dough you love me? – Professor Romance

Dough You Love Me?, an all-new second chance small-town romance from Stacy Travis, is now available in Kindle Unlimited!

First rule when returning to your hometown after storming out of sight: don’t fall for the guy who broke your heart.

Julia Browne should know better than to kiss where she bakes. She’s built a bread empire in California, and only plans to stay in Green Valley long enough to sell the family house.

She certainly won’t spend any more time with Shane Meadows than she has to…and she will not let him draw her in with his soft blue eyes or level her with his handsome smirk of a grin.

The last thing she wants is a temporary gig at Donner Bakery, baking sourdough side-by-side with Shane and clashing with his ego. And he thinks the sassy baker should take her fancy bread and go back where she came from.

But that’s before they take a series of wrong turns on a road trip to look at wheat, leaving them stranded for the night. Out on the open road, neither of them can escape the sizzling attraction and old feelings that feel a lot more real this time around.

But life is complicated, and Julia’s life in California might derail their second chance at love. Will they wake up and smell the sourdough?

They say you should leave the past in the past, but what if it’s the winning recipe for love?

‘Dough You Love Me?’ is a full-length contemporary romance, can be read as a standalone, and is book #2 in the Donner Bakery series, Green Valley World, Penny Reid Book Universe.

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Excerpt

My eyes traveled to one of the musicians who stood out from the others, not just because he was tall and lean with a dark shock of hair hanging over his forehead. He sat playing the French horn, a gleaming gorgeous pretzel of brass with a bell at one end.

The sound was a love language that spoke directly to my heart.

But an intricately curved, soulful symphony instrument at a country music jam session full of Tennessee local boys . . . WTF?

I didn’t have to be a country music aficionado to know that one of these things was not like the others.

Every other instrument came from the string family—banjo, guitar, fiddle. An older man with a gray beard stood behind Cletus playing the bass, plucking the strings, and nodding along with the music.

The faces in the room started looking more familiar. Maybe I’d known some of them once. Maybe I wasn’t such a stranger. Not that it mattered, since I had no plans of sticking around afterward to chat. I felt worn out from the funeral and the travel.

But . . . that horn . . .

My eyes remained riveted to the instrument and the man playing it. I’d been to a couple of orchestra performances with a full brass section. Those were the types of places people normally found a French horn—with musicians wearing tuxedos and following a conductor.

This man and his instrument stuck out like a glossy gemstone in a sea of wicker and cardboard. And yet, oddly, it worked. He pursed his lips and blew out notes that had no business sounding so beautiful.

Nodding and stomping one foot, he picked up the rhythm of the other instruments and made his accompaniment sound like it belonged there.

He kept one hand in the bell-shaped end of the horn and used his other hand to draw out a melodic sound. From the first note, he had me willing to follow him down whatever path he took. For the first time since I’d arrived in town—hell, for the first time in months—I felt a glimmer of happiness. Double-chocolate cupcake happiness.

I wanted to hear more, and at the same time, I knew exactly what I would hear. Something in his beautiful aching call sounded familiar, as though I’d been hearing it my whole life.

But that was impossible.

I hadn’t been in town in years. Even if I’d heard this man play before, it had to have been so long ago that surely the sounds wouldn’t be familiar now.

The music called, and I answered by freeing myself of the funereal black jacket I wore over a white tank top and getting comfortable leaning against the wall. As a spectator, I had license to gaze at him for as long as I wanted.

My senses scrambled and competed for which one should win out—the sight of him, the sound of his music, or the touch I felt from him halfway across a crowded room.

Taking a couple steps closer, I cautiously took in the whole of the man playing the gleaming horn. He looked about my age, early thirties, and the strong cut of his jaw and short beard made things happen to my lady parts that hadn’t happened in a very long time.

He wore a dark brown corduroy sport coat over a fine-checked plaid flannel shirt and dark blue jeans. His eyes were a pale blue, like an illusion of shallow water that actually runs deep enough to be dangerous. Soulful. Like repositories of hurt or art or knowledge.

Almost as though he could feel the heat of my stare, his eyes fastened to mine and didn’t let go.

So I did the only logical thing a person could do when faced with a sexy, soulful stranger’s lingering gaze.

I ran from the room.

About Stacy Travis

Stacy Travis writes charming, spicy romance about bookish, sassy women and the hot alphas who fall for them.

Writing makes her infinitely happy, but that might be the coffee talking.

She’s worked as a journalist, camp counselor, TV writer, SAT tutor, corporate finance researcher, education technology editor, and non-fiction author. When she’s not on a deadline, she’s in running shoes complaining that all roads seem to go uphill. Or on the couch with a margarita. Or fangirling at a soccer game.

She’s never met a dog she didn’t want to hug. And if you have no plans for Thanksgiving, she’ll probably invite you to dinner.

Stacy lives in Los Angeles with her very tall sons and a poorly-trained rescue dog who hoards socks. And she’s serious about the Thanksgiving thing.

Find Stacy online

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Overall Grade: ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Tropes: second chance romance; small-town romance; Penny Reid-inspired romance; going home

Stacy Travis’s Dough You Love Me? has found an apt home in Penny Reid’s crafted Smartypants Romance world. Set in the Donner Bakery series, the story follows Julia, who has returned to Green Valley after her grandmother’s death. Julia ran from Green Valley when she was younger because she was spurned by her crush, Shane. Never realizing that Shane felt like he wasn’t good for her, she left town and stayed away. She realizes she has stayed away too long in the shadow of her grandmother’s death. When she encounters Shane at the Friday jam session, long-buried feelings rise to the surface, and she runs again. Thankfully, she only runs as far as her grandmother’s home. As a friend of Cletus Winston, he connects her with his love, Jennifer Sylvester nee Winston who needs her help making bread. It becomes immediately clear that Julia will be working with Shane. As these two spend time together, those buried feelings find flight, and Shane and Julia fall in love in the specter of their past. Eventually, Julia decides to stay in Green Valley, finding her future with Shane.

Dough You Love Me? provides enough of that tension between falling in love and fighting the hurt feelings of one’s past. Julia and Shane engage in a tug-a-war of feelings until they simply can’t deny their attraction and love for each other. Through their story, Travis deftly points to how young people often struggle with differences. Shane’s story is wrapped up in his finding self-confidence in himself due to his disability. He rejects Julie out of a lack of confidence. When he finds music, specifically the French horn, he finds himself. When Julia returns to town years later, he is now able to love her despite his disability. Travis handles this storyline well.

I think Travis muted this message with the coincidence of Julia and Shane’s bread-making. On the one hand, she’s able to spend some time focusing on the importance of companies using local growers to source their ingredients. It’s an important message to consider, but I found it to undermine the larger message of Shane’s journey of self-acceptance. There were times when the story felt uneven as Travis had to balance what I felt were two storylines.

All in all, though, I loved Stacy Travis’s Dough You Love Me? as it returns us to the world of Cletus and Jennifer (even if they are sitting in the background), and it keeps us wrapped in the world of the Donner Baker’s delectable pastries and bread. I’m hoping we see more stories from Travis in this new world for her. I think Clay deserves a story in the Smartypants Romance world.

In love and romance,

Professor A

Tag: dough you love me?

✍🏻 Wondering what to read this week? Check out Stacy Travis’s second chance romance, Dough You Love Me? ✍🏻