“She’s absolutely amazing,” Lynne explained to Dean. “I think her sense of smell is almost as well developed as her taste buds. That’s why she’s such a good cook. All she has to do is smell something and taste it, and she knows what’s in it.”

“Well, I don’t know what’s in that cheesecake, but it’s great!” Dean said, kissing the air next to Hannah’s cheek, and then giving her a little squeeze around the waist. “I knew it would be good just looking at it, but I didn’t think it would be that good.”

“He said it was the best he ever tasted,” Lynne told Hannah.

“That’s right. I’ll want two every day, one in the morning and one right after lunch. Can you do that?”

“Absolutely.”

“There’s something else.” Dean leaned closer and looked directly into her eyes. “It’s a bit of a challenge.”

The warning bells in Hannah’s head began to clang. Whenever something was described as a challenge, it was usually impossible to achieve.

“I want to serve cherry cheesecake at the premiere. The only problem is, we’re doing champagne and finger food. You know what finger food is, don’t you, Lovey?”

“Of course,” Hannah said stifling the urge to plant him a facer, a Regency English term that she’d picked up while catering coffee and cookies at the Lake Eden Regency Romance Club. Planting him a facer meant hitting him in the face and that’s what Hannah felt like doing. In addition to his casual touches that bordered on the intimate, which she didn’t appreciate, Dean was being very condescending. Just because she lived in a small town didn’t mean that she was totally unsophisticated.

“Do you think you can figure out a way to make mini cherry cheesecakes so we can put them on a tray and serve them as appetizers?”

“Maybe,” Hannah said, not at all sure she could do it, but willing to try. “It can’t be my cherry cheesecake made smaller, though.”

“Why not?”

“It won’t work. It all has to do with specific gravity.” When Dean looked at her blankly, Hannah began to smile. She’d snow him with gobbledygook until his eyes glazed over to get even for implying that she was unsophisticated.

“The cheesecake I baked for you is enclosed in a metal springform, with a lubricated underlay for the carrier ingredients. It’s not baked in the traditional slow oven and that means it needs to solidify without granulating. Smaller containers would counter these parameters, and I doubt that experimenting with different media would yield positive results.”

“Oh.”

Dean’s eyes were sufficiently glassy and Hannah decided it was time to back off. “Let’s just say that the cheesecake I make for you is special. If I changed the size, I’d have to change the whole recipe.”