Unwrapped (Copper Peak Sparks #6)

A steamy firefighter romance featuring a quiet mountain man who’s been invisible for five years, a candy shop owner who’s been everyone’s favorite and nobody’s person, and a smoke-filled shop after dark where the sweet girl stops smiling and the silent man finally speaks.

She was handing out free samples. He walked through smoke and wanted something realer than sugar. I watched five women in the Trading Post fall in love.

I cheered for every single one of them from behind my counter with caramel on my fingers and a smile that never slipped. I’m everybody’s favorite person in Copper Peak. The sweet one. The easy one.

The girl who hands out free caramel corn and never needs anything back.

Nobody has ever looked at me and wanted. Then I burned a batch of autumn caramels so badly that smoke poured under the door, and a firefighter I’d never noticed burst into my shop.

He found me swearing at a copper pot with my hair falling apart and zero brightness loaded.

He looked at me — flushed, furious, covered in burnt sugar — and something crossed his face that I have never seen a man aim at me before.

I reached for a caramel to offer him. He said no. He said he wasn’t interested in the version I’d just put on. He wanted the one that existed before he walked in. His name is Weston Blair.

He’s been on the crew for years, walking through the courtyard right behind the louder guys, and I never once learned his name.

He’s quiet, steady, built for the mountains, and carrying an unsigned transfer to the wildland team because the thing he wants most requires leaving the brotherhood he’s built his whole identity around.

He started showing up at my shop after closing. In the candy shop after dark, I stopped being sweet. He stopped being invisible.

He tasted warm caramel off my finger at ten o’clock on a Tuesday night, and neither of us made it home.