The Bakery at Cranberry Cove

Mari Ortega does not rearrange her life around a man. She learned that lesson in Portland, and she has the bakery to prove it: the Saltbox, built back from a shuttered tackle shop by her own two hands, every ledger balanced, every early morning her own.

Dex Croft has loved her for three years and never said a word. He keeps things light, the way he keeps the harbor, because in the house he grew up in, heavy things got used as weapons. Then Emmy and Ben ask them to stand up together at the October wedding, maid of honor and best man, and light stops being an option.

A September gale takes out the Saltbox's front window and half of Mari's thin margin. The repairs throw them together, dawn after dawn, until the whole town knows what the two of them are still pretending not to. And when a letter Mari was never meant to see lands in the wrong hands at the wrong moment, an old wound reads it exactly wrong, and the safest thing Dex ever did looks like the one thing she swore she would never forgive.

He made his choice in private, and made it weeks ago. Now the only way through is for Mari to cross the distance first, and say the thing out loud that she has spent four years refusing to need.

The Bakery at Cranberry Cove is the second sweet, closed-door romance in the Cranberry Cove series: a friends-to-lovers slow burn full of harbor mornings, wedding-season chaos, small-town meddling, and two careful people learning that the bravest thing is to be seen. Come home to the cove.