A slow-burn, grumpy-sunshine hockey romance. Standalone in the Puck Bunny series.

The apartment above her bakery has been empty since her father died. Four years of closed doors. Her mother’s solution: rent it to a hockey player. Morning counter shifts in exchange for reduced rent. Simple — except the tenant is the coach’s kid, and the last time they were in the same room, he called baking “just flour and waiting” three feet behind her back.

The staircase door has been shut for four years. My father’s apartment. My father’s stairs. The third step still creaks the way it did when he’d come down to check the proof.

My mother broke her wrist six weeks before the holiday rush — the only window this bakery makes enough to survive the winter. I need the rent. I need the help. I don’t need Tommy Kowalski.

Tommy Kowalski is six-foot-one of grin and bad decisions, the Mammoths’ golden retriever in a locker room full of grown men. He’s got a yellow lab with no concept of personal space, a truck held together by dog hair, and hands that never stop moving. He talks like a man who has never met a silence he didn’t need to fill — which is exactly how he ended up dismissing my life’s work to a laughing room.

He didn’t know I was behind him. He didn’t know my name.

He’s supposed to be a rent check and a pair of hands on the morning counter. Nothing more.

He’s not supposed to show up in my kitchen at 3 AM because he heard something wrong through the floor. He’s not supposed to silently lower my spice shelf three inches to my reach between shifts. He’s not supposed to be the person I trust with my father’s recipe.

He’s not supposed to kiss me at the counter after close, with flour on his jaw and the mixer dying behind us.

His agent sees us as content — The Bakery Girlfriend. How a Defenseman Found His Brand.

His father is his coach, and his father doesn’t know yet.

And I promised myself, a long time ago, that no one was going to save this place but me.

I built this alone. I am not becoming the coach’s son’s baker.

Except the staircase door is open now. And Tommy Kowalski has a perfect record of showing up.

Grumpy baker, golden-retriever defenseman. Forced proximity. Found family. For readers who want to fall slowly.