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professionally trained bakers.
    “Good things don’t usually happen to me, and when they do it
makes me a little nervous,” Felicity admitted.
    Mary Beth’s brow knitted in a thoughtful frown. “Weren’t you
the one who lectured me at length about accepting what was put before me and
being grateful? Or was that lecture for your students’ benefit and not your
own?”
    The words brought a fleeting grin to Felicity’s face. “I am
grateful, believe me, especially for your friendship.” Of all her friends, Mary
Beth knew what it was like to be on top of the world one moment and to have it
crash around you the next. Mary Beth’s parents had lost everything in the stock
market crash of 2008. Their family had tried to hang on to their wealthy
lifestyle for a few years, but they’d all drifted apart. Her parents had moved
to Mexico. Her brother had entered the military. She’d moved in with her
boyfriend until he’d thrown her out when she’d told him she was pregnant.
    A homeless and hungry Mary Beth had shown up one day at
Felicity’s Hungry Hearts program. They’d been the best of friends ever since.
    Mary Beth grinned. “Good. Now, let’s put that gratitude to
work and cook up something wonderful.”
    Felicity nodded as she hooked her arm through Mary Beth’s and
headed back onto the sidewalk and toward the hotel and the kitchen of the Dolce
Vita.
    Cooking might help her forget how much she should dislike the
man who’d invaded her life this morning. But instead of anger and possible
resentment, warmth crept through her veins and stole up her cheeks as she
remembered Blake’s handsome face and the way his smile had softened his
features when he’d looked at her. She forced the thought away. What was it Mary
Beth had said?
    Something
wonderful.
    Yes, they’d create something wonderful. There hadn’t been
much of that in her life so far, but Felicity liked the way that sounded.

CHAPTER THREE
    “Are you sure you’re up to this challenge?” Reid Fairfax
asked from across his desk in his downtown Seattle office.
    Destiny Carrow sat in the chair opposite the editor-in-chief
of the Seattle
Gazette , Seattle’s only newspaper, and smiled. “Of course, that’s
why I’m here. That’s why I wrote that horrible review of Felicity’s restaurant.”
That’s why she’d turned her back on her onetime friend. Success came with a
price, and for Destiny that price was friendship. “What do you want me to do
now?”
    Reid sat back in his chair, contemplating her. The man was
different than she’d expected. He looked older than the pictures she’d seen
online while researching him. His short, kinky dark hair was threaded with
gray. His tall, deep-chested frame carried a few more pounds, but the slightly
cynical expression in his eyes was exactly the same as every picture she’d ever
seen. He was a hard man, and most likely a cruel man, but she needed what he
offered her—the job she’d been coveting for the last three years on the news
desk. With his help, she could finally make the transition from food writer to
reporter, first on a local level, then national. It was her dream, and nothing,
not even friendship, would stand in her way to achieve that goal.
    “All right, let’s get to new business. The Bancrofts are our
target now.”
    “Why? What do you want me to do?”
    “I want to ruin what’s left of them.”
    Destiny frowned. “I thought Felicity was the target.”
    He smiled. “She’s the distraction. She was to the old man,
and she will be for me. It took me a while to find the old man, hiding away
here in Seattle under a false name, but I eventually did.”
    “Why do you want to ruin them?”
    Reid’s smile became set in place. “Vernon Bancroft’s father
and my grandfather were business partners. That’s how Vernon got the money he
needed to open those hotels.” Reid’s eyes became glazed as though remembering a
time long ago. “My grandfather was the CFO of the company at the time