Page 17 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

“Because beside means your knee would be touching mine for three courses, and I’d rather eat my risotto without a cardiac event.”

Knox picked up his water glass and took a longer drink than thirst required.

Across wasn’t, as it turned out, better than beside. Across meant he could see her face, every expression, every reaction to every joke Gabriel told and every terrible anecdote Ronan volunteered. Across meant he watched her laugh at Devney’s story about Ronan’s first attempt at cooking dinner. (“He followed the recipe like it was a legal contract. He measured the olive oil with a graduated cylinder.”) Across meant he saw the exact moment she stopped being a guest at someone else’s table and became part of the conversation, leaning in, elbows finding the cloth, voice rising to match the room.

The dinner was loud, warm, full of crosstalk. Enzo brought antipasti without being asked, then soup. Knox ordered the lamb because it was on the menu and he could pronounce it. Enzo accepted the order without comment, which was either approval or pity. Lucy ordered the orecchiette in rapid, confident Italian that made Enzo pause mid-pour and study her with new respect.

“You speak Italian?” Knox asked.

“My mother cooked Chinese food for thirty years. But the woman who taught her to make pasta spoke no English, so Mom learned Italian by necessity and taught me by accident.” She lifted a single orecchiette onto her fork, easy and unhurried. She’d grown up between two cuisines and claimed both. “You don’t speak Italian.”

“I speak four languages, none of them useful in a kitchen.”

“Which four?”

“English, Mandarin, French, and enough German to order a beer and insult someone’s mother.”

“That’s three and a half.”

“Fair.”

She speared another bite and considered him like a first draft she was revising. “You don’t seem like a Mandarin speaker.”

“My father did business in Shanghai. I started lessons at eight.”

“Did you like it?”

“I liked being good at it. That’s not the same thing.”

“No,” Lucy said. “It isn’t.”

The observation sat between them, quiet. Knox picked up his wine glass and said nothing else, because saying more would mean explaining that his entire childhood had operated on that distinction, the gap between loving something and performing excellence at it, and that was a door he didn’t intend to open at a rehearsal dinner.

Devney leaned across Ronan’s empty chair. He’d gone to refill Tessa’s wine, a task he approached with the focus of a man defusing ordnance. “Lucy, tell Knox about the cake tasting last week. The one with the coconut.”

“The coconut was a mistake.”

“The coconut was an abomination.”

“I was experimenting.”

“You made Ronan cry. He ate one bite and his eyes watered, and he said, very seriously, ‘This cake has made me feel an emotion I cannot categorize.’”

Knox looked at Lucy. “You made Ronan feel something he couldn’t name. That might be your greatest achievement.”

“It was bad coconut. Don’t give me credit.”

“I’m giving the coconut credit. You’re the vehicle.”

Lucy’s mouth twitched. She returned to her orecchiette with determined focus, refusing to let him see that he’d landed a point.

Gabriel stood for a toast midway through the main course. He kept it short. Thank you for being here, thank you for loving us, thank you to Tessa for saying yes even though I’d been, in her words, “a flight risk and a financial liability.” The table laughed. Tessa blew him a kiss. Gabriel caught it, closed his fist around it, and put it in his jacket pocket, and the gesture was so sincere and so absurd that Knox looked away, and Lucy’s fork paused halfway to her mouth.

Then Ronan stood.

He opened the leather folder.

“Gabriel,” Ronan began, “when I first met you, I calculated the probability of our friendship lasting beyond the initial contractual obligations of our partnership.”