“You will be a very sensual duchess,” he said, thinking if she wriggled on his lap much more, he might disgrace himself.
“I am already a sensual chocolatier,” Amity reminded him. “Speaking of which, I brought you an engagement present. It cannot match the magnificence of this,” she pointed out, holding up her left hand where a large emerald twinkled in its setting of diamonds and gold, “but I think you will enjoy it.”
“Is it chocolate?” he asked, as she climbed off his lap.
“Naturally.”
He had, in fact, noticed a tin upon the sideboard when he’d arrived hours earlier for dinner. She fetched it and sat beside him on the couch, her face looking wistful.
“I cannot believe this will no longer be my home. What if I get lost in the many rooms of your house at St. James Place?”
He chuckled. “Our house, and Mother says you may decorate as you wish. She has secured a smaller townhouse two streets away.”
Amity froze and blinked at him. “Oh dear! I hate to be the cause of her moving out. You know she is welcome to stay with us forever.”
He shrugged. “It is the way of things. I already told her you would feel that way, but she is content. More than that. I believe she’s looking forward to setting up a new home that doesn’t have the ghost of my father lingering about.”
“Understandable,” his sensible fiancée said. Then she turned to face him, tucking her legs up under her on the sofa in a most comfortable way, and presented him with the tin. “Open it, Your Grace.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Yes, my lord duke.”
He couldn’t help laughing as he opened the tin. What he saw made his laughter stop, and all at once, his eyes teared up. After a moment, he managed to swallow the lump in his throat.
“You are an absolute sweetheart,” he whispered, lifting out a stag-shaped confection. Memories of his father flooded his mind, the best times when they were out hunting together or playing chess or talking about nothing important at all.
“Your mother was right,” he said, “about your talent for choosing exactly the right gift.”
He watched his bride’s eyes sparkle delightfully.
“Now taste,” she insisted softly.
Biting into the chocolate, he had to close his eyes as the sweet deliciousness burst upon his tongue, mirroring the new-found sweetness of his life.
“What do you taste?” Amity asked, sounding breathless.
He opened his eyes and looked into her glorious, brown gaze. “I taste love,” Henry said. “Pure and lasting love.”
THE END
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Sydney Jane Baily
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Please enjoy the following excerpt from Beatrice’s story, The Toffee Heiress, Rare Confectionery Book Two.
Excerpt from THE TOFFEE HEIRESS
Rare Confectionery Book Two
by SYDNEY JANE BAILY
London, 1878
The bell attached to the door of Rare Confectionery rang its pleasant tinkling sound alerting Beatrice Rare-Foure to a customer’s untimely entrance. Setting down her cup of tea with an indecorous clunk, she rose from the gaily painted, blue stool in the back room of her family’s shop. It wasn’t the first time she’d wished she could get away with turning the “open” sign over to declare they were “closed.”
Glancing down at herself, she hesitated. A few treacle stains from her earlier toffee-making endeavors graced the front of her cream-colored day dress.
“Hm,” she murmured. She’d neglected to put on an apron before starting her work hours earlier. Her mother, Felicity Rare-Foure, would say that was her first mistake. As Beatrice was the only one of her family working at that moment, she ought to have been in the front of the shop after setting the last tray of treacle toffee to harden in the cold box. Her mother would point out that was her second mistake.
Moreover, she should not have been relaxing in the back, sipping tea while reading an article about the Egyptian obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, which had recently arrived on British soil. By year’s end, the 69-foot monolith of red granite would be raised to stand on the Victoria Embankment. Many thought its placement to be in defiance of good taste, and Beatrice was eagerly reading how the feud over the location raged on. If her mother knew she’d been reading instead of minding the shop, Felicity would be raging on, too.
The middle Rare-Foure sister was perfectly aware how unwelcoming it was when a customer entered a place of business and found it deserted. And Beatrice agreed in principle, but she had never quite mustered the dedication to such a belief to care one way or the other, or to alter her practices when alone.
Besides, Beatrice would rather face her mother’s fury than stand behind the marble counter of Rare Confectionery all day, waiting upon tenterhooks for the next sweet-seeking clodhopper. Although everyone agreed she had a talent, if one could call it that, for making delectable treacle toffee, not a soul considered her affable when dealing with the public.
Her younger sister, Charlotte, was the best with customers but was out with a bad case of the sniffles. No one wanted a shopgirl with a runny nose serving them their confections.
“Hello!” she heard a man’s voice call from the front. “Salutations and all that. Is there anyone here?”
Snatching up an apron, Beatrice quickly pinned it in place over her stained dress and tied it around her waist. Then she pushed through the thick velvet curtain to the front of the shop and saw two large hands, not gloved, plastered against the front of one of their display cases, and the bowed sandy-haired head of a man, looking down at the confections.
What kind of boor leaned against glass? She would definitely have to clean it again.
“May I help you?” she asked, not particularly caring if she sounded friendly, despite Charlotte having told her how a smile and a little chatting often made the customers keep adding to their confectionery order.
The head raised, the whole body straightened, and a tall man looked at her over the top of the case with blue-gray eyes.
“I didn’t see you there a moment ago,” he said, scrutinizing her like another one of the sweet treats.
“I wasn’t here a moment ago,” Beatrice snappily told him. “I am now. May I help you?”
Instead of taking offense at her answer, he smiled. “I hope you may indeed, ma’am. I would like some boiled sweets, I believe they’re called. Those hard, flavored candies everyone is sucking on these days. But I don’t see any at all.”
Perfect! She would be rid of him in an instant and back with her tea and her Egyptian obelisk.
“You don’t see any because we don’t carry them. Good day to you.”
His face registered surprise. “Isn’t this a candy shop?” He glanced around as if to make sure he wasn’t suddenly at the barber’s or in a candle shop. “I see those little boiled balls everywhere. Why don’t you carry them?”