Page 28 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

“And walked the last twenty blocks. The train alone felt insufficient.”

“I thought you bought a place out here.”

“An investment. I’ve never spent a night in it.”

Lucy stepped aside, and Knox walked into Flour & Honey at midnight, and she locked the door behind him.

He sat on a flour sack near the prep counter. She studied him in the kitchen light. Without the jacket, the sharp lines of his suits gave way to something leaner. His forearms were tan. His watch hung loose on his wrist. He looked like he’d been holding himself rigid for years and had finally stopped, unsure what to do with his hands.

She returned to the ganache. They didn’t speak for a full minute, which should have been uncomfortable and wasn’t. The kitchen filled in around them. The scrape of the spatula against the bowl, the refrigerator cycling on, the faint tick of the proofing racks cooling.

“What are you making?” he asked.

“Wedding cake ganache. Third attempt. The first two were wrong.”

“Wrong how?”

“Too heavy for summer. Chocolate ganache needs to hold its shape at room temperature, but September can still run warm, so the ratio of cream to chocolate has to be lower than standard. I’m trying to find the line between hold and flavor.” She poured tempered chocolate into a bowl of warm cream and began folding. “You don’t care about any of this.”

“I care about ratios.”

She glanced at him. He was watching her hands with a focus she imagined he usually reserved for term sheets, and the attention made her fingers clumsy on the spatula.

“Taste this.” She held out a spoon.

He took it, tasted, considered.

“Too sweet?”

“No. The chocolate is right. But the texture’s heavy on the back of the tongue. Reduce the cream by ten percent and add a pinch of sea salt. The finish will be cleaner.”

Lucy stared at him. “You have opinions about ganache.”

“I have opinions about finish. Whether it’s a financial report or a chocolate sauce, the last impression is what people carry.” He set the spoon on the counter. “Also, my father made chocolate truffles every Christmas. Badly. But he was particular about the ratio.”

The word father landed in the kitchen like a dropped glass.

Lucy adjusted the recipe, reduced the cream, added salt, and folded again. The new batch was smoother, the finish cleaner, and she knew without tasting it that Knox was right, and that bothered her exactly as much as every other time he’d been right, which was considerably often.

She handed him a fresh spoon.

“Better,” he said.

“I know.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I didn’t say thank you.”

“You didn’t need to. Your face said it.”

“My face said nothing.”

“Your left eyebrow lifted approximately two millimeters. In my experience, that’s your version of a standing ovation.”

Lucy held her tongue. She wasn’t going to react to that. She refused to let him log her eyebrow movements and turn them into data points in whatever file he was building about her.

She handed him another spoon. He took it without being asked.