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“You surprised me, Lady Barbara,” he said after a beat. It felt safer to say Barbara than Pepper with half the ton at his back.

She drew a slow breath; lace fluttered at her neckline. “I’m not here to surprise anyone,” she said. “Except perhaps the Duke of Wyndale. The Flour Duke.” She said it as if the man in question must be somewhere across the room, safely distant; clearly no one had yet told her that the title belonged to the man standing at her elbow.

He went very still. “I beg your pardon?”

Her mouth firmed. “The Duke of Wyndale,” she repeated. “Your…peer? Surely you know him.” She kept her gaze on the room, not on him, which he appreciated more than he could say. “His mother is so proud of his charity. One hears of it constantly. It would be more impressive if he did not first sign bills that ruin people and then give them crusts to feel noble.”

“You speak rather strongly, Lady Barbara,” he said. Because you are speaking to him sat sharp and reckless on his tongue; he swallowed it.

“This is me speaking mildly,” she said. Her eyes travelled over the crowd as if she were looking for exits and finding only chandeliers. “He is the one who signed ‘coin at noon’ into policy. No more credit to small houses. Payment on the nail or nothing moves. Do you know what that does to shops that only see coin at delivery? To women who wait for bread that doesn’t come because some Board thought ledgers mattered more than people?”

Every word landed with a force he felt more than heard. He had written those words—the first five versions of them, at least. He had tried to soften; he had gone back to the Board with thirds and purses and noon payments; he had wrestled coin at noon for small bakeries since he became chair of the Board—but they hadn’t wavered on the first circular, and the ink at the bottom of it had still been his.

“And that is a matter very dear to your heart,” he said, because anything else might have been an apology and he did not yet know if he was allowed to make one.

Her jaw tightened. “Obviously.”

He wanted to ask why it was obvious since he knew she was Pepper now. But how much does she know about him? Plainly not the most important thing of all—that Chester Stockton and the Duke of Wyndale were one and the same.

“The Dowager Duchess is his mother,” she went on, voice lower now, for him alone. “She is so proud of his good works. If he did not destroy small businesses, they would not need his charity.”

He caught his lower lip briefly between his teeth to stop something imprudent from escaping. She was feisty. Fiery. Furious—with him. And she had no idea… that the man she was flaying so neatly was the one holding his tongue beside her.

“The Duke of Wyndale,” he said carefully, as if speaking of a stranger, “might say he meant to keep grain steady. To stop men at the docks from playing games with prices.”

“He should come to a bakery on Harley Street and watch what his steadiness does,” she retorted.

He had. He had stood in that very shop and watched her weigh out paper and sugar as if the day depended on it—which, in fact, it had. “I mean,” he corrected himself, “Wyndale ought to see for himself, as I have done.”

She turned her head then, properly looking at him. He had never been examined quite that way by any debutante—measured, suspicious, as though she were tasting a sauce and not yet prepared to approve.

“If you mean The Pâtisserie de La Loire,” she said, “you should know he nearly lost his flour on account of that very circular.”

“I have heard a rumor to that effect,” he murmured.

She let out a breath that might have been a laugh in a kinder world. “A rumor. Of course. The poor always appear in the rich’s stories as rumors.”

It was too much, and not enough, and he was so absurdly glad to be standing beside her and not across a committee table that he nearly forgot himself entirely.

“So how was it possible, Lady Barbara,” he asked lightly, “that you sold me—”

“Shh!” Her hand flew out and pressed against his forearm, warm through the cloth. The contact jolted through him with embarrassing efficiency. “Not here.”

He blinked. “Not…here?”

She glanced around. A group of matrons conferred over shawls by the hearth; two officers argued about cards near the door. No one was paying particular attention to the sideboard at that moment.

She trailed her fingertips along the wall, her boots placing each step with that measured care he already knew, and led him toward the wide doorway into the smaller room beyond. They stopped just inside the frame—visible, technically, to the room, and yet half-sheltered by the angle of the wall and a potted palm that had seen better days.

“Now,” she said under her breath. “Here.”

He had followed without question. He would have followed her into the kitchens, into the street, into the sea. The realization struck as he came to a halt beside her: he had left a table full of politics for the chance to stand in a doorway pinned between a plant and a woman who scolded his pastry as much as his policy. And he was pleased about it.

“‘Sold me’?” she repeated, eyes flashing up to his. “Nobody here must know about my role at the bakery. Not my mother. Not anyone.”

“I am here,” Chester said quietly. “I know.” And yet he still wasn’t entirely sure how all the pieces of her life fit together.

She shot him a look that ought to have pushed him back and instead made him lean a fraction closer, in spite of himself.