CHAPTER 1
It all began with macaroni and cheese.
Not the normal blue-box kind. The kind featuring artisanal tricolor pasta, overpriced truffle oil, and at least five other ingredients that meant the certified culinary crook next door could charge thirty-five bucks a pop for undersized portions served in photogenic, primed-for-social-media ceramic cows. Yes … Actual. Ceramic. Cows.
Felicity stabbed her spade at the stubborn dandelion roots until her tattooed arms were slick with sweat and covered in soil. The damn thing was so deep.
She threw the spade down and glared at the back of the old converted St. Clare Catholic Church building that housed both her plant store and the dumb restaurant that was the current bane of her existence.
She needed the bigger weed trowel if she was going to vent all her fromaged fusilli–fueled fury.
The restaurant’s macaroni and cheese concept—described as “quirky as fuck” by local influencers—meant St. Clare Circle had been flooded by people since C’est la Vache opened. The name, meaning “It’s the cow,” was a Francophile play on c’est la vie.
That grand opening had taken place on “National Macaroni and Cheese Day.”
Evidently, that was a thing.
And it was a roaring—or maybe mooing would be a better word—success.
But with the predicament Felicity was facing because of it, she would gladly drown every last one of those stupid ceramic cows in a river using a cement block like they were mob snitches. She might even sprinkle imitation orange dust package stuff over their watery graves to add insult to injury.
With fantasies of kitsch crockery mass murder unfolding in her brain, Felicity yanked so hard on the next weed that she lost her balance and landed ass-deep in mud.
“Perfect,” she said with a grunt just as a distinctive male snort echoed across the humid garden from the restaurant’s kitchen.
She ignored it.
Felicity had been ignoring and avoiding that very snorter ever since she overheard him grumbling to his boss about her aunt’s shop’s use of the patio. The St. Clare Catholic Church building had been repurposed, renovated, and divided thirty years earlier when her aunt and her aunt’s friends had saved the place from certain destruction. The half with the old church dining hall and Sunday school rooms and offices had been opened up and was most recently converted from a failing pub to a shining temple of macaroni and cheese. The half that was the old sanctuary belonged to her aunt’s plant store. Now her plant store.
The patio in question took up about ten thousand square feet of the forty-two-thousand-square-foot shared “courtyard” space in front of the old church building. This designated “green space” was mostly a muddy, rocky, weedy mess apart from the section of neat pavers Nic wanted to poach from Felicity’s store. Technically, the courtyard existed in a legal liminal space where a trust set up by the three owners of the St. Clare buildings was responsible for the upkeep, but the city still owned it and therefore had strict rules about how it could be used, the percentage of hard-scaping permitted, and so on. When the St. Clare Trust had been given permission to use and manage this easement, it was supposed to be used for local events that would bring the six-block St. Clare neighborhood together as a community. As far as Felicity could tell, the community-building neighborhood events never happened, but no one in the city seemed to care.
And since the small patio in front of the old sanctuary had been used exclusively by her aunt’s shop for eight years, Felicity wouldn’t let it go, no matter how many bovine-themed pasta tureens that hoity-toity trattoria sold.
Chef Nic Holm-Bozic could suck it.
Because her new archnemesis had to be named Nic.
Nic, Nik, Nick. There was something about the name that had her hackles rising. Like Nic Cage. You go to see a Nic Cage movie, and you never know if it’s going to feature a heart-pounding heist of the Declaration of Independence, or an angsty angel pouting over Meg Ryan, or a very campy Dracula, or a hairy misanthropic baker getting slapped by Cher. Wow, she had seen a lot of Nicolas Cage movies … and it might be because Felicity saw the movie Face/Off far too young or that her stupidest heartbreak to date had been after a single night getting hypnotized by a European-accented pretty boy named Nicky, but Felicity had never met a Nic she trusted. Those books that look like they should have a happily ever after but always end with one or both main characters dying? Written by a Nick. The only test she completely bombed in college was on The Prince. Thanks a lot, Nic Machiavelli. Also, Santa Claus never did bring her that Easy-Bake Oven she wanted, even though the obviously drunk man in the red suit at the Francis Scott Key Mall had said that he would. Saint Nicholas, like all the other Nicks, was a disappointment.
This Nic was no exception.
Not that Felicity had ever spoken to the asshole.
Even before she overheard him plotting against her business back at the end of May when he showed up in St. Clare Circle, she had steered clear. And now she felt validated.
Felicity had loved her aunt’s plant shop, Grow Away, since she was a kid. It wasn’t fair that, just because Nic had turned the failing restaurant next door into an overnight cheesy (in both senses of the word) sensation, Felicity might lose everything her aunt had built.
She dropped her gloves into her large tool bucket and wiped her forehead sweat with the back of her hand. Autumn arrived tomorrow, but the Kansas sun seemed determined to make this last summer day count. Even just a few hours past dawn, and the air was thick. Felicity’s shoulders were freckled and pink from her time in the garden over the summer, but the weatherman on the radio said there would be a dramatic shift in pressure tonight, so she was doing her best to protect her plants. Even if it meant that pink was verging toward red.
A watch ding reminded her that she needed to get inside to shower before the shop opened. The other half of the business Felicity had inherited was Grow Away’s boutique indoor plant design and maintenance services, which cared for indoor plants at hospitals, office buildings, and more. Somehow her aunt had been running all of it by herself. Felicity, however, was drowning. And if the storm tonight was as bad as the weather people predicted, and she couldn’t fix the small leak in her apartment in time, she might be literally drowning.
ADHD paralysis sank its claws into her brain. Instead of going inside, she stood at the wrought-iron gate, staring down at one of the large white signs that had appeared overnight all over the neighborhood. The giant poster board harbinger had been plaguing her thoughts for the last hour.
Public Forum to Discuss Building Permit 65873 will be held on Oct. 10 to discuss plans for empty lot SCC #456183a.
Underneath was an added sticker. She’d ripped off a similar one from the community bulletin board last night, but a replacement had already materialized. The same sticker had been plastered all over the six-block St. Clare neighborhood for the last month.
Parking problems lead to civil unrest. Support Permit 65873.
“Fuckety fuck fuck. That goddamn motherfucker.” She kicked the gate. “Civil unrest? You pompous, paradise-paving patriarchal parasitic—parasitic—parasitic—uh—” A half howl, half shriek tore out of her.
“Prick?” said a deep, smoky voice.
Felicity dropped her bucket, flinging tools and soil in every direction, whipped around, and found herself face-to-face with the man she’d successfully evaded for months.
The treacherously named chef next door.
Six foot three inches of pretentious Texas transplant. Part dairy-sauced pasta prodigy and (much larger) part general pain in the patootie.
Today, Nic was wearing his typical strategically distressed jeans and a gray T-shirt that was definitely a size too small, based on the way it clung stupidly to his tanned biceps and too-pronounced pecs. Sure, Nic might look like a scruffier Thor, but his haughty attitude made him a whole muscley lot of not worth it.
But oh fuck. He had green eyes.
She’d never seen him up close before, so she hadn’t realized … fuck. This was not good. More memories of old heartbreak and her most pathetic moments of teenage pining threatened to resurface. She used a mental toilet bowl plunger to flush that shit down the drain and off to the sewer system where it belonged.
Damn it, she was staring at him.
For how long? Unclear.
“Hi,” she said flatly after deciding there was no escape this time.
“Hey, I’ve been trying to come to talk to you—”
“You must be Nicolai.” She didn’t know why she said it, except that she was pissed he was looking at her like they’d known each other for years. It made her unreasonably furious.
But a lot of things made Felicity furious these days.
After a brief but confusing wide-eyed stare, he smiled, his face crinkling with roguish amusement. “It’s Nic, actually. And you must be the Felicia I’ve heard so much about.”
“Felicity.”
Smile turned to smirk on his stubble-rugged face.
Crap.
She should have let him think her name was Felicia. He’d been messing with her, and she’d corrected him on instinct. Just like he’d wanted. He won this round. Touché, dickwad. Touché.
He rubbed his chin, which was several inconvenient inches taller than the top of her head. Why did he have to be so damn tall? He cleared his throat. “Marshall sent me over after I showed him this week’s menu. He said I should see about getting some of the herbs from the communal garden. You know, I’ve come by a few times before this, but—”
“This is a pretty busy time for the shop. Classes and stuff.”
“Right. The classes…” His tone might have revealed that he knew about her dwindling enrollment. There had only been two kids last weekend. Given how much Felicity loathed teaching kids, she wouldn’t have minded giving them up, but her aunt had brought in significant cash from those classes before her health declined. She was in no position to abandon an income stream before winter if it would help her business stay afloat. “So are the classes—”
“Speaking of the general busyness of the store, I need to get ready to open up. I’m gonna skedaddle.”
Oh god. She’d said the word skedaddle aloud.
Fuck.
Nic’s scruffy cheek twitched like he was struggling to keep his expression neutral. “Before you—erm—skedaddle away…” The word skedaddle sounded even stupider in a gruff Texas drawl. He cleared his throat like he regretted repeating it and held out a sticky note. “Do you have these?”
While very conscious of where her dirty fingernails scraped across Nic’s immaculately clean kitchen calluses, she took the list and skimmed it. His handwriting was almost robotically neat. She could have guessed that he would have this type of handwriting, despite his affectation of effortless ruggedness. Close up, she was 93 percent sure the man ironed his jeans.
“Yep. Still a good amount of these. Glad I could help.” Felicity twitched her head toward the herb garden, gesturing to the colorful signs she had made to label the plants as a teenager.
He raised a not-at-all sexy eyebrow. “Okay … but can you show me—”
“Extra cutting shears are in the potting shed. I have to go shower before I open.” She dropped the last of her tools back in the bucket like a mic drop. “Wouldn’t want anything about my shop or me to be too sloppy for the St. Clare Circle patrons.” She turned away to hide her flinch. Her mouth needed to stop moving faster than her brain.
Her apartment was on the back of the old church building, and she could get to the metal fire escape steps leading up to it in less than five seconds if she sprinted. The postage-stamp-sized place had once been used as a backup rectory for visiting clergy, and it might be haunted. But it was home and her easiest avenue of escape from this conversation.
Still unwilling to look at Nic, Felicity hauled her stuff to the shed on the far side of the garden. She put away her tools in their correct spots and set her favorite bucket on the potting bench. After going through her mental checklist of equipment, she moved to leave, but a large shadow behind her nearly made her leap into her aunt’s rake collection. “Frack.”
“Whoa.”
“Jesus Christ. Wear a fucking bell next time. Don’t sneak up on people.” She righted herself.
His forehead furrowed with confusing concern for several seconds before smoothing. In a blink, his usual air of arrogant unconcern returned. “I thought we were having a conversation. I’ll try to move louder.”
“I really think a permanent collar with cowbell might be the safest option. Marshall Greene loves a good theme. Gotta keep up appearances while you’re running things for him…”
“Now, while I acknowledge that I could rock a cowbell … I mean … obviously…” He gestured to his physique.
Felicity grunted. Infuriatingly, she couldn’t find anything about that statement with which to quibble. Nic would look good in a cowbell. He would definitely look good in only a cowbell. During the past months, all of her hiding from him had provided ample time to take in every single—well—ample aspect of his physical person.
His ass. His hair. His shoulders and neck. The forearms. God, those fucking forearms. She’d never known that wrists could be sexy before. And now she knew he had those treacherous green eyes. The kind of eyes that were practically a cliché in fantasy novels.
Samantha Powell—typically called Sam by most around here—owned Menagerie Books, the nearby indie bookstore. Every week or sometimes more often, Sam left a book for Felicity to find. These gifted books were piled on top of one of the fifteen still-packed boxes in her apartment’s tiny galley kitchen, their spines uncracked despite the promise of the morally gray heroes and heroines within their pages.
Felicity wasn’t in the mood for reading.
Or for having this conversation.
Or for thinking about Nic wearing only a cowbell.
But imagine the way it would look framed by his pecs.
She licked her lips.
Copyright © 2026 by Andie Burke