Instead, she was wearing an apron smeared with butter, almost certainly had sugar in her hair, and had possibly forgotten how to breathe.
And he was … well. His eyes might have been exactly as she remembered, but the rest of him certainly was not. He had always been tall, but the lanky, unfinished quality of the boy she remembered—all sharp angles and limbs he hadn’t quite learned the purpose of—was gone. His shoulders filled his coat in a way they hadn’t before. His jaw was firmer, his face leaner, the softness of youth replaced by something that was?—
“I mean—Lord—” She caught herself, stumbled, started again. “Lord Rowanwood.”
The title felt strange in her mouth. He had not been Lord Rowanwood when she’d known him. He had been Kazrian. Just Kazrian. A fae boy who had not yet manifested, who held no title, who drew shapes in Orrit’s scone flour with his finger, and who sat on the floor in the tea house’s pantry with her and said things like?—
Something flickered across his expression, but it was gone before she could read it. “Miss Fields,” he said, which sounded as strange to her ears as ‘Lord Rowanwood’ had. “I am—I must apologize. I did not know anyone would be—the door was unlocked, and—I did not realize—” He glanced down at the tray between them. “Oh no. Were those—I’ve completely—may I set this down somewhere? I am so terribly sorry, I?—”
“Oh!” Lucie followed his gaze and registered, belatedly, that the caramels she had spent all morning working on had all slid violently to one side on impact and were now pressed together against the tray’s rim. She also registered, far more significantly, that beside the signet ring on the little finger of Kazrian’s left hand, his fourth finger bore no fae marriage bond marking.
She blinked. The caramels. They were talking about the caramels.
“No, please, it’s—do not worry?—”
“Where would you like me to?—”
“It is perfectly fine, truly, it was only an experimental batch?—”
“This is entirely my fault?—”
They were both speaking at once, and the tray was still suspended between them because neither had thought to actually move.
“The worktable,” Lucie managed. “You can set it on the worktable.”
“Right. Yes. Of course.”
They turned together, realized they were both still holding the tray, and performed a brief, mortifying negotiation over who would let go first. Lucie released her side. Kazrian carried it to the worktable and set it down with the exaggerated care of someone handling an exploding charm, then stepped back and clasped his hands behind him as though to prevent them from causing further damage.
A silence followed. The kind of silence that should have been brief and natural and was instead enormous and deafening, filling every corner of the kitchen with the unmistakable awareness that neither of them had the faintest idea what to say next.
“I did not know you would be here,” Kazrian said at last. He said it to the worktable rather than to Lucie, which she was grateful for because the floor felt considerably more stable beneath her feet when he was not looking directly at her.
“Oh—yes,” she said brightly. Far too brightly. She dialed it back. “I work here.” Which was, she realized the moment it left her mouth, perfectly obvious to anyone with functioning eyesight, given that she was standing in a kitchen wearing an apron with at least three different ingredients smeared across it. She might as well have addedand the sky, you may be interested to learn, is blue.
“You work here?” Kazrian’s gaze came up, startled, then he winced, his hand rising to the back of his neck as a flush appeared in his cheeks. “Yes. Right. Of course you do. The apron, and the … the fact that you were carrying a …” He gestured vaguely at the baking tray. “Through the kitchen. Yes. That is … yes.”
“I was not aware you were here either,” Lucie said, which was true in a far larger sense than the immediate one. By ‘here’ she meant not merely The Honeycomb but the entirety of Bloomhaven.
He had left for the Shaded Lands with Aurelise almost three years ago, and Lucie had heard—from Lady Rivenna’s occasional comments, from fragments of conversation between Lady Iris and the other members of the Rowanwood family who so often stopped by the tea house—that he had manifested his magic soon after arriving. She had expected him to return the following Season for his formal presentation to society, and she had dreaded it with a quiet, bone-deep dread that she told no one about and managed with the same ruthless competence she applied to everything else in her life.
And then he simply … had not come back.
The story that had circulated—carried, inevitably, by the gossip birds and confirmed by the Rowanwoods themselves—was that the youngest Lord Rowanwood had met someone in the Shaded Lands. A promising attachment. No need for a presentation. No need for a return.
Lucie had had feelings about that. Large, complicated feelings that had made it difficult to breathe and had sent her home early with a headache the day she had found out. She had then carefully folded those feelings away and reminded herself sternly that this was exactly as it should be. This was what she had wanted for him.
But now two more years had passed and he was here again. In Bloomhaven. In her kitchen. And she was trying very hard not to think about the last real conversation they’d had, or thenight beforethe last real conversation they’d had, when he?—
“Well!” she said, with a brightness she suspected was not entirely convincing. “Welcome to The Honeycomb. I suspect you are looking for your grandmother?”
“Oh, no. She is still at the tea house. She shall be along shortly.” He brought his hands in front of him and clasped them together, then seemed to think better of it and moved them to his sides. “I merely wanted to take a look around.”
“Of course!” Lucie said.Excellent.A tour. A task. Something to occupy her hands and words so she did not have to stand here looking at him and trying not to notice the ways in which he was both exactly the same and entirely different. “Let me show you around.”
She turned and led him toward the far side of the kitchen, talking as she went. Talking was good. Talking was safe. If she was talking about ovens and shelving and the hearth sprites’ preferred temperature range, she could not possibly be thinking about the breadth of his shoulders or the way his voice had deepened since she had last heard it.
“The building was an apothecary before Lady Rivenna purchased it,” Lucie said, running her hand along the stone wall near the hearth as she passed. “The bones of it suited a confectionery surprisingly well. Lord Evryn installed the lumyrite lattice throughout the kitchen to allow me to channel magic into my confections. It runs through almost everything. The ovens, too, which rely entirely upon lumyrite to produce heat or flame and do not contain a traditional firebox within.”
