cooking class

COOKING CLASS

Contemporary Romance / Romantic Comedy

Millhaven Romance, Book 1  •  Dual Close Third Person POV  •  HEA

A fraud food blogger with zero kitchen skills hires a humiliated Michelin-starred chef for private lessons—and neither of them is prepared for what starts simmering.

Poppy Calloway has built a wildly successful food blog on one gloriously catastrophic lie: she’s never cooked a single dish in her life. When a viral comment thread threatens to blow her cover right before her first live cooking demonstration, Poppy has thirty days to transform herself from kitchen disaster to competent cook.

Enter Dex Weston—recently returned to small-town Millhaven after his Michelin-starred NYC restaurant was savaged in a career-ending review, now teaching cooking lessons out of his grandmother’s kitchen to pay the bills. Dex doesn’t want students. He doesn’t want to be back in Millhaven. And he definitely doesn’t want to spend a month teaching a chaotic, flour-covered, perpetually barefoot woman who makes even a failed soufflé feel like the best moment of his week.

But she pays well—and falling for the grumpy chef teaching her to crack an egg isn’t exactly something Poppy can review her way out of.

Tropes

Primary Tropes

• Grumpy × Sunshine   Enemies-to-Lovers
• Forced Proximity   He Falls First
• Secret Identity / Fish Out of Water
• 30-Day Countdown Structure

Secondary Tropes

• Opposites Attract   Found Family
• Small-Town Setting / Returning Hero — Millhaven

Emotional Themes

• Authenticity Over Performance — Poppy’s whole brand is a lie; Dex’s whole identity is a wound
• Failure as Foundation — his career-ending review; her thirty-day deadline
• The Intimacy of Feeding Someone / Being Fed

Book Details

Genre:  Contemporary Romance / Romantic Comedy

Heat Level:  High-Heat, Open-Door (explicit intimate scenes)

POV:  Dual Close Third Person (Poppy & Dex)

Tense:  Past Tense

Ending:  HEA (Happily Ever After)

Setting:  Millhaven — small-town, grandmother’s kitchen

Series:  Millhaven Romance — Book 1 (standalone readable; each book features a new Millhaven couple)

Cooking Class

A guaranteed HEA. Thirty days. One failed soufflé. And a chef who had absolutely no plan for how she made his kitchen feel like home.

Perfect for readers who love grumpy-sunshine food romance, sunshine heroines whose chaos is secretly their superpower, and love stories where the real recipe was always the people in the kitchen.