Flowers wound up the side of the cake, the blooming vine of a fairy tale.
He studied the effect with distaste.
A tap of the leftmost flower, and the petals changed color from an iridescent pink to a deep, brooding blood purple, almost black in tone. He swept his hand in front of the cake. One after another, the edges of the peony poppies bled, the dark color leaching over the celestial pink. Still fairy tale, but with the inevitable malevolent element.
Better.
Also better suited to a dungeon or coffin than a reception table, but from the impression he got of the bride, the Tim Burton vibe was strongly in her wheelhouse.
With a stylus pen, he touched the dark petals with the faintest dusting of gold.
“Roses would have been the obvious choice,” Liam Boateng commented. Dominic’s friend and sous-chef stood at his side, arms folded, studying the screen.
Frowning, Dominic spun the projected image around on the tablet, tilting the angle to better see the intricate lacework on the upper tier, draped in smooth folds around both the royal and Marchmont family crests. He pulled a cluster of the poppies and moved them to the base layer, so the cake appeared to be rising from a frothing profusion of flowers.
“Most other tenders will work with that cliché.” He stepped back to cast another critical eye over the design. “And Daciano will ignore the flower brief completely; he’s an anthophobic. Won’t have so much as a petal in his salon.”
“He’s also totally overrated and increasingly unreliable.”
Dominic made another crisp adjustment and a short sound of agreement. “The embargo on this contract will be ironclad. One drink at his local and he’d be shooting his mouth off about every last detail. He failed as credible competition before Marchmont even popped the question.”
Liam scoffed. “Please. Like there’s any credible competition.”
Dominic shot him a warning glance. “Confidence is warranted. Certainty is not. We’ve lost contracts before. We’ve lost contracts across the road before.”
Which was still irritating.
His eyes went briefly to the silhouette portrait he’d tucked into the edge of a photo frame on the desk, to keep Pet’s work intact. The outline of Sylvie’s face seemed to change in mood daily. Right now, he could almost hear her laughter.
“Noted.” Liam plucked a peony poppy of the non-digital variety from a vase. “Are we sure these are the groom’s favorite flower?” He was obviously skeptical. “Do men even have a favorite flower?”
“Ooh.” The exclamation came from the doorway. Pet was leaning against the frame, fanning her face. “What was that I just walked into? A sudden puff of toxic masculinity? How doubly disappointing from the blokes who can turn all that gorgeous lace and pearls into three-dimensional, edible reality.” She joined them at the table, eyeing both the smaller image on the tablet and the life-sized version on the adjacent projector screen. “And since you ask so obnoxiously, only person who still owes me a tenner for the staff lunch”—she held out her hand, and Liam immediately reached for his wallet—“yes, we are sure.”
She pocketed the ten-pound note he gave her and tapped the side of her nose. “I have my sources,” she added in a spot-on James Bond voice, Connery-style. “And amongst my vast wealth of knowledge—believe me, I know what men like.”
One wink at Liam and the usually levelheaded sous-chef shuffled his feet and coughed several times.
Dominic sent the final images to the printer. It would be faster and easier to submit digitally, but apparently a royal wedding was smothered in enough secrecy and paranoia to stymie a Bletchley Park operative. The staff at St. Giles Palace had requested everything in hard copy, delivered by a private courier. At this point, he was surprised the instructions hadn’t included a self-destructing scroll and an invisibility cloak. “If you wouldn’t mind horrifying me on your own time, did you finalize the paperwork for the new apprenticeship?”
“Yes, boss.” Pet sketched an absentminded salute. She was reading through the assembled proposal on the table, with blithe disregard for the CONFIDENTIAL markings stamped across the heading. She frowned. “You’re going with fruitcake?”
Heavy, unmistakeable undertone of ew.
Dominic slotted the latest printouts into the folder. “Thanks for the heads-up on the flower selection, but we’re dealing with the royal household. There’s still a hefty amount of protocol, and even if the bride and groom look like they’ve respectively stepped out of The Nightmare Before Christmas and an Archie comic, the royal tradition is—”
“The brandy-soaked, raisin-spotted, intestine-clogging brick known as fruitcake,” Pet interrupted. “Will look and taste the same whether it was made yesterday or two decades ago. And at no time during its lengthy existence will anyone want to eat it. I’ve told you, the bride likes chocolate cake. Specifically and vitally, she apparently likes your Death by Chocolate fudge cake. Very little about this couple conforms to royal standards, which is half the reason the bookies are already taking revolting odds on how long the marriage will last, or if they’ll actually make it to the altar. Rose is infamously a strong personality and a massive pain in her family’s arse. I guarantee that however far she has to bend to tradition, she’ll wrangle final say over details like the inside of her cake. You should be pitching chocolate.”
Dominic waited for the rolling stream of words to come to an end. “Again, I appreciate your contribution to the proposal, Pet, but—”
“But your judgment is infallible, right?” The words were low. “No regrets, no mistakes for you.” Her lips momentarily pinched together, then she turned away.
Liam shot an uncomfortable glance from her departing back to Dominic’s taut expression. He drummed his fingers against the folder. “So . . . should we send samples of Death by Chocolate, as well, or . . . ?”
There was something cold and dark between Dominic’s ribs. With each passing day of his sister’s presence here, it sliced deeper. “Get the proposal sealed and delivered, please. And take the samples of the fruitcake.”
“And—”
“You’ve had the instructions. Do your job.”
In deliberate mimicry of Pet, Liam snapped him a salute. His manner was ironic, and his eyes were a little too knowing.
Sugar Fair
Favored establishment of Instagram.
As expected, not invited to submit a tender for the royal wedding cake.
Doing it anyway.
Beneath an encompassing, unflattering net, Sylvie’s hair was plastered stickily to her head. To her left, Mabel stood at an oiled marble slab, constantly pulling and stretching a molten sugar mass with her bare hands. The bulging muscles in her otherwise thin arms shifted with the rhythm of her movements, but she never paused. Most of the staff disliked blowing and sculpting sugar, for reasons of both tedium and pain. Mabel was in her element. Humming the Beach Boys of all things, she tested a satiny, pliable piece of the mass between her fingers. It was a finicky, often frustrating process for the uncertain or unskilled—one pull too many, an alteration too far in temperature, and a perfectly workable sculpting medium became a rock-hard, crystallized mess in the bin.