Page 42 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

They gathered around the farmhouse table, not for a meeting or a strategy session, but for a meal. Gabriel distributed plates. Devney poured wine. Ronan opened his laptop and tried to present his updated numbers, and Devney closed it gently and said, “After food.” Marco narrated the entire scene from his perch on the prep counter with the detached tone of a nature documentary. “And here we observe the urban billionaire in his transitional state, attempting to nourish his adoptive pack through the ancient ritual of takeout procurement.”

Gabriel pointed a fork at Marco. “I resent that characterization.”

“It’s affectionate.”

“It’s accurate,” Devney said. “That makes it worse.”

Lucy ate. She listened to them argue about nothing. She watched Ronan fix her display shelf with a level, a laser measure he’d produced from his jacket pocket, and a focus that made Lucy suspect it had been waiting there for weeks for exactly this kind of need. Devney sat on the counter nearby, eating pad thai with chopsticks, offering commentary he hadn’t requested.

“It’s a shelf, Ronan.”

“It’s a load-bearing display surface with a measurable deviation.”

“It holds muffins.”

“Muffins deserve a level shelf.” He adjusted the shelf by a millimeter, checked the level, adjusted again. “There. Months of anxiety, resolved.”

“You’ve been anxious about my shelf for months?” Lucy asked.

“Yes. It took me months to calculate whether mentioning it would cause more stress than the deviation itself.” He stepped back. “The deviation won.”

Gabriel laughed. Even Lucy, who had spent the last three days forgetting how, felt the tightness in her throat go slack.

She watched Devney steal spring rolls from Ronan’s plate while Ronan pretended not to notice. She watched Marco refill everyone’s coffee without being asked. He understood that the best thing you could do during someone else’s crisis was maintain the ordinary.

Knox was the exception. While everyone else worked the phones and the floor plans, he let his coffee go cold and didn’t reach for any of it. He watched. Mostly he watched her, and every so often she felt it, and every so often she let herself not look back.

Mrs. Hadley came through the back door at noon. She was carrying a paper sleeve of fresh hangers from the dry cleaner, which meant she’d been working, and a tin of shortbread cookies, which meant she’d been baking, and that happened so rarely that Lucy stared at the tin like it might contain instructions.

“My mother’s recipe,” Mrs. Hadley said. She pressed the tin into Lucy’s hands. “I make them once a year. This seemed like the occasion.”

“Mrs. Hadley, you didn’t have to.”

“I wanted to. Those are different things.” She surveyed the room like she’d been auditing this block for four decades, which she had. “You have good people.”

“I know.”

“Do you? Because you walked in here alone at the start, and you stayed alone for a long time, and I let you because alone was what you needed. It isn’t what you need anymore.”

Lucy opened her mouth, then closed it. Mrs. Hadley had a talent for delivering sentences that required no response because the response was internal, and she trusted you to carry it.

“The cookies are better with tea,” Mrs. Hadley said, and left.

Lucy opened the tin. The shortbread was perfect, sandy, crumbly, the edges browned with the consistency that came from decades of practice. Mrs. Hadley had never offered Lucy a recipe or invited her next door for a meal. She communicated affection through below-market rent, sidewalk sweeping, and single nods that carried more warmth than most people managed with full sentences. And she had baked for her.

Lucy ate a cookie, then another. She carried the tin to the table and set it among the Thai containers and the papers and the wine glasses. Everyone reached for one without asking. The shortbread disappeared in ten minutes, and nobody said anything about it because some things were better honored through consumption than commentary.

The afternoon stretched out. Tessa arrived after all, having cleared her whole afternoon with no notice, three of her client venues already pulled up on her phone—spaces where she’d catered events that had storefront leases coming up, kitchens already wired for production; it was the kind of intel only a caterer working every corner of the city could pull together by lunchtime.

“I’m not pressuring you,” she said. “I’m presenting options.”

“You’re always presenting options.”

“It’s how I show love. Some people bring flowers. I bring spreadsheets.”

“That’s Ronan’s line,” Devney said.

“It’s everyone’s line in this group,” Marco said. “You’re all data-driven romantics. It’s my favorite thing about you and also the reason none of you should plan a surprise party.”