As she sat down across from him, he asked, “Do you have good news for me?” He gave her a hopeful look that made her want to lie. That made her think that maybe they weren’t so different. They both loved their families. They both wanted their hard work to bring success.

But this was business, so she straightened her spine. “No deal with the bread. My mom won’t have it. She’d rather be bankrupt than have us bake for your restaurant. I’m sorry.”

He sighed heavily, and for the first time ever, he didn’t seem to be shrugging things off with a smile.

“Any luck on your end?” she asked. “I mean, about selling your ideas to your dad?”

He sat back, tossing his pen over the many scattered papers. “No,” he said simply. Just one word, jam-packed with frustration.

She should just go home. What was the point of continuing a conversation? Yet she recognized a look in his eyes—the same desperate desire to do something to stop these ships from sinking. And…and she was now past want. She needed that wine.

“I—” She felt her voice giving out. “I actually was wondering if you had any wine. I mean, I’d pay you for it.”

He looked her over in what she was coming to learn was a thoroughly assessing way of his, a mixture of curiosity and something more intense that made her feel stripped down to the bone. “What are you doing downtown at this hour?”

She hitched a thumb toward the bakery. “I was just sneak baking.” She mentally head slapped herself. Why had she confessed that? It was private. To most people, anyway.

He frowned. “What’s sneak baking?”

“Oh. Sometimes I go in after hours and bake whatever I want. It’s…a way of unwinding, I guess. Being creative. Forgetting about everything else.”

“I might have to try it. Because all I do after hours is pore over the numbers. And then I can’t sleep.”

“I hear you,” she said.

“You probably shouldn’t be downtown alone at night.”

In Blossom Glen? Tessa waved a hand dismissively. “Like you?” He smiled a little at that. “I’ve been doing it for years. It’s my therapy.”

His lips cracked a slight smile. “Wine sounds like a great idea.” That warmth in his eyes was back, and it was directed at her. Only briefly, though, and then he got up and went to the back room.

She was hungry—yearning, even—for what was really at stake here: her dreams, her life, a way out—and her imagination was in overdrive lately. But while she was way too smart to make the same mistake that she made when she was eighteen, to think that Leo had actually liked her, she knew what it meant when a man looked at her a certain way.