The Heat Stays

She came back to save a restaurant. She didn't plan on staying.

Nora Voss has spent twelve years building a career in Chicago - a Michelin star, a reputation for impossible standards, a restaurant that runs exactly the way she wants it. When her mother has a stroke and can't run the family restaurant in Millhaven, Tennessee, Nora comes back for six weeks. Maximum.

What she finds: the kitchen cleaner than it has any right to be, the food better than she remembered, and Marcus Ellery - the sous chef she trained when they were both twenty-two, who has been running Voss & Co for eleven years like someone who was waiting for her to come back.

He wasn't waiting. He was living. But he was also in love with her, and had been since the summer she left, and he'd never said a word.

Running a kitchen together is easy. Everything else is harder.

Nora plans to fix the finances, rebuild the menu, find a replacement chef, and leave. She does not plan to read twelve years of Marcus's notebooks full of margin notes about afternoon light. She does not plan to argue about the mushroom risotto and arrive at something better than either of them could have alone. She does not plan to fall in love with her own mother's restaurant all over again - or with the man who kept it alive while she was gone.

He's loved her for twelve years. She's just starting to look.

The Heat Stays is a slow-burn small town romance featuring reverse grumpy/sunshine (she's the demanding chef, he's the steady golden retriever), friends-to-lovers with twelve years of history, she falls last, professional rivals-to-partners, dual POV, and an HEA with found home.

Perfect for readers who love Emily Henry, Devney Perry, and Lucy Score.