Page 5 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

“You’ll survive,” Gabriel said. “Tessa has me doing gratitude journaling. Every morning. Three things I’m grateful for.”

“What are they?” Ronan asked.

“Tessa, coffee, and the fact that Knox hasn’t been ruined by a woman yet, so I still have someone to complain to.”

“Heartwarming,” Knox said.

They finished dinner and split the check evenly, Knox calculating the tip to the penny, as always. They stood on the sidewalk outside, and the evening air carried the smell of Manhattan in late spring: exhaust, someone’s perfume, and garlic from a restaurant two blocks over that had no business smelling that good.

Gabriel clapped Knox on the shoulder. “Try to be a person on Thursday.”

“I make no promises.”

Knox walked home. His apartment was six blocks away, and the walk was part of his system, fourteen minutes of transition between the social performance of dinner and the solitude he preferred. He used the time to decompress and file the evening into its appropriate categories.

Tonight, the filing system wasn’t cooperating.

He kept circling back to what Ronan had said. Dev says something happened at the party with you and Lucy. She grabbed your tie and kissed you. Knox had been reduced to monosyllables in the aftermath, and he couldn’t even blame her for the observation. She’d been right. He had forgotten how to form sentences.

He’d spent weeks pretending the incident was an anomaly, a statistical outlier that could be excluded from any meaningful analysis. Except his data set kept expanding. He thought about her when he was eating lunch. He thought about her when he was calculating depreciation. He thought about her when he closed his eyes at night, which was inconvenient, because sleep was supposed to be restorative, not an exercise in involuntary recall.

Ronan and Gabriel had looked at the Oath and seen a finish line they could abandon when something better appeared. Knox looked at it and saw a test of character. Anyone could keep a promise when it was easy. The measure of a man was whether he kept it when every part of him wanted to break it.

His apartment was dark. He turned on one lamp, poured two fingers of whiskey, and sat at the kitchen counter with the glass between his hands.

Thursday would put him back in her bakery, in a planning meeting surrounded by the smell of bread and the baker with the confidence of having never been wrong about anything. A woman who had once called his suit “strategically boring.”

Knox drained his whiskey. The television remote sat on the counter where he’d left it that morning. The TV was still tuned to a station he’d deny watching under oath if Gabriel or Ronan ever asked. He picked up the remote, set it down, then picked it up again.

He watched forty minutes of a movie he’d seen twice already, where the woman owned a bookstore and the man learned to deserve her by the third act. Gabriel had caught him once, walked into his apartment unannounced and found Knox on the couch with the Hallmark Channel playing on the television. Gabriel had stared, and Knox played it off calmly with a single statement. “It’s market research.”

“Into what?” Gabriel had asked.

He avoided answering. The honest answer was too simple and too damning. He didn’t have to fall in love if he could watch it happen to someone else.

He went to bed and waited for sleep, which, unlike his numbers, refused to cooperate.

Chapter 2

LUCY

Lucy Wang’s hands knew what to do even when her brain was on fire.

Five fifteen in the morning, and she was elbow-deep in brioche dough, working the butter in with the heel of her palm while the ovens preheated behind her and the espresso machine hissed its first breath of the day. The bakery was still dark except for the kitchen, the front windows catching the orange glow of a streetlamp and the headlights of the delivery trucks rumbling down the block. Park Slope was asleep. Lucy was not.

She hadn’t slept properly in weeks.

The brioche needed kneading, and kneading was good. Kneading was rhythmic and physical and demanded her attention the way ledgers and projections never could. She pressed the dough flat, folded it, pressed again. The butter resisted, then yielded, then blended into the flour and eggs until the whole mass was smooth and elastic. It smelled like something her mother would have made on a Sunday morning at Golden Lotus, back when Golden Lotus still existed.

She crushed the thought before it could take root.

She didn’t want to think about Knox Knightly, his tie, the whiskey on his breath, or his hands coming up to steady her when she’d grabbed him. She didn’t want to think about the expression on his face when she’d pulled back, that rare, unguarded look that lasted a beat before he reassembled himself into a man who found the entire world mildly inconvenient.

She kneaded the brioche harder.

The bell above the front door jingled at five thirty. Marco let himself in with his own key, a canvas bag over his shoulder and a travel mug that Lucy knew contained black coffee with an embarrassing amount of sugar. He had worked at Flour & Honey since the second month, back when Lucy couldn’t afford a second baker and Marco couldn’t afford to be picky about where he worked. Years later, he was her head baker, her sounding board, and the person most likely to notice when something was wrong with her.

He hung his jacket on the hook, tied his apron, and appeared at her station. “You’re making angry brioche again.”