Name: Hot Cross Buns
Author: Kevin Snell

A high-heat M/M small-town romance about old wounds, second chances, and the dangerous return of the man who never really left.

He built a life around routine. The man who broke him is back in town.

Theo Lassiter knows how to keep a life contained—wake before dawn, start the dough, open the bakery, serve the town, go home alone, repeat. The routine works because Theo built it that way—predictable, quiet, safe.

Then Cal Patton comes back to Saltwick Bay—former football star, hometown legend, the boy Theo wanted too badly, and the man who left him kneeling in the dirt behind the bleachers six years ago and walked away like it meant nothing. Cal is supposed to be temporary, back in town to help his mother, coach football, and figure out what comes next after the injury that ended the life he thought he was building. But Saltwick Bay is small, the bakery lights are still on, and some wounds don’t stay buried just because both men learned how not to touch them.

A guarded baker. A fallen football hero. One town too small for avoidance.

Theo has spent years becoming steady. The Muffin Top opens before dawn, the ovens run hot, and the work is precise, physical, and reliable in a way people rarely are. Theo knows what dough needs. He knows what the town expects. He knows how to give just enough of himself away without risking the parts that still hurt.

Cal Patton used to move through Saltwick Bay like the future had already chosen him. Then football ended, his body failed him, and the town he left behind kept living without him. Now he’s back in his mother’s house, coaching at the high school, and trying not to look too closely at the bakery he keeps driving past.

Theo remembers everything. Cal remembers more than Theo thinks. The avoidance turns into contact, the old pain turns into heat, and their unfinished history becomes a second chance neither man knows how to ask for. Theo doesn’t need Cal Patton to come back. That’s the problem. He already has.

Hot Cross Buns is the second Saltwick Bay Romance, a high-heat M/M second-chance story that turns on a single question—whether Cal Patton can prove that this time he knows how to stay. Theo’s routine was built to survive the man who left, and the book is about what happens to a survival system when the reason for it moves home. The series starts with Hot Dogs and Handies and finishes with Hot Nuts and Bolts.

Six years of rising before dawn, and the hardest part of Theo’s day is still the truck that passes the bakery without stopping—until the morning it stops.