Sous Chef Birdie Malone is willing to do anything to disprove the rumor "she doesn't play well with others."

Even if it means taking a job as a line cook at a local meat and three while trying to be the superhero her five-year-old daughter Amara believes her to be. Competing in her hometown’s yearly foodie competition would definitely help. If she wins, she will finally get the position and recognition she's been desperate to receive. Even if Saxon Turner, world-renowned chef and ruiner of her life, is one of the judges. No one ever needs to speak about what happened between them. She can keep her secrets.

Chef Saxon Turner is in danger of having his foodie travel show canceled after he gets caught in a dark room with the Governor's daughter. Luckily, a long-time friend steps in and offers him an opportunity to judge a foodie competition and a chance to lay low until it all blows over. Maybe this time he will be able to shed the bad boy image he's carried with him through most of his life.

Or at least he thought it would be until he saw that one of the contestants is Birdie Malone.

It's been six years since he’s seen Birdie and he’s more than surprised to find the talented petite brown-skinned chef competing in a small town food competition when she should be commanding a kitchen of her own. When they met, the passion between them was hotter than a pit barbecue fire and the way he left things between them when she got kicked out of culinary school is chief among his regrets. Now that she’s back in his life, he can only hope that she will trust and respect him again.

Birdie just wants to win the money to start her own catering business and ignore the fact that Saxon has unexpectedly become an unwanted distraction. But the passion, intensity, and creativity he inspires in her can’t be denied. Will she be able to keep him out of her bed and her head in the game?