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 106The teaching kitchen found its space in March. A corner unit in the West Village, two blocks from the bakery location, ground floor with large windows that let in the morning light at the angle I had been mentally requiring since the concept had arrived in the Sydney notebook. Not large. Deliberately not large. Twelve people maximum, which was the number I had decided was right for the kind of teaching I wanted to do. Renee had found it in January. She had been right that she would know the right space when she saw it. "This is it," she said, standing in the middle of the empty room on the Tuesday we walked through it. "This is it," I confirmed. We signed the lease on a Wednesday. The buildout began the following week. --- Life in February and March had a specific quality. Not the urgent rebuilding quality of the first return from Sydney years ago, when I had been managing loss and trying to construct something around it. This was different. Quieter. More deliberate
Last Updated: 2026-06-25
Chapter: Chapter 105New York in February was exactly itself. Cold in the specific committed way of a city that had been cold for months and had stopped apologizing for it. The air at JFK arrivals had the particular quality of recycled warmth meeting outdoor cold, that specific threshold feeling of a building releasing you back into winter, and I stood on the curb with my bags and breathed it in and felt something that had no single name. Recognition. That was the closest word. The recognition of a place that had been inside you all along, regardless of how far you had gone from it. Renee was at the curb. Of course she was. She had the car running and the heat on and the expression of someone who had been waiting for this specific moment for two years and was not going to make it strange by making too much of it. She looked at me. I looked at her. "Hi," she said. "Hi," I said. She got out and helped with the bags without being asked and I let her and we got everything in the trunk a
Last Updated: 2026-06-25
Chapter: Chapter 104 January came and I was still in Sydney. One more month, I had told myself in December. I was keeping that promise. Not reluctantly. Not with the specific restlessness of someone waiting to leave. Just with the understanding that the last month of something deserved to be its own thing, that you didn't sprint through the ending of a chapter because the next one was waiting. You gave it its proper time. Then you closed it. --- The teaching kitchen plans had grown through December into something real on paper. Three notebooks now. The original one with its two sentences and all the subsequent pages filling in, and two more that had arrived because the first wasn't big enough. Layouts. Concepts. The specific vision of a space that was about process rather than product, about showing people how the thing was made rather than simply offering them the made thing. A curriculum, even. Loose, at this stage. Ideas more than syllabus. But the shape of it was there, and the shape was rig
Last Updated: 2026-06-24
Chapter: Chapter 103June arrived and I had been in Sydney for a year. I did not mark this with any ceremony. No toast, no acknowledgment, no deliberate reflection on the anniversary of it. I noticed the date the way you noticed dates that carried weight — with a quiet internal recognition and then the deliberate choice to let the day be what it was, which was a Tuesday, which meant the Newtown kitchen and the morning prep and the specific ordinary work of a life that had found its shape. One year. I was still here. --- Patrick noticed. He came into the kitchen on the Tuesday of the anniversary and stood at the counter watching me work for a moment and then said, without preamble: "A year." "Yes," I said. "How does it feel?" I thought about it. "Like longer," I said. "And like less time than I needed." He absorbed this. "How much more time do you need?" he said. I looked at the dough in front of me. "I don't know yet," I said honestly. "But I think I'll know when I know." He nodded. "The j
Last Updated: 2026-06-24
Chapter: Chapter 102January arrived in Sydney with the full commitment of a summer that had decided to make itself known. The heat was serious in the way Sydney January heat was serious — not aggressive, not the punishing concrete heat of a New York summer, but pervasive, the kind that arrived before dawn and settled into everything and made the city move at a different pace than the rest of the year. I had adapted. This was the thing I noticed most about myself in January, the small quiet evidence of someone who had been somewhere long enough to stop being a visitor. I bought a second fan for the flat above the Newtown kitchen. I learned which streets stayed shaded longest in the afternoon. I knew the specific hour the coastal walk was best done to avoid the midday heat and I did it at that hour without having to think about it. I had become someone who lived here. Not permanently. Not with the full weight of a life planted somewhere. But genuinely, in the day-to-day sense of a person who had found
Last Updated: 2026-06-23
Chapter: Chapter 101October in Sydney was the beginning of spring. I had forgotten this from the first time. Or not forgotten exactly, more that the seasonal reversal had stopped registering as strange and had simply become part of the texture of being here. The jacaranda trees were beginning their bloom again, the purple arriving slowly on the Surry Hills streets like something being remembered rather than something new. I noticed this. I noticed most things in October with the specific sharpened attention of someone who had decided that noticing the world around her was preferable to being inside her own head. I had been in Sydney for four months. --- Patrick had been good about the hours. In July and August I had worked too much and he had let me because he understood why and because the kitchen needed the help and because sometimes the most useful thing you could do for someone was simply give them somewhere to put their hands. By September he had started gently redirecting me. "Go," he said
Last Updated: 2026-06-23
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