Free Need You for Always (Heroes of St. Helena) by Marina Adair

before Emerson knew what had happened she and Liam were making plans for forever.
    Then her mom passed and her father’s world fell apart, and Emerson knew that her family needed her at home. Too bad Liam’s idea of forever didn’t extend to her loved ones. He took one look at what forever with Emerson would include and offered it, and her job, to a fancy-and-free twenty-two-year-old pastry chef named Lena.
    Emerson had learned the hard way that love didn’t always conquer all, and that she would never again work for someone she was personally invested in. She also learned she was too talented to be picking up dry cleaning.
    “Wow.” Harper let loose a low whistle. “Never thought I’d see the day where the girl who beat down Jimmy Wagner with a water wiennie for pulling her pigtail would let some guy walk all over her dreams.”
    “That is not what I’m doing.” Although it totally was and they both knew it. “Between Violet getting suspended and my dad interviewing, I won’t have time to be a gofer.”
    “You won’t be a gofer. We’re talking stocking the refrigerator and picking up prescriptions,” Harper said, making it clear she knew exactly what kind of interview she’d sent her on. “And what if it gets you your truck faster?”
    “There’s always next year.” Wow, saying that hurt.
    Harper lowered her voice to that disappointed level that made Emerson squirm. “Two years ago you didn’t apply because your mom was sick. Last year it was because your family needed you.”
    “They did,” Emerson defended. She couldn’t even imagine what would have happened to her family if she hadn’t stepped in and picked up the pieces. She thought Harper would have understood that. “Violet wasn’t even talking to humans, my dad slept all day and stared at the garden all night, and—”
    Harper placed a silencing hand on Emerson’s arm. “I know. I know what it was like, what you went through, and how incredibly selfless you have been. Just like I know that if you don’t make some space for yourself, you’ll be in this same place in five years. Maybe even ten.”
    Wasn’t that exactly what she’d told her dad the other day?
    “As your best friend, I can’t let you do that.”
    Not one to be told what she could or couldn’t do, Emerson was about to explain where Harper could shove that BFF entitlement when Harper reached behind the counter and pulled a weathered notebook out of her backpack.
    Emerson felt her stomach bottom out.
    It wasn’t just any notebook. It was small, leather bound, and the spine was worn from use. Across the front in blue script was The Greek Streatery Fleet .
    “Where did you get this?” She took the journal and ran a finger down its side. She didn’t need to open it to know what lay beneath the cover. Every family recipe, every idea, and every dream she and her mother had made for their streatery was in her palms. “I thought I had lost it when I cleaned Mom’s things out of the attic.”
    “Your mom gave it to me before she passed,” Harper said quietly. “Made me promise that if you had the chance to do something amazing, I wouldn’t let you talk yourself out of it. So I’m playing the mom card, Em. What would Lillianna want you to do?”
    Emerson swallowed hard as she opened the cover, and her eyes burned. There on the first page, framed by chef’s-hat scrapbooking trim, was the hundred-year-old handwritten recipe that had started it all: her great-grandmother’s baklava. Beneath the recipe was a photo of a young Emerson, standing on a kitchen chair, helping her mother glaze the phyllo layers with honey. And beneath that, in beautiful script, was her mother’s favorite saying:
    If ever in doubt, eat the whole tray.

    It was still dark when Dax awoke, hot and sweaty and tangled in the sheets, gasping for breath as if he’d just had a weekend-long sex marathon with a bossy little chef. And he wished to hell it had been a smoking-hot sexathon that had his