And Sylvie put a shit-ton of glitter in his hair.
In her defense, when she’d practiced the robotic component of her unicorn cake in the garden shed at home, the results had been significantly less impressive. The treasure chest was to burst open in stages, spilling out hundreds of colored sweets before it set off a chain reaction to move the unicorn’s hoof and horn. She’d made dead certain that everything would taste as good as it looked. Dominic had commented before that her foundations were sometimes sacrificed for the exterior glitz. He wasn’t wrong, and she did listen to legitimate criticism.
Levers in right place? Aww. Look, he’s waving at you. Wrong place? I appear to have constructed this small missile.
“Fantastic,” Jim Durham said, bending to examine the chest as it sprang apart on cue and the sweets cascaded forth. One of his knees gave an alarming little creak, thus providing an unintentional soundtrack for her hinges. Sylvie remembered watching Jim’s old cooking show on TV as a child. She and her aunt had taken turns each week making the Friday recipe for dinner. He was in his seventies now and on the list for a double knee replacement, he’d told her. Popping a sweet in his mouth, he winked at her. “I’d expect nothing less from our resident witch. What other magic do you have in store for us?”
He was such a nice man. Always kind and supportive. Smelled a bit like port.
She smiled back at him. “Only the good kind. Promise.”
“You couldn’t have worked any harder today,” Mariana praised her, also circling the display and reaching to toss a sweet onto her tongue.
Dominic surveyed the spectacle from a short distance. His wide chest moved with a silent heave of breath. “Unicorns now.”
He sounded like a fed-up character in Jumanji, forced to endure one of her ghastly trials after another.
The arrogant dude whinging in the back never fared well in a film.
Sylvie opened her mouth to respond—and became aware of a low clicking sound that she’d initially thought was Jim’s knees again. Even as it registered properly, the rhythm of the mechanism stuttered. That wasn’t right. The second apparatus should have flicked over by now, setting the unicorn in motion.
She leaned forward to check the control box, and—shit. “Duck!”
“Oh, a duck.” Jim took a few steps back. “Is it. I must admit, I did think it was a unicorn, too.” He looked slightly doubtfully at the long horn. “His bill—?”
“Duck!”
“Yes, indeed. Duck. Clear as a bell,” Jim said soothingly. “If the creator says it is so, then so it shall be.” He reached to pat her shoulder.
Dominic’s eyes suddenly narrowed on the control box.
Sylvie grabbed Mariana and hauled her back.
The mechanism came crashing down, catapulting the unicorn off the table and throwing up a cloud of glitter.
Contestants screamed. Mariana swore like a sailor. Jim’s knees sounded like chattering teeth. The cameras tracked every movement.
And a large edible hoof nailed Dominic right between the eyes.
The rest of the unicorn continued to smile jauntily as its head sailed past, one eye lowered in the wink of a creature that hadn’t quite grasped the gravity of its situation, until it splattered against the fridge.
The cakes were still delicious, Sylvie’s fellow contestants assured her as they rescued chunks of chocolate sponge from the scene of the massacre, and the producers were beside themselves with glee, imagining this week’s teaser shots.
Glitter twinkled in the stubble that edged Dominic’s chiseled jawline.
Hoof remnants smudged his forehead.
He was ominously still as they stood, staring at one another. Only his chest moved with his even breaths.
Without breaking eye contact, he swept one hand through that lush head of thick silvery black hair, and a massive cloud of sparkling particles swirled through the air, as if he’d thrown a handful of stars.
She was eliminated from the show twenty minutes later.
For weeks afterward, she continued to find random pieces of glitter on her clothing, in her pockets, behind her ears—and every time it glimmered in the light, she heard a deep, scathing voice.
Cheap tricks and glitter might get you a gig pulling rabbits out of hats at kiddie parties, but they won’t make you a baker.
And every time, the response that came from deep inside her was the same.
Plus or minus a few expletives, depending on her mood.
Watch me.
Chapter Two
Present Day
Sugar Fair, Notting Hill
Proprietor and Head Chef: Sylvie Fairchild
“You’re an entertainer at best. Not a baker.”
—Dominic De Vere, maker of cakes, eater of crow
Royal Wedding Belle? Sylvie’s gaze traveled from the Metropolitan News’s front-page headline to the inset photograph of Princess Rose. Currently fourth in line to the throne, but likely to be bumped down the queue if her bachelor uncle, the Prince of Wales, or her older brother ever reproduced. The princess was smiling up at a tall blond man. With narrowed eyes, Sylvie scanned the text below, but it was the usual recycled speculation, nothing new since the same engagement rumors last month.
And then, driven by some latent masochistic impulse, she couldn’t help flipping through to the arts and lifestyle section to see the article currently being discussed by her staff. Dominic’s name immediately jumped out at her—and how lovely, they’d printed a photo of him as well, as if his face plastered all over the ads for the upcoming season of Operation Cake weren’t enough.
The personality was nothing to brag about, so she supposed they had to milk the bone structure.
It was a lengthy piece about icons of the London food industry. Most of the featured businesses were Michelin-starred restaurants well out of her dinner budget, but they had interviewed a couple of confectioners and pâtissiers, including Dominic—who’d had a number of things to say when the journalist had asked about the balance between modern marketing and maintaining artistic integrity.
Cue a bunch of pithy quotes about the reliance of certain bakers on gimmicks and social media algorithms over skill and substance.
It would be pretty unsanitary if her eyeballs actually rolled right out of her head in a commercial kitchen, so it was fortunate that her newest intern called out for help with decorating a tray of truffles. She had learned from experience that it was best to heed those requests quickly. Penny tended to panic at every mishap and turn tiny mistakes into messes that had to be scrapped entirely.
Sylvie was pressing sugar stars into white chocolate truffles when she caught sight of movement through the window onto the main shop floor. With a tickle of welcome amusement, she watched as a dapper little chap in Thomas the Tank Engine overalls sidled another few steps away from his mother. The young woman was engrossed in a display of wrapped fruitcakes, weighing each one in her hands and trying to sniff them through the packaging. Her daughters were transfixed by the chocolate waterfall, staring with wide eyes as it flowed between twinkling tree branches in the center of the room, but her son had his sights fixed firmly on the enchanted castle. He darted a glance between his mum and his target, visibly weighing up his chances. Give him twenty-odd years, and he was a shoo-in for covert ops at MI5.
The Castle—because anything that had taken that long to make deserved to be capitalized—had begun life as a small sugar tower, part of Sylvie’s ongoing attempts to exactly replicate the appearance of glass art—pâte de verre—in edible form. From the bricks to the turret, the tower appeared to be constructed out of highly textural, glistening ice crystals, as if a fairy-tale witch had cast a spell of perpetual winter. She’d then got a little carried away. For weeks, she’d spent every free evening hunched over in the back room, after full twelve-hour days in the kitchens and storefront. She’d ended up with a record number of blowtorch burns on her hands and wrists, a withered sex life, and a bloody epic five-foot-tall castle. Totally edible from moat to uppermost flying flag.