Page 77

By the time His Royal Highness pronounced the first custard “intriguing,” Chester had lost all feeling in his smile. The Pavilion glittered around him—cut crystal, polished marble, the hum of titled voices congratulating themselves on having discovered something new. Wyndale was being very much admired.

Chester wanted to be anywhere else.

He let his gaze drift past the prince’s shoulder, past the Dowager’s pleased tilt of the head, to the far side of the room where the dessert tables stood in orderly ranks. There. A flash of sea-green silk, a familiar tilt of dark head—then, with a practiced sideways slip that would have done credit to any smuggler in Cornwall, she edged toward the door in the corner. The one painted to match the paneling. The one most of the guests would never notice.

Of course, she’d go that way. Back to heat and copper and safety. Back where no one was staring at her as though she were a curiosity on a plate.

He understood the impulse far too well. Chester also felt like a man wearing another fellow’s skin: the duke on display while the clerk crouched somewhere underneath, seemingly trying not to be seen.

She slipped through the service door and was gone.

Wyndale murmured something appropriate about flour consistency in answer to a question he barely heard. The prince laughed. The Dowager beamed. Reed, chose that moment to appear at his elbow with a reassuring nod—everything running to time, “Your Grace, the custards going out exactly as planned.”

“Excellent,” Chester said. “If you’ll excuse me—there is a matter I must settle before the tasting.”

He did not wait to see whether anyone believed him. The moment he was clear of the prince’s circle, he angled through the crowd, not quite hurrying, not quite strolling, heart thumping like an idiot. Reed gave him a sharp look, then a sharper little smile, and turned his attention conveniently elsewhere.

The painted door yielded to his hand. On the other side, the sound dropped at once: the roar of conversation muffled, replaced by the softer clatter of plates and the distant, comforting racket of a busy kitchen. The corridor was narrow, paneled in plain wood.

She was there, just past the threshold, one hand braced on the wall as though the quiet had winded her.

“Running away?” he asked softly.

She jumped, then turned. “I am…retreating strategically,” she said.

The corners of her mouth quirked, in spite of everything. “You ought not to be here,” she murmured. “This is the servants’ passage.”

“So it is.” He took a few steps closer. “And yet somehow we’re both in it.”

Neither of them belonged here—her in sea-green silk and pearls, him in a coat cut to impress princes—but they had both chosen this thin strip of space between worlds. Between guests and staff, between title and trade. Between Pepper and Lady Barbara for her, and between Chester and Wyndale for him.

“Chester,” she said, and the name went through him like a strong drink.

“Pepper,” he answered, because anything else would be a lie.

For a moment they only looked at one another, the closed door to the glittering world at his back, the door to the kitchen at hers. The air smelled faintly of sugar and starch and the ghost of vanilla. His heart beat a frantic, foolish rhythm against his ribs.

He could have stepped aside. Let her go past him, back to the safety of ovens and orders. He could have gone back through the painted door and pulled Wyndale on like a mask.

Instead he reached for the tray still dangling between them, set it on the little side table by the palm, and did the reckless thing.

“Tell me not to,” he said quietly.

She didn’t. Her eyes widened, dark and clear and so terribly brave. Her hand lifted of its own accord, fingers curling in his lapel.

They met in the middle.

The first touch was desperate and careful at once; he was suddenly, stupidly afraid of scaring her, of doing anything that might make her pull away. Her lips were soft and cooler than his, tasting faintly of sugar and something sharper underneath that might have been terror or hope. He kissed her as Chester, with none of Wyndale’s practiced charm—only a man who had been thinking of this since lemon tarts on a beach and a curtain and a whispered yes.

When she answered—when her mouth moved under his, when her fingers tightened to keep him there—the corridor, the Pavilion, the entire edifice of his life went silent.

The kiss stopped being a question and became a taking, a giving. He angled his head, tasting sugar and vanilla and the faint salt of nerves, learning the shape of her as carefully as he’d ever learned a new recipe. Her lips parted on a soft, startled sound that went straight through him; heat slid low and sharp, and he swallowed it, gentling the stroke of his mouth even as everything in him shouted more. His hand found the curve of her jaw, thumb brushing the soft place just beneath her ear, and she shivered into him as though he’d discovered some secret only he was allowed to touch.

“Chester,” she whispered into the narrow space between them, like the name were an endearment and not an alias. He had to answer it, had to say the only truth he owned. “Pepper.” Just that—no title, no invention—two foolish syllables that felt like a vow. For the breadth of a heartbeat, it seemed to him that this was the truest he had ever been to his own heart: not duke, not Board, not son, just a man kissing a woman in a stolen strip of corridor because he could not bear not to. They were risking discovery with every shared breath, with every brush of her skirts against his boots, and still he could not make himself let her go.

The world narrowed to a clumsy, glorious closeness. He fumbled for her waist and missed, fingers brushing briefly against the slick fall of silk before he caught her properly and drew her in. She fit against him like the space had been carved just for them—her palm flat against his chest, feeling the pounding of his heart; his hand spread low at her back, anchoring her, holding her as though he could keep all the rest of his life at bay.

Her hip bumped the little table, the palm leaves rustled against his shoulder, and she rose onto her toes, deepening the kiss, pulling him under with a boldness that stole what breath he had left. For this, some wild, foolish part of him thought. For her. For us. The painted door could fly open, the Dowager herself could stand gaping on the threshold, and he could not have stopped; with Pepper in his arms, he forgot the prince, the Board, the weight of Wyndale entirely. She made him feel not like a duke playing at goodness, but like the best version of himself he had ever managed to be. The word he had no business thinking—love—lodged, solid and absurd and utterly undeniable, in his chest. If only she could forgive the title he bore. If only the name she flinched from did not belong to the man who would gladly wager all of it on this one impossible, perfect, perilous kiss.