Page 13 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

Gabriel and Tessa were paying for the wedding; Knox only moved their money around and left notes on things nobody had asked him to evaluate. So she’d invented a surcharge instead, an annoyance fee levied against one man in particular and collected entirely in her head. It helped more than it should have.

“He’s here,” Marco said from the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a towel. He didn’t say who. He didn’t need to.

Lucy checked the clock. One fifty-eight, two minutes early. Of course he was early. The man probably considered being on time a character flaw.

She pushed through the swinging door to the front.

Knox was standing near the register, holding a slim leather binder and wearing a suit the color of charcoal smoke. He’d already found the table she’d set up near the window, a two-top because the farmhouse table in the back felt too intimate for a meeting that was supposed to be about numbers. He hadn’t gone over and sat down. He was waiting.

“You moved the meeting to the front,” he said as he followed her.

“The back room is being used.”

“By whom?”

“By my preference for not being in a small room with you.” She pulled out a chair and sat. “Numbers?”

He opened the binder. The inside, she saw, was organized with the kind of order that suggested a man who kept a duplicate stapler on his desk in case the first one revolted. There were tabbed sections: venue costs, catering estimates, vendor comparisons, a timeline with milestones, and a final tab labeled CONTINGENCY that Lucy was certain contained backup plans for his backup plans.

“I’ve broken the budget into six categories,” he said.

Lucy noticed his hands. Long fingers, clean nails, steady. They were keyboard hands, contract hands, not dough hands.

“Venue, catering, flowers, photography, music, and miscellaneous. Each section has three tiers: essential, preferred, and aspirational.”

“Aspirational?” Lucy repeated.

“Gabriel and Tessa’s combined net worth allows for flexibility. But Tessa specified she wants elegant, not extravagant. Gabriel specified he wants Tessa to be happy. Those are different mandates, and the budget needs to reconcile them.”

Lucy pulled the binder closer and flipped through the first tab. The numbers were immaculate. Every line item sourced, every estimate cross-referenced with at least two vendors, every total carried forward with mechanical accuracy.

The man probably dreamed in decimal points.

It was, she had to admit in the most private corridor of her mind, impressive.

“Your catering estimates are low,” she said.

Knox’s chin lifted a fraction. “They’re based on per-head costs from four comparable Manhattan venues, adjusted for⁠—”

“For venues that use mass-produced dessert trays and call it a pastry course. I’m not making sheet cake, Knox. Every item on the dessert table will be handcrafted. Croissants are laminated, which means days of labor per batch. The petit fours require tempering. The wedding cake alone is forty hours of work, minimum, and that’s if I don’t sleep.” She tapped his number with her fingernail. “This covers ingredients. It doesn’t cover me.”

He was quiet. Then he uncapped a pen, crossed out his number, and wrote a new one above it.

“Better?” he asked.

The new figure sat on the page between them. He hadn’t padded it with a polite ten percent or negotiated it down. He’d doubled it.

“You didn’t even argue,” she said.

“You explained the labor. The number was wrong.” He recapped the pen. “I don’t argue with better data.”

Lucy sat back. She’d come prepared for a fight about margins and markups, the same financial condescension she’d been swallowing from bankers and landlords since the day she opened. She hadn’t prepared for a man who corrected his own math without being asked twice.

The front door chimed. Mrs. Hadley came in from next door, where she’d been running her dry cleaner since before Lucy was born. She wore her usual expression of tolerant surveillance. She approached the counter and waited.

“Mrs. Hadley, your usual?” Lucy was already standing.

“The scone. And tea. Not the tea from last week. That one tasted like you didn’t believe in it.”