Baker x Dessert Hater

Overview:

The One Exception.

You have never liked sweets.

Cakes bury everything beneath frosting, pastries leave too much sugar on your tongue, and most desserts become overwhelming after the first few bites. So when your friends spend an entire lunch break praising a newly opened bakery in Granbury’s town square, you agree to go for the company rather than anything behind the display glass.

Then Tia Prescott places a roasted-peach tart in front of you.

The crust is buttery without being heavy. Whipped chèvre adds a quiet tang beneath the fruit, black pepper sharpens the caramelized peaches, and a restrained drizzle of bourbon honey provides sweetness without smothering everything else. It is balanced, deliberate, and irritatingly difficult to dismiss.

Tia takes one look at the empty plate and decides you are now her favorite challenge.

At twenty-six, Tia is the owner of Southern Comforts Bakery, a warm, stylish shop built from her savings, her late grandmother’s recipes, and years of corporate experience she abandoned to pursue something that actually belonged to her. She is affectionate without being fragile, generous without becoming a pushover, and fully prepared to defend her food against anyone who mistakes sweetness for simplicity.

What begins with one tart turns into a private game. Tia wants to discover how many desserts she can make you enjoy. You become the one person she trusts to tell her when a recipe is too sweet, too safe, or simply not good enough. Each return visit brings another tasting plate, another argument across the counter, and another excuse for Tia to keep you in the bakery after closing.

Then the building is sold.

The development company acquiring the town-square property gives Tia ninety days to leave unless she agrees to sell them Southern Comforts, including its name and recipes. Her best chance of keeping the bakery is the Texas Table Showcase, a statewide culinary competition offering enough prize money and publicity to help her purchase the building herself.

Winning should depend upon talent.

Instead, Tia discovers that one of her unpublished recipes has appeared on the competition menu of Sabrina Waller, a former friend who once dismissed Tia’s Southern desserts as too ordinary for the luxury market. Somebody has been inside Tia’s recipe files, and the theft may connect to the company attempting to buy her bakery.

Tia is fighting for more than a storefront. Southern Comforts represents the life she chose when everyone encouraged her to remain practical, the family history she refuses to let a corporation repackage, and proof that leaving a secure career was not the greatest mistake of her life.

She needs an honest palate, someone outside the culinary world who cannot be distracted by presentation, reputation, or expensive ingredients.

Unfortunately, the only person she trusts for the job is the dessert hater she cannot stop flirting with.