SEDUCING MY BESTFRIEND'S BROTHER
Ava Reyes has spent four years doing what she does best — keeping her feelings exactly where they cannot do any damage.
She is twenty-nine, co-owner of a thriving bakery, and hopelessly in love with the one man she has absolutely no business wanting. Marcus Calloway is her best friend's older brother — steady, brilliant, and infuriatingly easy to be near. When he left for London six years ago, Ava buried her feelings and moved on. Or did a convincing enough impression of it.
Then Marcus comes home. Permanently.
And he is engaged.
His fiancée, Isabelle Ferreira, is a sharp London solicitor who is warm, intelligent, and impossible to resent. She has done nothing wrong. She deserves everything she has.
Which makes what Ava is beginning to want all the more dangerous.
Because the more Ava finds herself near Marcus — at family dinners, in stolen conversations, in the small accidental moments that keep finding them together — the more she notices things she shouldn't. The way he watches her. The way the air shifts between them when no one else is paying attention.
She is not a woman who chases unavailable men. She has a conscience, and it is loud.
But she is also a woman who is tired of being careful.
What begins as a private war with herself slowly becomes something more deliberate. Ava doesn't set out to destroy anything. She simply sets out to make Marcus Calloway finally see her.
What she doesn't account for is how much it will cost — and how deeply she will fall before she understands the difference between wanting someone and deserving them.
Some fires don't care how carefully you've been living.
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Chapter: Chapter 14I opened the bakery at six on Saturday as usual. This was not unusual. Saturdays were our busiest morning — the neighborhood came out for weekend pastries the way it came out for nothing else, unhurried and deliberate, people who had been eating efficiently all week allowing themselves the particular luxury of something made with care. By eight the line was out the door and Renee and I moved through the morning rush with the focused efficiency of people who had done this enough times that it had become a kind of choreography. By 10:30, the rush had thinned. By eleven the bakery held four customers and the comfortable quiet of a Saturday morning finding its pace. At 11:03 the bell above the door chimed. I was behind the counter. I did not look up immediately — I was finishing a note on the order sheet, completing the sentence, giving myself the three seconds that had become my standard preparation for Marcus Calloway walking into a room. Then I looked up. He was in a grey henley
Last Updated: 2026-05-10
Chapter: Chapter 13November arrived the way it always did in New York — without apology. One morning the air was crisp and manageable and the trees along Court Street still held their color, and the next morning you stepped outside and the wind had a different quality to it entirely, something serious and committed, and the city had shifted into its winter register without asking anyone's permission. I had always loved November in Brooklyn. I loved the way the light changed — lower and more golden, arriving at angles that made ordinary streets look considered, like someone had adjusted the contrast on the whole borough. I loved the way the bakery felt in November, warmer by comparison to outside, the smell of spiced things carrying further in cold air, the way customers came in slightly windswept and left looking restored. November was good for business. It was good for baking. It was good for the particular kind of interior life that required darkness and warmth in equal measure. It was less good f
Last Updated: 2026-05-10
Chapter: Chapter 12Marcus did not come to the bakery the following Thursday.I noticed at ten o'clock, which was when he usually arrived. I noticed again at eleven, when the morning had fully settled into its quiet middle rhythm and the window table sat empty with the particular emptiness of something expected and absent. By noon I had stopped looking at the door with any real expectation and had transferred my attention entirely to the ganache I was tempering, which required precision and therefore was an excellent professional reason to stop thinking about anything else.Renee said nothing.This was, in its own way, louder than anything she could have said.He didn't text either.Not Thursday, not Friday. Saturday I was at the bakery for the wholesale prep and my phone stayed quiet in the way phones stayed quiet when you were aware of them, which was the worst kind of quiet. Sunday was the Halloween dinner at the Calloway brownstone and I had told Patricia I was coming and I was not going to cancel, n
Last Updated: 2026-05-09
Chapter: Chapter 11The week after my conversation with Jade, I waited for something to change.For the temperature to drop at family events, for Jade to become careful around me in the particular way she became careful when she was managing feelings she hadn't fully processed. For Marcus to suddenly seem more distant, which would mean Jade had said something to him, which would mean the whole careful architecture of the last few weeks would need to be revisited from the ground up.None of that happened.What happened instead was ordinary — Jade texted me Monday about a television show she'd started, Tuesday about a work thing, Wednesday to ask if I was coming to her parents' Halloween dinner the following weekend. Normal Jade, full frequency, no detectable change in signal.Either she had processed it faster than I expected, or she was holding it carefully and waiting.Knowing Jade, probably both.The bakery on Monday was busy in the good way — a wholesale order from a restaurant in the West Village tha
Last Updated: 2026-05-09
Chapter: Chapter 10Jade Calloway had two modes when she suspected something.The first was direct — she asked the question plainly, looked you in the eye, and waited with the particular patience of someone who had decided they were going to get an answer and the only variable was how long it took. This mode was efficient and slightly terrifying and most people capitulated within thirty seconds.The second was oblique — she circled the thing, approached it from angles, asked questions that were technically about something else but were actually about the thing, until the person she was talking to either confessed voluntarily or found themselves so thoroughly cornered that confession felt like their own idea.I had known Jade for eleven years. I knew both modes intimately. I could see them coming from a distance the way you could see weather moving in over the water — the particular quality of light before it changed.She was in mode two on Sunday.We were at brunch — just the two of us, our regular place
Last Updated: 2026-05-05
Chapter: Chapter 9I did not plan the bookstore.That was the thing I kept coming back to afterward — the fact that it was genuinely accidental, unengineered, a collision of two people's Saturday afternoons with no architecture behind it. I had not manufactured it. I had not known he would be there. If I had, I might have chosen a different bookstore entirely, which was its own kind of information about where my resolve stood on a given Saturday in late October.The bookstore was on Court Street in Cobble Hill — small, independent, the kind of place that smelled like paper and wood polish and took its fiction section seriously. I had been going there since college. I went when I needed to think, which meant I went fairly often, and I went alone, which meant I knew the layout well enough to navigate it without looking up from whatever I was already reading.I was in the back corner, in the literary fiction section, halfway through the first chapter of something a review had recommended, when I heard his
Last Updated: 2026-05-05
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