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I scowled. That had sounded more like the annoyed trainer than the concerned boyfriend. And you know, in my head, this whole moment had been a lot more romantic!
“I got up too late for breakfast, and lunch doesn’t count if you lose most of it.”
“You have to eat!”
I’d been in the process of pulling a blanket back up to my chin, but at that I stopped. “You have food?”
I checked him out. He was in one of those buttoned-up, three-piece suits they liked here—plain brown, but it fit like a glove, hugging broad shoulders and muscular thighs. Which I’d have appreciated more right now if he’d been holding a sandwich.
“I don’t have it on me!”
I pulled the blanket up again.
He pulled it down. “But I know a place; if you don’t want to eat here, that is. They’re serving dinner in a few moments; I was sent up to fetch you.”
I made a face. Dining with a table full of people I’d just killed, and who thought I’d done it by cheating my ass off. Sounded like fun. My stomach grumbled.
I didn’t want to move, but I didn’t want him to leave, either. Besides, anything he brought back through this weather would be stone-cold by the time it got here. “Is the food good?” I asked suspiciously.
“Best in the city.”
My mouth started to water.
“And you haven’t even heard what’s for dessert.”
Chapter Forty-nine
Dessert better be pretty damned epic, I thought grimly, after getting dressed and slogging through slushy, snow-filled streets. To be fair, the buildings blocked most of the wind, but every so often a cross breeze, which was more like a cross gale, would hit and I honestly thought I might turn to ice. Which would have been fine, except we weren’t on our way to a cozy restaurant with a roaring fire, where I might have been able to thaw out.
“A pharmacy?” I said, not bothering to keep the disbelief out of my voice.
“Pharmacies had lunch counters in the US not so long ago,” Pritkin informed me as we hurried down a darkened alley. “And Rothgay’s is known for its food.”
My stomach grumbled unhappily. It did not seem impressed by this knowledge. It wanted steak, not some dime-store sandwich. Or roast beef—didn’t the Brits do good roast beef? Or fish and chips or Irish stew or meat pies—God, I could really go for a meat pie right now! Or anything served in an old-world pub with leather booths and pints filled with frothy beer that was almost like a meal itself.
My stomach grumbled again, louder this time.
“It was a holdover from the Middle Ages,” Pritkin continued. “When apothecaries sold candy and cakes—”
Wish modern docs prescribed those, I thought enviously.
“—due to being the main source for sugar and spices, many of which were also used in medicines.”
“That’s great, but—”
“In fact, apothecaries were originally part of the Company of Grocers, which itself belonged to the Guild of Pepperers, and sold wine as well as sweets. But in the early seventeenth century, they broke away and established the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, which still exists today.”
I narrowed my eyes. I was starting to suspect that I was being teased. “Pritkin—”
“However, in the magical community, the association between food and medicine—or potions—has remained strong.”
I was about to put my foot down—damn it, I was starving—when he threw open a door at the end of the alley, and—
“Oh!” I just stood there for a moment, staring. You know that scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy goes from a black-and-white farmhouse t
o Technicolor Munchkinland? It was like that. Only with food.
I stepped through the door into a world of bright marble and gleaming countertops and bustling, happy shoppers and a rotating centerpiece sculpture three stories high that seemed to be made out of candy, not to mention case after glass-fronted case full of—
