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When she opened them, they shone. “This is a terrible and brilliant idea,” she whispered. Her mouth trembled into a smile. “Yes,” she said. “I will marry you.”

Relief hit him so hard, he laughed, half-choked. He caught her hand, pressed his mouth to the knuckles, then rose and did what he had ached to do from the moment he stepped into the room.

He kissed her.

It wasn’t the frantic, stolen heat of corridors and beaches. It was deeper—steady, sure, full of everything they had walked through to reach this point. Her hands slid up to his shoulders; his arms folded around her, careful of silk and utterly indifferent to anything else.

Just Pepper and Chester and the recipe Papa had promised all along: one person who could cherish it, and the other who had finally learned how.

Chapter 33

If anyone had told Chester Wyndale that a wedding breakfast could save his reputation, he would have laughed them out of the room.

And yet there they all were, in his mother’s glittering London dining room, and the only thing anyone seemed to care about was the pastry.

Three long tables groaned under the weight of it: towers of croquembouche glinting with spun sugar, gleaming tartes au citron, glossy chocolate glazes, baskets of still-warm brioches that sent up a scent like memory and comfort. Papa—Monsieur Duval—had outdone himself. Henry prowled behind the displays like a general protecting his troops.

Lady Erica’s fifty important families were there. Two nobles from Scotland. An alarming fraction of the House of Lords. Dr. Fernando with his brisk little wife, who really did have the air of a Transylvanian princess. Even the Dowager, that seasoned campaigner, had gone glassy-eyed at the sight of the éclairs.

And no one—no one—seemed to be whispering “baker’s daughter” behind their napkins. They were too busy chewing.

Perhaps the gossip sheets would make something of it tomorrow. The Flour Duke marries the pâtissier’s girl. He found he couldn’t make himself care. If they did, he could always buy the house he’d been eyeing on the Brighton shore and take Pepper and the girls and as many ovens as they pleased to a life with more sea air and fewer opinions.

He glanced down the table.

Pepper sat between her parents. Monsieur Duval had never looked more proud; Lady Erica never more luminous. Their hands brushed when they reached for the same plate of petits fours and, to Chester’s quiet delight, did not snatch away again.

Pepper laughed at something Aunt Florence said, head tipping back, that wild, bright joy alive in her eyes. The sea-green silk of her gown had been cut into its best version today, softer and grander all at once. The pearl bracelet gleamed at her wrist. She looked like exactly what she was: a duchess and a baker’s daughter, whole and unapologetic.

His wife.

A hot, ridiculous rush of gratitude flooded him. Two months of preparations, of fittings and lists and his mother’s alarms about seating charts, and he still hadn’t quite believed this day would arrive.

It was not that there had been no scandal. There had been buckets of it, poured over their heads in ink.

For a fortnight the London papers had treated him as if he were a new kind of curiosity. The Morning Chronicle had gone first with: DUKE OF WYNDALE TO MARRY HARLEY STREET BAKER’S DAUGHTER—FLOUR DUKE TAKES FLOUR GIRL? The society sheets had followed: CUSTARD OVER CIRCULARS: HAS WYNDALE GONE SOFT?; LADY WITH A LIMP WINS FLOUR KING’S HEART; HARLEY STREET HEROINE TURNS BOARDROOM TYRANT SWEET.

Some of it had been vicious—sniffs about her ankle, her birth, her father’s shop. Some of it had been almost embarrassingly admiring. The prince’s steward had allowed himself to be quoted about “a dessert that may be relied upon,” and suddenly the same people who had muttered about a baker’s blood were sending discreet footmen to secure recipes. Darley had fumed, the Dowager had taken to fainting couches in a way that suggested performance as much as distress, and yet the tide had turned in spite of them.

He wanted her.

Not furtively in corridors. Not half-dressed on a beach. Not with his name caught half in her throat and half in her doubts.

He wanted to lay that name down between them, once and for all, and show her exactly what he meant when he had promised: I choose you, whole.

Pepper turned her head just then, as if she’d felt him looking. Their gazes met across the silver and candlelight. Something leapt in her eyes—a shared memory, a shared hunger. The corner of her mouth curled.

Chester’s grip tightened on his champagne flute.

Enough.

He waited until a new wave of attention crashed over the croquembouche—some argument about whether the sugar strands counted as architecture—and slipped from his chair.

It took a surprising amount of maneuvering to reach her. He answered what he must, smiled where he should, and finally found himself behind Pepper’s chair.

He bent, letting his hand rest lightly on the back of it, and lowered his mouth to her ear.

“I have something upstairs for you,” he murmured.