Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Index of Recipes

Baking Conversion Chart

Prologue

Prologue

Lake Eden, Minnesota—Wednesday, the Second Week in March

“Cut!”

Dean Lawrence had directed at plenty of locations, but Lake Eden was the worst. These yokels raised boredom to a whole new level. The chubby broad who ran the bakery made a great cherry cheesecake, and that was the only good thing he could say about Podunk Central.

Nothing was working today. They were never going to get this scene. The local lethargy must be catching, and it was time to kick some butt.

“What’s with you, Burke? You’re supposed to make people weep for you! Get up. I’ll show you what I want here.” Dean pushed Burke out of camera range and got ready to play the scene himself.

Midway through the scene, he noticed that the redhead who baked his cheesecakes was staring at him with new respect. Maybe she’d be a little more receptive, now that he’d impressed her with his talent. He opened the center desk drawer, pulled out the prop gun, and stared at it while he waited for Lynne’s line.

“I love you, Jody! Don’t do this to me!”

It was a perfect reading of the line and Dean was glad he’d decided to use her in his next movie. He put on a tortured expression as the camera came in for his close-up, and gazed at Lynne with tears welling in his eyes. “I’m not doing it to you, Li’l Sis. I’m doing it for me.”

He raised the gun to his temple. Lynne looked horrified, exactly as she should, and he gave her a last, sad smile. Then he squeezed the trigger. The gun went off and Lynne screamed for real. Their director was dead.

Chapter

Chapter

One

Two Weeks Earlier

Hannah Swensen did her best to convince her sleep-logged mind that the insistent electronic beeping she heard was in the soundtrack of her dream. A huge semi tractor-trailer was backing up to the kitchen door of her bakery, The Cookie Jar, to deliver the mountain of chocolate chips she’d ordered for the gazillion Chocolate Chip Crunch Cookies she’d promised to bake for her biggest fan, Porky Pig, who’d finally overcome his stutter with the help of a voice coach and was now being sworn in as president of the United States

The dream slipped away like the veils of Salome, and Hannah groaned as she clicked on the light. No doubt her dream was the result of watching Cartoon Network until two in the morning and eating two dishes of chocolate ice cream with a whole bag of microwave popcorn. She silenced the alarm and threw back the covers, sitting up in bed in an effort to fight her urge to burrow back into her warm blankets and pull them up, over her head.