“Caramels. Yes. They looked … they looked as though they would have been very good.”
“It is perfectly all right. They were only a test batch.”
“Still. I am sorry.”
“Well … thank you.” She gave him a brief nod, fully intending to calmly walk past him, and then somehow, mortifyingly, could not seem to convince her feet to move.
“Well,” he said. “I shall … see you. Downstairs. Later. Presumably.”
“Yes,” she said. “Presumably.”
She stepped past him—thank you, feet—and did not look back. She descended the stairs, which had the decency not to produce their extra step this time, crossed the kitchen, and came to a stop near the worktable.
Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her fingertips.
Kazrian was here. He wasactually here. In this building. And he was going to be hereevery day, working in her kitchen, fixing the very infrastructure she depended on for her craft, and she was going to have to stand beside him and speak to him and exist in the same room as him.
She could manage this. She had managed far more difficult things. She was, in fact, excellent at managing things.
She looked across the kitchen.
Balthazar was standing upright on the counter, his fur settled, his ears pricked sharply forward, and there was a question burning behind those too-intelligent eyes.
Lucie exhaled. She shut her eyes.
“Yes,” she whispered. “He is the gentleman I told you of.”
She opened her eyes, took another breath, and pressed both palms flat against her midriff. “This is fine. This is fine.” She nodded to herself. “This isfine.”
Then she backed up until her spine met the closed pantry door behind her. She tilted her head back against the wood, shut her eyes, and groaned.
Chapter Four
Kazrian steppedinto his grandmother’s study, shut the door behind him, leaned back against it, and groaned.
Lucie worked here.
She workedhere. Not in some other kitchen, in some other town, with some other man’s name. (Of course he’d look at her left hand the moment he’d recovered enough to tear his gaze from her warm hazel eyes; no wedding ring.) And now Kazrian was going to have to inhabit the same space as the one person in all the United Fae Isles he had crossed into another realm specifically to avoid.
He pushed off the door and began pacing, seeing nothing of the small space around him. The room could have been on fire and he would likely have walked a circuit through the flames without noticing, because his mind was entirely occupied with the image ofher.
Good stars, was it possible she had grown even more beautiful in the time that had passed? She was?—
No. Not helpful.
He would not think about the exact shade of warmth the morning sunlight had cast across her brown skin, or the endearing way her hair had been half escaping whatever she had done to pin it back, or the fact that he knew how soft the curve of her cheek felt beneath histhumb?—
Not! Helpful!
He stopped in the center of the room, pressed both hands over his face, and groaned again. This was absurd. He was behaving as though the sky had cracked open and the stars had rearranged themselves, when in fact nothing whatsoever had changed.
He lowered his hands, and his fingers found his father’s pocket watch without thought—drew it from his waistcoat pocket, clicked it open, clicked it shut, clicked it open again. The steady motion helped. It always did. It kept his hands occupied while his mind ran through a problem, turning it over the way he turned the watch, searching for the place where it would yield.
The facts, then. He would deal in facts, because facts were reliable and feelings were not.
Fact: Lucie worked here, and she had built something here, and whatever she had created in this kitchen was important to her and to his grandmother.
Fact: Kazrian had been engaged to repair the building’s magical infrastructure, and he could not do that while hiding in this upstairs study.
