Page 65 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

It was Tessa.

Tessa: Final headcount confirmed, two hundred and four. Cake on track for tomorrow? Also, how are you?

Lucy read it twice. Tessa did not ask how people were in the middle of logistics. Tessa asked for delivery windows and contingency plans, and she saved feelings for after the invoices cleared. Which meant Gabriel had told her something, and Gabriel had been told something, and everyone in this wedding seemed to know more about Knox than the woman he’d left a note for.

Lucy: Cake is on schedule. I’m fine.

Both statements were professional. One of them was true.

She slid the phone into her apron pocket and looked at the cake on the turntable, three tiers and most of a hundred roses, forty hours of work that hadn’t waited for Knox to surface. Tomorrow there would be a tent and two hundred guests and the last of the roses to finish by morning.

At six Marco finally untied his apron and then didn’t leave even then—wiping down the espresso machine, which was already clean, restacking the to-go cups, which were already stacked.

“Go home, Marco.”

“In a minute.”

“It’s been two days. I’m not going to fall apart overnight.”

“I know.” He folded the towel and set it down. “You don’t fall apart. That’s the part that worries me.”

She walked him to the door. He squeezed her shoulder on the way out, two seconds, nothing said. Then he was gone, and she locked the door behind him and turned off the kitchen lights one bank at a time.

Monday’s order sheet sat where Knox’s binder belonged. She didn’t move it.

She went upstairs, still in her work clothes, and sat at the kitchen table instead of the couch, because the couch asked questions she didn’t want to answer.

Tonight, the door stayed locked.

Tomorrow hadn’t happened. He’d given her days of “I’ll explain” and “I promise” and “Please trust me,” and she had trusted him. She’d trusted him with her kitchen, with her family’s story, with her body, with the slow, deliberate openness of a woman who had worked very hard not to need anything.

She didn’t call again.

She sat in the dark and let herself be angry. Anger was better than the alternative. She had been so sure of him. Tomorrow, at the wedding, he would run out of places to hide.

Chapter 20

LUCY

The cake traveled to the wedding in four boxes, and Lucy traveled with the top tier on her lap.

Her hard work rode in those boxes. She’d logged them like she logged everything, in the notebook by the register, because if she was going to lose two nights of sleep and most of her remaining sanity to lemon elderflower and a hundred cascading buttercream roses, she wanted the number on record. The ledger ran eleven hours of baking, nine of structure and stacking, and twenty of piping, petal by petal, at the marble counter.

It turned out dread had made excellent roses. Her hands had never been steadier. She chose not to examine why.

“Pothole,” Marco announced from the driver’s seat.

“I felt it.”

“The cake felt it.”

“The cake is fine. The cake has internal supports.” Lucy adjusted her grip on the box. “Unlike the rest of us.”

The venue was a restored glasshouse on the garden’s east side, all white iron and clean panes, and Tessa had filled it with so much greenery that the building looked like it had been grown rather than built. September did the rest. The morning came through the glass roof in long, warm panels, and Lucy stood in the service entrance with a tier in her arms and admitted, privately, that Tessa had outdone every event planner in the city.

Assembly took two hours. Bree ferried trays. Marco built the dessert table with the solemnity of a man installing a museum exhibit, and Lucy stacked, doweled, piped the seams, and placed two hundred individual desserts she’d finally priced right, because a man with a binder had once told her to fix it.

She saw him at eleven, across the glasshouse, being fitted with a boutonniere.