Page 44 of Tempting Mr. Knightly

“You’re supposed to say no.”

“You don’t want someone who lies to you. You want someone who stays when the truth is hard.” He was quiet. “My father was a man who told people what they wanted to hear. It worked until it didn’t. I’d rather give you the truth and sit through the silence than hand you a comfortable lie.”

“That’s a terrible sales pitch.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

She closed her eyes, then opened them. The display case threw long, warm shadows across the floor. “Knox?”

“Yeah?”

She leaned against his shoulder. It wasn’t a decision so much as a controlled giving in, the body overruling the mind because the mind had been holding out for too long.

His shoulder was solid, warm. He sat perfectly still and let her rest against him, a man who understood that the person leaning on him was doing something she’d never done before, so he guarded the stillness and let her stay.

They sat like that while the coolers cycled, and the ovens ticked as they cooled, and the street outside went quiet by degrees.

“Knox?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you. For staying.”

He was quiet a beat. Then, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Neither of them moved.

Chapter 13

KNOX

It was the last Saturday of August, the final cake tasting, one o’clock.

Knox had been watching Lucy’s hands for forty minutes.

She was piping buttercream roses onto a demonstration tier, the final decision before Gabriel and Tessa committed to a design. Her wrists turned with a fluid economy that made the work look easy, which he now understood, after a summer of watching her, meant it was devastatingly difficult. Each rose required twelve rotations of the piping bag, the pressure constant, the angle adjusted by fractions of a degree between petals. She hadn’t looked up once since starting the row.

Tessa and Gabriel sat across the table, reviewing the flavor combinations Lucy had laid out on labeled plates. Lemon elderflower, chocolate hazelnut, vanilla bean with salted caramel, and a dark chocolate ganache that Knox recognized from the midnight session when Lucy had taught him to fold chocolate and he’d learned more about surrender in thirty minutes than almost a decade of business school had offered.

“The elderflower is extraordinary,” Tessa said.

“The hazelnut,” Gabriel countered. “Definitely the hazelnut.”

Tessa gave him a look that contained their entire relationship. Affection, assessment, and the certainty that she was right. “We’re having the elderflower.”

“I love the elderflower.”

“You love the hazelnut.”

“I love whatever you love. That’s in the vows.”

“That’s not in the vows.”

“It should be.”

Knox watched this exchange from the end of the table, where he’d positioned himself with a coffee and his binder, keeping up the pretense that he was here in a financial capacity and not because the alternative was his apartment, where the remote sat on the counter and the television remained tuned to a channel he no longer watched. Its formulaic happy endings had quit satisfying anything in him, and he knew, with a clarity that terrified him, why.

Lucy finished the last rose. She set the piping bag down and turned the tier slowly on its stand, inspecting each petal in turn. She held herself to standards that would have exhausted a lesser baker. Knox watched her find and correct an imperfection he couldn’t see, her thumb pressing the edge of a petal until it met whatever invisible standard lived in her head.