The Cocoa & Cipher Confectionery - The Hidden Havens Series Book 14: A Cozy Urban Fantasy Romance (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798184511719)

She came to take his chocolate apart. She didn't expect it to put her back together.

Beatrice Okafor is a neurological researcher running on empty. Fourteen months into a grant partnership with Lexis AI, she arrives at a warm Cambridge confectionery with a pelican case full of analysis equipment and a single objective: map the anomalous cognitive compounds in the chocolatier's work and file her data. Clean science. No complications.

Simon Adeyemi has been feeding the Scholar's Ward for six years. He knows what people need before they do, gives it freely, and has never once asked what he needs in return. When the sharp-eyed researcher sits down at his marble prep table, his copper vats register something he hasn't felt in years: this one matters.

But the data Beatrice files in eleven seconds becomes a weapon in eleven more. Lexis AI deploys a synthetic cognitive signal into the Ward's Wi-Fi infrastructure - a digital frequency that mimics Simon's unquantifiable magic and begins lobotomising the academic community one mind at a time. To fight it, they need a counter-signal built from everything her science can map and everything his craft can feel. They need each other's opposite expertise. And they need to be in the same warm kitchen, at the same cold marble, for long enough to realise that the signal they've been building together isn't just neurological.

Friends to Lovers. Secret Academic Rivals. Forced Proximity in the most delicious kitchen in a city that doesn't appear on any map.

The Cocoa & Cipher Confectionery is the fourth book in the Scholar's Ward arc of The Hidden Havens Series - twenty standalone cozy urban fantasy romances set in the secret magical districts of modern Boston. Each book is a complete love story. Every couple is guaranteed a happily ever after.

Series reading order: While each book stands alone, readers who have followed the series will recognise familiar faces in the warm amber light of the Study Hour.