Texas Smoke, Second Chances
A Pitmaster Romance

About this book:

Maya Montgomery doesn't need a critic to tell her that Montgomery's Pit BBQ serves the best brisket in Travis County—thirty-five years of salt, pepper, post oak, and patience have already proven it. But when Julian Vance, the *Austin Chronicle*'s razor-tongued columnist, walks through her screen door two hours after sell-out and calls her life's work "nostalgia," the fire in her pit gets a whole lot hotter. He wants nuance; she serves truth. He reviews innovation; she guards a legacy. And with a forty-percent rent hike threatening to bulldoze her family's smokehouse, Maya can't afford a single bad write-up—no matter how infuriatingly handsome the critic might be.

Julian Vance has built a career dissecting plates with surgical precision, but nothing in his culinary institute playbook prepared him for Maya Montgomery. She's stubborn, soot-stained, and absolutely certain that barbecue can't be improved by a man in a linen shirt. Yet as he returns morning after morning—sampling her smoke ring, watching her tend Big Bertha's temperamental flame, tasting the history in every slice—Julian finds his red pen hovering. The woman who refuses to compromise is the only thing in this city that feels real, and the harder he tries to stay objective, the more he wants to burn his reputation to the ground for her.

Between blistering reviews and clandestine midnight bastes, blistering arguments and stolen kisses behind the woodpile, two people who speak entirely different languages of flavor discover they're cooking from the same recipe: passion, patience, and the courage to let something simmer until it's fall-apart tender. But when the festival flames rise and the ultimate review drops, will the truth they've uncovered survive the heat—or turn to ash?