Page 16 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

“Polite people look away. He looked closer.” Marco pushed off the doorframe. “I have brioche to shape. But for the record? His catering estimate was low, and the fact that he fixed it the second you explained why tells me more about that man than six months of dating would.”

Lucy carried the cups to the sink. She ran the water hot, watching steam curl off the surface.

She’d spent too many years living on the principle that men in expensive suits only understood taking. They bought buildings, restructured leases, optimized assets, and if a family restaurant that had been standing for thirty years happened to be in the way, well, that was arithmetic, not malice.

Knox Knightly had walked into her kitchen with a portfolio full of numbers and hadn’t tried to change a single thing about her food. He’d changed his own math. He’d written her prices up, not down. He’d listened to Mrs. Park talk about her mother’s recipe and hadn’t turned it into a business opportunity or a sympathy play.

He’d seen the photo of Golden Lotus and kept his mouth shut.

Lucy dried her hands on the towel by the sink. She reached into her apron pocket and felt the edge of his business card, still there from Thursday, the one she hadn’t thrown away.

Underpriced. Fix it.

She had turned the card over and had found the back was blank. No phone number, no follow-up, no “call me.” He’d said his piece and left it with her. He kept handing her things and walking away, and Lucy didn’t know what to do with someone who gave without grabbing.

The lemon bars were still $3.50. She wasn’t changing them for him, but she pulled up her cost sheet that night and stared at the number until the screen went dark.

Chapter 5

KNOX

Ronan had prepared a toast.

Knox knew this because Ronan had emailed him the first draft shortly after six, labeled “TOAST v1.0 / REVIEW REQUESTED / DEADLINE: COB FRIDAY.” The document was four pages long, single-spaced, and opened with a bar graph comparing Gabriel’s happiness metrics pre- and post-Tessa. The Y-axis was labeled “Subjective Wellbeing (Estimated).” The X-axis was labeled “Time (Months Since Emotional Breakthrough).”

Knox had responded, “Cut the graph.”

Ronan had responded, “It provides context.”

Knox had let it go. Some battles were better conceded before they started.

The pre-rehearsal dinner was at Enzo’s. This far out, it was technically only an engagement dinner, but Gabriel had taken to calling it the rehearsal so his mother would stop emailing. Enzo’s was a restaurant in the West Village that Gabriel had rented for the evening, small, immovably Italian, a place where the waiter corrected your pronunciation and the menu had no English translations because the owner, a seventy-year-old Calabrian named Enzo who remembered every slight and most compliments, believed that if you couldn’t read an Italian menu you didn’t deserve his food.

Knox arrived early and chose a seat at the long table that gave him sight lines to both exits and the kitchen, another habit, this one inherited from his father, who’d taught him that a man who couldn’t see the door was a man who’d already lost the negotiation.

The table was set for twelve. White cloth, heavy silverware, candles that Enzo had lit himself because he didn’t trust anyone else with his matches. The room smelled like garlic and old wood and something caramelized, pork fat and wine reduction, that made Knox’s stomach tighten with an appetite he didn’t expect.

Gabriel and Tessa arrived together, which surprised no one. Gabriel was wearing a sport coat with no tie, collar open, laughing at something Tessa had said in the car. He’d been laughing more since the engagement, loosely, without checking the room first to see who was watching. Tessa had done that to him, or undone something, and the result was a man Knox barely recognized but liked considerably more than the version who’d been drowning in his own discipline two years ago.

Ronan and Devney came next. Ronan was carrying a leather folder that Knox recognized as the toast. Devney was carrying a gift bag. She’d already read the toast, suggested revisions, and made peace with the fact that her husband would ignore all of them.

Tessa’s sister arrived, then a bridesmaid, then a college friend of Gabriel’s. The room slowly filled.

Lucy arrived last.

She was wearing a green dress, the color of sage, with a neckline that followed her collarbones and stopped at exactly the point where professional became something else. Her hair was down, which Knox had never seen. It changed the architecture of her face, softened the angles he’d been filing away across conference tables and sample trays, and made them harder to slot under anything sensible.

She saw him. Her chin lifted. She crossed the room and took the seat directly across from him, which wasn’t the seat Tessa’s place card had assigned her.

“You moved,” Knox said.

“The seating chart put me next to you. I assumed that was Tessa’s idea of comedy.”

“It was Tessa’s idea. We’re coordinating the budget.”

“We’re coordinating the budget in an office. This is dinner.” She unfolded her napkin and placed it in her lap with neat finality, establishing boundaries with linen. “Across is better than beside.”

“Why?”