Fans of Honey and Spice will devour this rivals-to-lovers debut, where a disgraced baker and the cocky cook across the aisle go head-to-head for a restaurant of their own. Nadia Chandinie’s steamy, tender debut serves Guyanese cooking with a side of flirty, slow-burning heat. Contemporary romance at its most flavorful.

Natasha Narine is not exactly thriving…

A kitchen fire shuttered her family’s bakery, and her parents have never let her forget whose fault it was. Now she’s twenty-seven, living back in their house, and rolling roti at her mother’s Guyanese food stall in the Flower City Flea Market, trying to save up enough to buy back everything the fire took. A recent ADHD diagnosis explains a lifetime of missed details and near misses, but her parents don’t believe it, so she carries the blame alone.

It doesn’t help that Ricky Foo is four feet away, grinning at her over a wok…

Ricky has been trying to get Natasha’s attention since the day she walked into the food court in a pink jumpsuit, and he’ll take a scowl over nothing at all. When his father walked out and cleaned out the family’s accounts, Ricky put his own plans aside to build their Guyanese Chinese stall into the busiest in the market, keep his mother afloat, and get his youngest brother through school. Anything left over goes to the flirting he’s convinced is working.

Then the market’s owner announces a cooking competition. Four rounds, four weeks, and the winner takes ten thousand dollars and a rent-free, one-year lease on a restaurant of their own.

Natasha needs that prize to reopen the bakery and prove she isn’t the screwup her parents see. Ricky needs it for everything he’s been holding together by himself. Neither of them counted on sabotage from the other stalls, on how good it feels to be the only person who understands what the other is cooking, or on wanting each other this badly with everything on the line.

They’re in each other’s way, and the competition has only one winner. But what’s growing between them doesn’t play by those rules.