DOMINIC'S POV

I had been to the bakery eleven times before I ever spoke to Mara Villanueva.

I thought about that on the drive back to the penthouse after our meeting, sitting in the back of the car while the city woke up around me. Eleven times I had slipped away from my office, told my assistant I had a private appointment, and driven to a small bakery on the edge of a block my company was acquiring. Eleven times I had sat in the corner, ordered the same thing, and left before the morning rush started.

I had never done anything like that in my life. I was not a person who had hiding places. I was not a person who needed them. My life was structured to the point where spontaneity was practically a foreign language, and yet somehow this bakery had become the one place I went when the structure got too heavy to carry.

I first found it by accident fourteen months ago. I had been in the area for a site visit and my driver had taken a wrong turn and I had looked out the window and seen the light on inside and the sign in the window and I had told him to stop without knowing why. I went in, sat down, and ordered whatever was in the glass case closest to me. The woman behind the counter that morning was not Mara. It was an older part-time worker who moved slowly and called everyone sweetheart. The place was quiet. The coffee was good. Nobody looked at me like I was anything other than a man who wanted breakfast.

I came back the following week.

I saw Mara properly for the first time on my third visit. She came in through the back before the other worker arrived, moving fast and efficiently the way people do when they have too much to do and not enough time. She didn't notice me in the corner. She tied her apron, checked something in the back, came out and started restocking the display case, and talked to herself quietly while she worked, a low continuous murmur that I couldn't make out from where I was sitting but that sounded like a running commentary on everything she was doing.

I found it unexpectedly calming.

I found her unexpectedly calming, which was strange because every time I encountered her in an official capacity she was the opposite of calming. She was loud and direct and had absolutely no interest in making me comfortable. She had stood up at that community meeting and looked straight at me, through my representative, through the careful corporate language we had packaged the development plans in, and said what nobody else in the room had the nerve to say. That my company was not here to help the neighborhood. That we were here to replace it.

She wasn't wrong.

I sat in my home office that morning after leaving the bakery and read through the contract my legal team had prepared. I had given them her conditions the night before and they had revised accordingly, and reading it now I was aware that I had agreed to terms I had not anticipated agreeing to. The permanent suspension on her building and the two adjacent properties was not a small thing. My acquisitions director was going to have questions I wasn't ready to answer yet.

But I had agreed to it in the room without hesitating, which was unlike me.

I told myself it was practical. The arrangement needed her cooperation and her cooperation required security. It was a reasonable business concession to make an important deal work. That was all it was.

My phone rang. It was Theo.

I let it ring twice before answering because Theo called at unreasonable hours and had no concept of a working morning.

"It's six forty five," I said.

"I know," he said. "I've been up since five. I went for a run. You should try it, it's very humanizing." He paused. "Are you at the bakery."

I was quiet for a second too long.

"You are," Theo said. "Dominic. Again?"

"I had a meeting there."

"A meeting."

"A business meeting."

"At six in the morning. At the bakery you have never told anyone about but that I found out about because your driver told my driver because they're friends and apparently your secret isn't as secret as you think."

I made a note to have a conversation with my driver.

"It was a business meeting," I said again.

Theo laughed and the laugh had that particular quality it always had, the one that meant he knew something and was enjoying knowing it more than was strictly necessary. "The woman who called you soulless at the community meeting. What was her name."

"Don't."

"I'm just asking."

"Theo."

"Mara," he said, like he was trying the name out. "I looked her up after you mentioned the block acquisition. She's been fighting you for months. She's very good at it." He paused. "She's also very pretty, which I'm sure is completely irrelevant."

"It is completely irrelevant."

"Of course it is." He didn't believe me and he wasn't pretending to. "So what was the meeting about."

I had not planned to tell Theo. I had planned to handle the entire arrangement quietly, inform only the people who legally needed to know, and manage it efficiently without it becoming a conversation topic in my personal life. But Theo had a specific skill, inherited from no one I could identify, of extracting information simply by waiting and saying very little.

"I need to be married in six weeks," I said. "You know why."

"Grandfather's clause. Yes."

"I've made an arrangement with someone."

The line was quiet for a moment and then Theo said, carefully, "The baker."

"It's a legal arrangement. A contract. Six weeks and then it's done."

Another silence. This one longer.

"Dominic," Theo said, and something in his voice had shifted, quieter now, the way he got when he was about to say something he actually meant. "You have been going to that bakery for over a year. You go before anyone is awake. You've never taken anyone with you and you've never told anyone about it." He stopped. "That's not a business decision. That was never a business decision."

I didn't answer.

"Just don't hurt her," Theo said. "Whatever this arrangement is. Don't let it be the thing that hurts her."

I ended the call and sat with that for longer than I should have.

My phone buzzed. A message from my legal team confirming the contract revision was ready for final review. I opened it and read through every clause carefully, the way I read everything, looking for gaps, for weaknesses, for anything that needed tightening.

I stopped on the clause about the bakery building.

Permanent suspension. My signature.

I confirmed the revision and sent it back.

Then I opened my laptop and pulled up the anonymous food review account I had been writing for fourteen months, the one with four hundred followers who had no idea who was behind it, and I read the last review I had written. The one about the ube cheesecake. I had written it the morning after the community meeting, the night Mara had looked across a room full of people and said exactly what she thought without flinching.

I had written that the bakery felt like the kind of place that existed to remind you that some things were still made with care in a world that had mostly stopped bothering.

I closed the laptop.

The wedding was in six weeks. It was a contract. It was clean and temporary and entirely practical and I was going to treat it exactly that way.

I almost believed it.

My phone rang again. This time it was a number I hadn't seen in three years, a number I had saved under a single initial because I couldn't bring myself to delete it and couldn't bring myself to label it properly either.

My father was calling.