The window displays: perfect, thank the stars. Lady Rivenna had approved the arrangement Lucie and Georgiana had created, and Lucie checked each morning for any confection that needed replacing with a fresh version. She would see to that shortly, once she had worked through the rest of the list.
Batches completed and stored: the honeycomb brittle, the glazed petit fours, the elderflower champagne jellies, five varieties of chocolate truffle, and three dozen sugar flowers in various pastel shades.
Batches still to be made today: chocolate truffles filled with honeycomb cream, more florentines, and the ginger and dark honey biscuits. Then there was honey light to capture this afternoon—Golden Hour, which required late afternoon sun and had to be done today because she needed it for the cherry blossom petit fours she was finishing tonight, and she had only discovered the night before thatGolden Hourwas almost finished.
Lucie worked through the morning. She mixed the ginger biscuit dough, set it to chill, prepared the honeycomb cream, which also needed time to cool, and began on the florentines. She could hear Georgiana’s voice drifting from the front, the warmth of it as she greeted someone, and the low chime of the door enchantment.
She had just finished dipping the florentines in dark chocolate and turned back to the worktable to begin tidying the scatter of ingredients and utensils from her morning’s work when the back door opened.
Henry.
He was smiling and carrying an umbrella, which struck her as odd, given that the morning was a blaze of sunshine.
“Good morning.” He held up the umbrella. “Georgiana forgot this, and I think it shall rain later.”
Lucie glanced at the window. The sky was a clear, uninterrupted blue. “It looks rather fine to me.”
“The clouds on the horizon. You cannot see them from here, but they are gathering, trust me. By mid-afternoon we shall have rain, and a good deal of it. I have always had an eye for weather.” He moved further into the kitchen. “Georgiana never believes me, and then she ends up running home through the rain.”
“How fortunate she has you to remind her, then,” Lucie said, and took the spices she’d used for the ginger biscuits back to their shelf.
She turned back to find Henry setting the umbrella against the leg of the worktable. “I won’t keep you,” he said, leaning one hip against the edge of the table in the way that suggested he intended to do precisely that. “I can see you are busy.”
“I am rather.” Lucie gathered an armful of jars and carried them toward the pantry. “With the Season beginning tomorrow and everyone flooding into town, we expect?—”
“I wanted to ask you something.”
She set the jars on the pantry shelf and came back for the next armful. “Oh?”
“The Primrose Assembly concert. I know you said no before, but I thought perhaps now, with the preparations nearly finished, you might reconsider.”
She almost laughed. Preparations nearly finished? He could not be serious. “Henry, I truly cannot. I am even busier now than?—”
“You are always busy.” The smile stayed, but something beneath it shifted. “You never have time for me anymore. You and that Lord Rowanwood are always flitting about this kitchen together, and I really think it would do you a world of good to get away from?—”
“Flitting?” The word stopped her mid-stride. She turned to look at him, a wooden tub of flour in her hands. “You mean that I am running a kitchen and he is trying to stop the building from destroying itself before we have even opened?”
Henry blinked. The smile faltered, then reassembled itself. He took a step closer. “Lucie. You should sit down. You are working yourself into a state, and it does not become you.”
“I am perfectly well. I simply need to get past you.”
She stepped toward the pantry. Henry moved. Not much. A half step, easy and unhurried, just enough to put himself between her and the pantry door. “Where are you rushing off to? You have not stood still one minute since I came in.”
“To the pantry.” She smiled, because he was smiling, because this was a game and the rules of it required her to smile. “Henry, I have things to put away.”
“The things will keep.” He spread his hands, the picture of reason. “Oneminute. Talk to me for one minute. The pantry is not going anywhere, and neither am I.”
She laughed. It was automatic, the bright social sound her body made without consulting her, the one that smoothed things over. She had been trained not to make a scene, to never be the one who turned a pleasant morning into something it need not be, and she did it with barely a thought.
She stepped to the side to go around him.
He shifted again.
“Henry.” Her voice was not quite steady now, the smile slipping at the edges. “Let me past. Please.”
“Not until you sit down,” he said, “and give me a minute of your time.” His hand came up toward her arm. “And then I may consider?—”
The back door opened, and Lady Rivenna swept into the kitchen. She took in the kitchen in a single sweep—Lucie with the flour tub, her back to the table; Henry a half step too close, his hand an inch from her upper arm—and her expression did not flicker by even a hair’s breadth.
