Her brother, on the other hand, was rather less reserved.
Henry Stratton visited the shop often. To see Georgiana, he said, which was true, but certainly not thewholetruth, because his attention, once he arrived, had a way of settling on Lucie and staying there. He was handsome and outgoing and generous with his compliments—about her confections and about how well she was doing for herself.
He had made his interest clear. More than once. And the thought of italways produced a kind of pleasant warmth inside Lucie. It was nice to be admired. Nice to have someone notice her and seek her out and make no secret of the fact that he found her worth paying attention to.
Even if it was nothing like what she had once felt for?—
Lucie tilted the bottle over the next caramel with very deliberate care. She did not think ofhimanymore. Well, not often, at least. No more than once a week. Certainly no more than that.
Fine. She thought of him every morning when she passed The Charmed Leaf on her way to The Honeycomb, but only briefly, and only because the place reminded her of him, and one could hardly be blamed for that. It was a passing thought. A flicker. Then it was gone, and she could turn her thoughts to Henry instead.
Henry who was human, successful, the kind of man her parents would approve of. The kind of match her sister Charlotte had made with Theo. Better, in fact, or so Henry would certainly say. His family had owned commercial property in Bloomhaven for years, and Henry had grown those holdings into something rather more impressive through his own efforts. Lucie doubted he would appreciate the comparison to Theo Turner at all.
She had set his attentions gently aside, not because she did not find them welcome, but because The Honeycomb was about to launch, and Lady Rivenna had staked her name and her resources on Lucie’s ability, and Lucie was not about to let herself be distracted by a courtship when there was so much still to be done. Even if the man in question was handsome and well-liked and quite possibly the most sensible match she could hope for.
She had been polite about it. She had been careful to leave the door open, because she did not want to offend him, and she did not want to close it entirely. Now was simply not the right time.
When she was done with the honey light, she stoppered the bottle and set it back on the shelf. Then she turned to survey the caramels. Balthazar rose from his patch of sunlight and padded along the counter, and Lucie took a step backward to stand beside him, both of them gazing across at the worktable in appraising silence. She glanced down at him. One ear tilted forward. The other remained where it was.
“You are not impressed,” Lucie observed.
Balthazar blinked slowly. The blink that meantI am reserving judgment, and you would do well to do the same.
“I think this is the one,” she said, regarding the caramels with a tilt of her head. “I think this is the batch.” She folded her arms across her chest. “Would you care to wager on?—”
A sharp, indignant squeak cut through the kitchen, followed by a blur of blue. Lucie sidestepped without looking, cupped both hands together at precisely the right height, and caught the kitchen pixie mid-flight.
There was a shelf on the other side of the kitchen that would not tolerate anything blue. One of the building’s many magical eccentricities, and far from the worst of them. The difficulty was that kitchen pixies were, unfortunately, blue-tinged, and this one in particular had a very short memory.
She sat up on Lucie’s palm, shook her head in a rapid blur that sent a scatter of faint sparks from her wings, and blinked twice with a dazed expression. She chattered something small and defiant, then launched herself from Lucie’s hands and fluttered off toward the high shelves near the ceiling, where her companion was watching from a safe perch.
“As I was saying,” Lucie continued, taking a step back toward Balthazar. “Would you care to wager?”
This was a game they had developed over months of recipe testing, and Balthazar took it seriously. He turned his head and surveyed the kitchen with a slow, considering sweep, then reached out with one paw and pushed a small plate toward the edge of the counter.
Lucie glanced down at it. A handful of blueberries, what remained of the ones she had brought with her that morning. She had been eating them between tasks, and Balthazar had been helping himself. There were perhaps seven left, rolling gently against one another on the plate from the force of his nudge.
“The blueberries.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “All of them?”
He held her gaze without so much as a flicker.
“Very well. Winner takes all. If I am right and this batch is perfect, the rest are mine. If you are right and it needs further adjustment—yours.”
He settled his chin onto his paws, which in Balthazar’s vocabulary of responses constituted acceptance of terms.
“Now we shall simply have to wait. Neither of us may claim victory until they have set.” The honey light required at least an hour to fully settle into the caramel, and the surface needed to firm before she could handle them.
Lucie took a breath and released it slowly, and in the small pause before the next task claimed her, she let her gaze travel the kitchen. The quick, habitual survey she made a dozen times a day.
The hearth was burning, several sprites asleep among the flames. The cooling cabinets hummed with their enchantment—steady today, thank goodness, not the erratic surging that had frozen an entire tray of chocolate ganache solid as river ice last week. The copper pots hung clean and gleaming from the overhead rack. The stone floors had been swept by the brownies before dawn.
Everything in order. Everything as it should be.
She crossed back to the worktable and studied the caramels, frowning slightly. They would need somewhere to set undisturbed, and the kitchen was rather warmer than she would have liked this morning. The hearth sprites had celebrated their Ember Night last evening, one of their small, fierce holidays that involved, as far as Lucie could tell, a great deal of dancing and an absolutely spectacular fire. And though the sprites themselves were now curled fast asleep among the remaining flames, the kitchen still carried the lingering warmth of their revelry.
There were the cooling cabinets, but Lucie did not currently trust those. Perhaps?—
A sharp chime rang through the kitchen. Lucie’s gaze snapped to the enchanted list pinned to the pantry door. The parchment had been placed there by Lady Rivenna, connected to the lumyrite lattice: a running tally of deliveries, tasks, and reminders that Lucie updated each evening and that chimed when something required her attention. Most of the entries were Lucie’s own, but Lady Rivenna occasionally added to them from a distance—and her latest addition had just bloomed into existence.
