Chapter One

      Yvonne Niles gawked at the man standing at her bakery counter. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you don’t want your dad to marry my aunt.”

      Chaz Walker ran one hand across his strong jawline. His glare told Yvonne that was exactly what he thought of Aunt Pauline’s engagement to Hank Walker. “So I take it you’re fine with it?” he challenged with intense, dark eyes.

      Auntie P. and her beau, Hank, had been in her bakery shop not an hour ago choosing the cake for their upcoming Matrimony Valley wedding. The older couple seemed to be flat-out in love despite knowing each other for only a handful of months. Sure, the quickness of their engagement took everyone by surprise, but she wasn’t about to confess her few niggling doubts to this man. “Not really my call, is it? Or yours.”

      She’d seen several control freaks as part of Matrimony Valley’s now-thriving location wedding business, but this son’s interference with his father’s wedding topped the list. It was usually mothers of the bride who made life difficult. Son of the groom was a new one, to be sure.

      “My dad just told me they ordered a chocolate wedding cake.”

      Yvonne put on her best bridezilla wrangler voice, which seemed ludicrous to use on the handsome yet brooding cowboy currently standing in her bakery. “Yes, Pauline wants me to make my signature Black Forest cake. Because she knows how good it is and how everybody loves it.” It was true. That cake had been written up in Southeastern Nuptials magazine as the best, most unusual wedding cake in the region. It was her signature cake. She pointed to the article and photograph framed on the bakery wall to underscore the point.

      Were he not currently boasting a scowl cold enough to have frozen Matrimony Falls despite it being a very warm September, she might have called Chaz downright attractive. “My dad hates chocolate. She up and ordered a chocolate cake. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

      She’d met too many men like this—ones who could never understand why the rest of the world wouldn’t bend to their will on even the tiniest of issues. Neal had been exactly like this. Isn’t that just the way? she thought to herself. The first good-looking single man to show up in the valley in a long time, and he turns out to be a self-centered know-it-all. And about something as innocuous as his father’s wedding cake, to boot.