Page 21 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

“The Knightly Foundation?”

“Yes. It’s a private foundation that supports small businesses in the five boroughs.”

“I’m familiar.” Lucy pressed her thumb against the bridge of her nose. “Thank you, Ms. Liao. I’ll call you back.”

She hung up, slid the phone an arm’s length away down the counter, and stared at it.

Knightly.

She did the math on the timing. Grant offices didn’t call the morning after you applied. Nominations crawled through committees and public-filing reviews for weeks, which meant Knox had put her name forward long before the letter slid under her door last night. He couldn’t know about the rent. No one did. The coincidence should have been a relief. Instead it sat wrong, a door swinging open at the exact moment she’d started looking for a window out.

She called Devney.

“Did you know about this?” Lucy asked without preamble.

“About what?”

“A grant. Through the Knightly Foundation. Someone nominated Flour & Honey for a small business grant, and I have three guesses who and the first two don’t count.”

Devney was quiet. Lucy could hear Ronan in the background, reading something aloud about quarterly projections. “I didn’t know. Let me ask Ronan.”

Muffled voices. Ronan’s measured cadence. Devney came back.

“Ronan says he doesn’t know anything about it. He says, and I’m quoting, ‘I would not have omitted Lucy’s business from my own grant recommendations had I been aware of the program, which suggests the nomination originated outside my operational awareness.’”

“So Knox.”

“Ronan won’t confirm that.”

“He doesn’t need to. The foundation has Knox’s last name on it.”

“Lucy, can you stop for one second and consider that maybe he did something nice?”

“Nice would be telling me about it. Nice would be asking. This is a man who ran my lease numbers in his head during a budget meeting and calculated my rent without being invited to. He doesn’t do nice. He does efficient.”

“Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”

“They are when you’re the person being managed.”

Devney went quiet. When she spoke again, her voice was even and steady. Years as her closest friend had taught her exactly where the line was. “You know I sat where you’re sitting, right? With Ronan. He did things for me before I was ready to let him. Drove me crazy. But the things he did weren’t about control. They were about someone who didn’t know how to say what he felt, so he showed it instead.”

“Ronan is different.”

“Ronan is Knox’s best friend. Where do you think he learned it?”

“And you know about the Oath,” Devney said. “Ronan walked away from it for me. Gabriel tore his up for Tessa. Knox is the last one holding, and Ronan says he holds it like a railing.”

Lucy did know. The no-marriage pact, three signatures at Harvard, the story Devney told over wine like a war she’d won. It had seemed funny once.

Lucy pressed her forehead against the cooler door. The metal was cold. It helped.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have bread.” She hung up.

Marco was watching from the kitchen doorway, a piping bag in one hand.

“Don’t say it,” Lucy said.

“I’m not saying anything.”