Page 29 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

They fell into a rhythm. She made. He tasted. She adjusted. He observed. The conversation came in pieces, between batches, in the gaps where the chocolate cooled and the cream warmed and neither of them had anything to do with their hands except hold the spoons and occasionally brush fingers when she passed one over.

She couldn’t say how soon after his comment the conversation turned personal.

“Your father made truffles,” she said, not a question but an opening.

Knox set down his spoon. “Every Christmas. He’d take over the kitchen for an entire day and let me work beside him, the one day a year he wanted me in the room. He never wrote anything down. He did it by feel, ruined every pot we owned, and the house smelled like burnt sugar for a week. My mother hated it.” He paused. “But the truffles were the exception. He was a terrible cook in general, but he cared about the truffles. They were the one thing he made with his hands instead of his signature.”

“What happened to him?”

“He fell in love.” Knox’s voice was even, but his hands had gone still on his knees. “He was a fund manager, successful and sharp. He met a woman and lost his ability to calculate risk. He leveraged his fund to maintain a lifestyle she expected, and when the market corrected, he lost everything. His clients. His reputation. His marriage. Me, for the most part.” He was looking at the flour-dusted floor. “He drank himself into an early grave. I was twenty when he died.”

Lucy stopped folding. She stood across from him with chocolate on her wrist and the spatula suspended above the bowl, and she let the story settle.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. He made his choices.”

“You can be sorry about someone’s choices and still be sorry they suffered.”

Knox raised his head. His throat moved. He studied her with the attention he gave to things that defied his models, and she recognized the expression because she’d seen it at the budget meeting, and at the rehearsal dinner, and standing in his office while she yelled at him. It was the face of a man who kept encountering something he couldn’t quantify.

“My parents had a restaurant,” Lucy said.

She hadn’t planned to say it. The words came out because Knox had given her something real and the kitchen at midnight felt like a place where reciprocity was allowed.

“Golden Lotus. In Queens. Chinese restaurant, thirty years. My father built it from nothing. My mother ran the front. Jane and I grew up in the kitchen, doing homework on produce boxes, learning to fold dumplings before we could ride bikes.” She set the spatula down. “Eight years ago, the building was sold. Some investment firm restructured the portfolio, pulled the commercial leases. My parents lost the restaurant in ninety days.”

Knox didn’t move.

“My mother had a breakdown. She’s better now, but she’s never been the same. My father works as a line cook in someone else’s kitchen off the Expressway. He used to own the best Chinese restaurant in Queens, and now he makes fried rice for someone else’s menu.” Lucy’s voice was steady. She’d told this story to herself so many times the edges had worn smooth. “I built this bakery because I needed to prove that what happened to them wouldn’t happen to me. That I could build something they couldn’t take.” She picked up a towel and wiped the chocolate from her wrist in slow circles, buying time to keep her voice level. “Mrs. Hadley gave me the lease. Below market. She didn’t ask for a business plan. She asked me what I’d make on the first morning, and I said brioche, and she said, ‘Good. I like brioche.’ That was the whole negotiation.”

“She sounds like a good judge of character.”

“She’s a good judge of pastry. The character part is secondary.” Lucy hung the towel on the hook. “I was twenty-four. I had savings from three years of working pastry jobs and a notebook full of my mother’s recipes that I swore I’d never use because this was supposed to be mine, not a copy of theirs. I opened the doors, didn’t sleep for a month, burned the first hundred croissants, and figured it out, batch by batch, because figuring things out is what I do when the alternative is admitting I need help.”

“Who is ‘they’?”

“Men in offices with spreadsheets who decide which buildings are profitable and which families are acceptable losses.”

The sentence fell between them and lay still. Knox was looking at her with an expression she could read, or could read and didn’t want to, because what it said was, I am one of those men. I sit in one of those offices. I make those spreadsheets.

He didn’t say that. He said, “Your parents’ restaurant wasn’t an acceptable loss.”

“No,” Lucy said. “It wasn’t.”

“And your bakery won’t be one either.”

She looked at him. He wasn’t performing sympathy. He was sitting in the wreckage of a story he didn’t know was connected to his own and offering the one thing he had. Certainty.

It was past two in the morning. Lucy had been standing for nineteen hours, and her back ached, and her hands were stiff, and she understood his insomnia completely because she hadn’t been sleeping well either, and the reason was sitting three feet away pretending he wasn’t looking at her mouth.

“You should go,” she said. But she didn’t stand.

Knox didn’t move. Instead he picked up a clean bowl and held it out. “Show me.”

“Show you what?”

“The fold. You’ve been doing it all night. It looks like it requires more skill than anything I do with a balance sheet, and I’d like to understand it.”