Accidentally Yours: The Summer We Became Real

Ariella Hayes was seventeen years old when she learned that grief had a taste. It tasted like burnt sugar. Like the batch of croissants she’d left in the oven too long the morning after the funeral, too numb to hear the timer, too broken to care. Like the coffee, she drank black now because adding cream felt like a luxury she didn’t deserve. Grief tasted like everything and nothing. Mostly nothing. She was thinking about this at 4:47 a.m., lying in bed and staring at the water stain on her ceiling that resembled a reaching hand. She’d been awake since three. She was always awake from three, that gray hour when the world was silent enough to hear all the things she tried not to think about during the day. Like how it was her fault. How she should have been the one in the car. How her mother hadn’t really looked at her in six months. The timer screamed, and Ariella dragged herself out of bed, moving through the apartment like a ghost, past her mother’s bedroom door, down the narrow stairs to Hayes & Daughter Bakery. The name felt like a lie now. Her grandmother was gone. Ethan was gone. Soon the bakery would be gone too, and it would just be Ariella and her mother in an empty building, haunting the space where their family used to be. She is about to embark on a life-altering journey as she enters a contract marriage with billionaire heir Aiden Frost, all in a bid to rescue her family’s struggling bakery. As they step into this pretend union, neither of them anticipates how their arrangement will evolve into a haven, where they might uncover feelings that challenge their initial intentions.