him, too.