Page 4 of Win a Date with a Baker

A broad-shouldered man in a faded black baseball cap stands a few feet away with his arms crossed over a flour-dusted charcoal T-shirt.

He’s...big. Not bodybuilder big. But he has the kind of shoulders built by lifting fifty-pound bags of flour instead of barbells.

His forearms?—

Okay.

His forearms are. magnificent. Strong. Inked. Lightly dusted with flour that somehow only makes them more distracting.

His jaw is covered in a few days’ worth of dark stubble, and beneath the brim of his cap, a pair of startling blue eyes fix on me with unmistakable irritation.

“You know,” he continues, “there’s a whole bakery in front of you. You don’t have to experience it through a six-inch screen.”

I blink.

“I’m sorry?”

“Every night it’s the same thing.”

He gestures vaguely toward my phone.

“People come in, take forty pictures, buy one donut, and spend the next hour pretending they discovered the place.”

My cheeks warm. “I wasn’t pretending anything. I was taking one picture.”

“For the internet.”

“My mom, actually.”

He gives me a look that clearly sayssure.

Kathryn shifts beside me. “It really was for?—”

“I don’t care,” he says with a shrug. “Just don’t block the case for people who came here to eat.”

Ouch.

The words themselves aren’t especially harsh. His tone is.

I open my mouth, then close it again. Because honestly? He’s kind of being a jerk. An incredibly handsome jerk.

Which is deeply inconvenient. Because…

Kathryn leans toward me just enough to whisper, “Please tell me that’s not...”

I nod. “It is.”

The woman behind the counter sighs dramatically. “Tyler.”

The man closes his eyes for half a second. “What?”

“Be nice.”

“I am nice.”

She snorts.

I stare at the baseball cap. Then the flour. Then those ridiculously well-defined forearms.