#shipmas22

"You do know you're not supposed to eat the ingredients, right?"

Marinette couldn't help a snorting giggle at the look on Adrien's face when his head snapped up.

"I waf-n," he started before swallowing and trying again. "I wasn't eating ingredients." He met her disbelieving stare steadily, his face giving away nothing.

She stepped towards him, eyes narrowing on his statuesque features before scanning the counter behind him. The Dupain-Cheng Bakery's kitchen on any given day could be politely described as a mess and accurately described as a hastily abandoned war zone, but in the fervor of holiday baking it looked like a tornado of icing sugar and red and green sprinkles had torn through and ransacked the cupboards. Adrien's space, the epicenter of the baking storm, was, marginally, cleaner. It was, at least, more organized than the chaos surrounding it, with a few mixing bowls and various ingredients laid out around the Dupain-Cheng Book of Secrets, as Tom called it, and a scale.

Marinette took in all of this as she stalked toward her boyfriend, until she was a mere foot in front of him and her eyes swept back to his carefully molded expression of polite innocence. "Damned model training," she muttered as she shifted her own expression from observation back to suspicion.

"If you weren't eating the ingredients to our Christmas pastries, M. Agreste, what was that in your mouth just now?"

"Would you believe me if I said it was a failed attempt that I was embarrassed you'd see?"

She snorted. "Two years ago, maybe. Or if even one of the ovens was warm." She took another step closer, narrowing the space between them to an inch. "Or-" she stretched up onto the balls of her feet so they were nose to nose, her hands resting on his flour-dusted shoulders for balance- "if I were as unobservant as you, Chaton."

Marinette allowed herself a small, devious grin before kissing Adrien quickly on the cheek and leaning forward to whisper in his ear. "You have chocolate on your face, dumbass."