THE WORST IDEA I HAVE EVER HEARD(MAYA'S POV)

That's my baby. I know it is."

The words hung in the candlelight between us, and I made myself hold his gaze instead of looking away, because looking away would have been its own kind of answer.

"Julian..."

"You don't have to say it again."

He sat back against the counter, arms crossed, watching me with an expression I couldn't quite name.It wasn't anger, not exactly. Something more exhausting than that.

"I already know."

"Then why do you need me to say it?"

"Because you haven't. Not once. You went quiet and let me decide what that meant. That's not the same as you telling me."

He wasn't wrong about that either, which was the most irritating part.

Behind me, the back room door creaked open, and Chloe reappeared with an armful of blankets and a flashlight jammed under her chin.

"Okay, good news, we have blankets. Bad news, I checked the weather app before it died and it says the roads are closed county-wide until further notice, which is apparently code for 'a week,' because that's what happened during the storm in 2019 and everyone still talks about it like it was a war."

"A week?" I repeated.

"Give or take." She set the blankets down on the counter, glancing between us like she'd just walked into a room mid-argument and was hesitant to ask what it had been about.

"You two okay?"

"Fine," I said, at the same moment Julian said, "No."

Chloe looked at him, then at me, then very deliberately picked the flashlight back up.

"Right. I'm going to go check if the Petersons' generator situation is actually solvable, because apparently the alternative is standing here."

"Chloe..."

"Nope." She was already backing toward the door. "Whatever this is, I don't want to know yet. Tell me tomorrow, when I've had coffee and can process it properly."

She disappeared out into the storm before either of us could stop her, and I made a mental note to thank her later, and possibly also apologize, because leaving me alone with Julian Vance was either the kindest thing she'd ever done or the cruelest, and I genuinely couldn't decide which.

The shop went quiet except for the wind. The candle guttered low between us, nearly drowning in its own wax, then caught itself and steadied, throwing one long shadow of Julian's shoulders up the wall behind him.

For a second neither of us said anything at all, and I let myself listen to the storm instead, low and constant against the door, like something enormous settling in for the night.

His phone buzzed on the counter, screen lighting up the dark. He glanced at it and went very still.

"Your mother?" I asked.

"My mother." He didn't pick it up.

"She's confirming a car will be sent down for me first thing tomorrow morning, storm or no storm. She's also reminding me, in case I'd forgotten in the last six hours, that Eleanor will be arriving Thursday and that I am, quote, expected to make an effort."

"Who's Eleanor?"

"Candidate four." He said it flatly, like a job title. "There were six, originally. My mother had a folder. An actual folder, tabbed, with photographs and family net worth listed under each name like she was building a spreadsheet of my future.

I found it on her desk in October and made the mistake of asking why Eleanor's tab had a gold star on it."

"What did she say?"

"That gold stars motivate people." He almost smiled, except it didn't reach anywhere near his eyes. "I have spent my entire adult life being managed. Board seats, mergers, marriages. Somewhere along the way I stopped noticing it was happening because fighting it never changed the outcome, only the timeline."

"That's not managing your life. That's owning it."

"I'm aware."

"Then why haven't you stopped it?"

Something flashed across his face, quick and sharp.

"Because it's not that simple, and you don't know the first thing about my family, so don't stand there in your bakery acting like you'd have handled it differently."

The words landed harder than either of us expected. I saw it hit him a half second after it hit me, watched something close off behind his eyes like he was already regretting it and hadn't decided yet whether to take it back.

"I'm sorry," he said, quieter. "That wasn't fair."

"No. It wasn't."

"You've had a harder night than I have. I shouldn't have said that."

I didn't answer right away, because my hand had found the edge of the counter without my permission and gripped it hard enough that my knuckles had gone pale, and I needed a second before I trusted my voice.

Under the anger, my wolf was pacing, low and unsettled, picking up something in his voice that had nothing to do with the words themselves, some current running underneath his frustration that smelled, unmistakably, like fear of losing something rather than anger at being inconvenienced.

The baby chose that exact moment to kick, one sharp, deliberate jab under my ribs, like even him had an opinion about the last thirty seconds.

"You want to know why I don't know how to be gentle about this?"

My voice cracked on the word gentle, and I hated it, hated that he could hear it.

"Because you're not supposed to be real. You were supposed to be one night. A mistake I made once and then fixed. I built an entire life specifically so nothing like tonight could ever happen to me again, and you weren't supposed to walk into it and prove that all of that planning meant nothing."

Something changed in his expression, softened at the edges in a way that made it worse, not better.

"I'm sorry," he said. "That I'm inconvenient."

"That's not what I meant."

"It's exactly what you meant, and you're allowed to mean it."

He rubbed a hand across his jaw, and for a second he looked less like the man who'd stormed my shop demanding answers and more like someone just as unmoored by tonight as I was.

"I just need to understand what happens now. Because I have a family arriving up the mountain who expect me married off by New Year's, and instead I'm snowed into a bakery with the mother of my child, and none of it fits together in any version of my life that made sense yesterday."

I glanced toward the counter, where the stack of mail I'd shoved under the register that morning had slid out when I moved the tray beside it.

Three overdue notices, red stamped across the top of each one, fanned out in the candlelight like a hand of cards I'd been dealt and couldn't fold.

Julian followed my gaze. He didn't say anything. He didn't have to.

"That's not your business," I said, sweeping the notices back under the counter.

"I didn't say it was."

"You were thinking it."

"I was thinking that we might have more in common tonight than either of us wants to admit."

I looked up at that. "Meaning what?"

He was quiet for a moment, turning something over, and when he finally spoke his voice had changed, careful in a way it hadn't been all night.

"There's a version of this week," he said slowly, "where I don't spend seven days being paraded in front of Eleanor and five other women my mother picked out of a folder. And there's a version of this week where your shop isn't three notices away from closing."

"I'm listening."

"What if those two problems had the same solution."

My stomach dropped,I had this dread of someone who already suspects what's coming and knows, somewhere underneath the dread, that she's probably going to say yes anyway.

"What kind of solution?"

He held my eyes across the candlelight, and for the first time all night he looked almost nervous, like the next word cost him something to say out loud.

"Be my fiancée," he said.

I stared at him. "Excuse me?"

"Not real. Obviously not real. I mean."

He stopped himself, exhaled, started over.

"I need my family to believe I'm engaged. You need this shop to survive the winter. I have more money than I know what to do with and a week trapped in the same town as you regardless of what either of us decides. It solves both problems at once."

"You want me to pretend to be your fiancée."

"I want you to save your shop."

His voice had gone very even, very deliberate, the voice, I'd learn later, he used when he'd already made a decision and was simply walking someone else toward agreeing with it.

"The rest is just what we call it."

Outside, the wind shifted pitch, a low, mournful note through the eaves that hadn't been there a moment ago, and the whole shop seemed to hold its breath along with me.

"That is," I said, "the worst idea I have ever heard."

He held out his hand across the counter, the way you'd close a business deal, except neither of us moved to shake on it right away.

For a long second we just stood there, his hand open in the space between us, and I was aware of him in a way that had nothing to do with strategy, the warmth radiating off his skin even through the cold, the stillness of someone who had decided not to be the one to close the last distance between them.

"Probably," he agreed. "Is it a yes?"