Page 64 of Tempting Mr. Knightly
“You’ve been standing for five hours. Sit.”
She sat at their table. She stared at the empty chair across from her.
Her phone buzzed.
A spam message announced a sale at a store she’d never visited.
She put the phone down where she could watch it not ring.
At noon, she called Devney.
“He hasn’t texted since yesterday,” Lucy said. “He said he’d explain today. It’s noon. Nothing.”
Devney was quiet a beat too long. “Gabriel said Knox was in his office all day yesterday. Didn’t leave. Didn’t eat.”
“That’s not unusual. He does that when he’s working on something.”
“Gabriel said he was different. Not his normal quiet. The other kind.”
“What other kind?”
“The kind Ronan had before he told me about the Oath.” Devney paused. “The kind that comes before a confession.”
Lucy’s grip tightened on the phone. “A confession about what?”
“I don’t know. Gabriel wouldn’t tell me. He said it wasn’t his to share.”
“Devney.”
“Lucy, I’m not keeping secrets from you. I genuinely don’t know. But something is wrong. I can feel it.”
Lucy braced a hand against the table. “What do I do?”
“You wait. Or you go to him.”
“You know I don’t do that.”
“I know. But Lucy, sometimes staying still is the thing that breaks you.”
Lucy ended the call. She didn’t move. She was sitting where the waiting lived.
Eventually, she went to the cake. The three tiers had cooled overnight, and she stacked them, doweled them, smoothed the crumb coat until the seams vanished, then filled a bag with buttercream and started the roses—a hundred of them, a cascade from the crown to the base.
At four, she set down the piping bag and called him. It rang four times and went to voicemail.
She didn’t leave a message. She didn’t know what she would have said.
She typed a text instead, deleted it, typed another, and deleted that one too. What she finally sent was four words.
Lucy: You said today, Knox.
The dots never came.
Yesterday there had been promises, at least. Tomorrow, I promise. Please trust me. Today there was nothing.
Marco should have left at three, when the bakery closed for the day. He hadn’t. He’d spent the afternoon finding things to fix at the edges of the kitchen and staying within arm’s reach of her without making it a thing, the way he had whenever something was off.
At five, her phone buzzed and her whole body lunged for it.
