“But look at what has changed since then. Iris was not welcomed warmly at first, being half fae, but she is now. She is as central to Bloomhaven as the tea house she runs. Once upon a time, you would not have found a human sitting at any of the tables of The Charmed Leaf. That has changed.” Charlotte looked at her steadily. “If they gave their blessing—if they stood beside Kazrian openly and dared anyone to say a word—people would fall into line. They would have to. No one crosses that family.”
“Some people, perhaps,” Lucie said. “But not on our side, Charlotte. That is the thing you keep stepping over. The Rowanwoods can weather anything. They sit so high that nothing thrown from below could ever reach them. But we do not sit high. We sit very low indeed, by comparison, and it is our side where the backlash would come, and it is our side that could not weather it. Mother and Father would suffer for it. So would every other person connected to us.”
Charlotte was quiet for a moment. Then she shrugged, one-shouldered and stubborn. “Perhaps not. Perhaps it would come out all right in the end.”
Lucie laughed despite herself. “Oh, Charlotte. You sound exactly as naively, hopelessly optimistic as Kazrian did three years ago.”
Charlotte looked at her sidelong. “And is he not still hopeful now?”
The question caught Lucie somewhere soft. Her gaze dropped to her hands again. “I am not sure. I think he loves me still, but I have made it clear to him that there is nothing between us now. The past is in the past.” She pressed her palms over her face, groaning softly. “And there is the launch.Tomorrow, Charlotte. I cannot think of anything else now.”
“Then don’t.” Charlotte reached over and gently pulled Lucie’s hands away from her face. “You focus on your launch. I shall do some investigating.”
Lucie’s eyes snapped wide. “Charlotte. Don’t you dare.”
“Merely inquiries! Very subtle ones! No one would suspect?—”
“There is nothing to investigate!”
“I will be extremely?—”
“Charlotte.” Lucie fixed her with the look that had worked approximately four times in their entire lives. “Promise me you will leave this alone.”
Charlotte held her gaze. Then she sighed—a magnificent, full-bodied, theatrical sigh—and settled back against the cushions. “All right,” she said. “I promise I will not … investigate.”
Lucie’s eyes narrowed. “That pause. What was that pause?”
“What pause?”
“The pause beforeinvestigate. You paused, Charlotte. You are leaving yourself room to maneuver.”
“I am doing no such thing.”
“You are. I can see it on your face.”
Charlotte looked at her with an expression of such profound innocence that it could only have been manufactured. “Lucie,” she said, placing a hand over her heart. “I would never.”
“You would always.”
They looked at each other. And then Charlotte’s composure cracked first, and a grin broke through so wide and warm that Lucie could not stop her own laughter from bubbling up and joining in.
Charlotte wrapped her arms around her and squeezed until Lucie’s ribs protested. “Not a single inquiry,” Charlotte murmured against her shoulder. “Not even a very small one.”
Lucie laughed and held on, feeling the last cold knot beneath her breastbone come gently, gratefully loose. She could do this. One more day. Tomorrow the doors would officially open and the confections would speak for themselves and The Honeycomb would become what Lucie had poured every scrap of herself into making it.
And after that, Kazrian would step back into his own world, Henry would fade into the distance where he belonged, and Lucie would set about the perfectly manageable task of forgetting that she had once been foolish enough to fall in love with a fae lord.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Iris had saidthe upstairs study, and so it was to the upstairs study that Kazrian went, taking the narrow stairs inside The Charmed Leaf Tea House two at a time, his theory sitting whole and terrible in his chest where it had been assembling itself since the previous afternoon.
He had spent yesterday—in the moments when he was not helping Lucie with chocolate bees or honeycomb pieces or an array of other tasks—chasing the thing he’d sensed as he’d fallen asleep on a storeroom floor. He had reached into the lattice again and again, quietly, the way one might run a thumb over a familiar seam, searching for thefeelof the thing that ought not to have been there.
Sometime in the afternoon, not long before Lucie had declared that they had done quite enough for one day and that she would be leaving shortly and he really did not need to wait for her, he had finally found it again.
And this time he knew immediately who it belonged to.
He had then spent the whole of last evening assembling the courage to confront the person whose magic had absolutely no business being present within the actual lumyrite in The Honeycomb’s walls.
