“No,” she said uncompromisingly. She shifted her weight sideways so she could pull a small pink ticket from her pocket. “But I appreciate a wise man. Have a voucher for free cake.”
He looked at her, looked at the voucher in his hand, made an all right, then face, and wandered off.
The smiling, ponytailed barista bent and placed a steaming metal flagon at each of their feet. “Two Midnight Elixirs. Sorry about the wait. We’re packed tonight.”
“I noticed.” For the other woman, Sylvie found a smile. “Thanks.” Completely ignoring Dominic now, which would usually be a gift beyond compare but, as the cherry on an endless stream of unsettling experiences, perversely annoyed him more, she picked up her flagon and took her first sip. “Hmm,” she said, and wrote something into her phone.
Dominic’s jaw shifted a few times, then he picked up his own drink and dubiously examined the contents. Johnny Marchmont’s favorite drink was a dark indigo color, shades of purple when the light hit it. The consistency was thicker than he’d expected, midway between creamy coffee and a milkshake. He brought the cup to his nose and inhaled. There was spice in it. And he was pretty sure . . . He took a mouthful, considered it for a second, and swallowed. Star anise. Followed by a strong hit of berry and intense sweetness.
He’d rather have an espresso, but the drink wasn’t actually that bad. When he broke down the rest of the contents, it would make for an unusual but palatable cake flavor.
“So, ‘Darren,’ whoever he is, isn’t amenable to disclosing his recipes,” he murmured aloud as he jotted star anise onto his tablet. An earlier call to the coffee shop had netted only an irritating giggle from the staffer at the end of the line, and “Ooh, no. All our recipes are a Clyde family secret. Darren would never tell. Shhh.”
“His recipes. Please.” Sylvie’s dislike of Darren and his saccharine alliteration was apparently strong enough to break the silent treatment. “He regularly steals ideas from Sugar Fair. I’d bet my stake in this contract that he didn’t concoct this himself.” She took another sip, a frown of concentration in her eyes. Then she wrote down something else. Dominic’s eyes traveled to her fingers against his will, and she lifted both her chin and her phone, covering the screen. “Unfortunately, he didn’t rip this one off me. And it’s way too . . . not beige to come from your kitchens.”
“A neutral palette is universally appropriate.”
“That’s not how you pronounce ‘dull.’”
They both drank more.
Dominic wrote down Boysenberry? Definitely vanilla; no more than two drops.
Finishing their drinks, they ordered another round from the barista.
“This place would be Byron’s worst nightmare,” Sylvie commented after a few minutes of silence, staring at the clown again. Dominic wasn’t repeating that mistake. “I thought he handled the elimination well today.”
He accepted another flagon of Midnight Elixir and swallowed a mouthful. It burnt a warm trail down his throat that he quite liked. “He cried for an hour. I’ve seen less moisture expelled by hydraulic dams. Ironic, considering his gâteau opéra was dust-dry.”
“Don’t be horrible.”
“Every poignant, quivering teardrop was straight out of school drama. Are you planning to let every evictee faux-snivel into your neck?” Dominic’s thigh was starting to cramp. He shifted irritably. “It’s inappropriate.”
“Some of us have compassion for others. It’s called empathy.”
“Some of us would hug a rabid squirrel if it shed a few tears and burbled an improbable sob story. It’s called gullibility.”
If she kept hurling her eyeballs around her skull like that, he wasn’t going to be the only one with a headache.
He must have grimaced unconsciously, because Sylvie stopped rolling her eyes and narrowed them on his face.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re all strained here.” Without warning, those cool fingertips touched him again, this time glancing over his temple, a light kiss of a movement. He stiffened, his hand curling around the flagon of Elixir.
Sylvie’s own hand folded into itself. A tinge of color invaded her cheekbones, until they matched the patchy remnants of her lipstick. “Sorry. Instinct. I didn’t mean to . . . infringe on your . . .” She cleared her throat.
“I . . .”
Had apparently experienced a human touch so infrequently lately that one silk-soft tap and the rest of his body almost separated from his skin.
Except he could still feel that prickle through his nerves.
Not exactly a reaction he had to every bit of casual physical contact.
“Headache,” he said shortly, sitting back. He touched his temple. “It’s been a very long day.” Each word came out with grim emphasis.
“Staff problems?” Sylvie guessed warily. She was frowning into her Elixir. After burying her nose in the cup and inhaling deeply several times, she wrote down three more things on her list.
He was falling behind, as his mind wandered down several unsettling avenues. Raising his flagon, he drained half the mixture in one go. The more he drank, the more cloying the sweetness in the aftertaste. It wasn’t so much complementing as cloaking the other flavors. Not honey. Sucralose?
“Those as well.” He felt damned sorry for Aaron, but hopefully the interim measures they’d taken paid off, because he also couldn’t afford an endless stream of expensive mistakes.
Especially if they secured the Albany contract. The short-term pressure would shoot into the stratosphere at that point, and he confidently expected a significant increase in knock-on sales once the name of the bakery was released in connection with the cake.
The royal effect on trade was no joke. Princess Rose could single-handedly exceed the impact of thousands of pounds of advertising budget.
He could almost hear Sylvie’s voice in his head: She’s a person, not an algorithm.
What nontheoretical Sylvie said aloud was “Me too.”
A combination of fatigue and high sugar content was slowing his reaction time. It took a second before he connected those words to a meaning. He glanced up. “You’re having staff problems?”
“Problem, singular.” Sylvie wrinkled her nose. “Unless you count Jay and Mabel, our senior assistant, constantly squawking and pecking at one another like territorial budgies. Which is doing my head in, but nothing new.”
Jay . . . one of those surnames with an unnecessary repetition of consonants. Fforde. Dominic had met him a couple of times, and they occasionally crossed paths in the street. Sharp head for figures but flapped under pressure. He’d crumble in a crisis.
“Jay’s your business partner?”
“Business partner. Lifelong best friend. We’ve known each other since we were babies. We were born in the same maternity ward, twelve hours apart. Our mothers apparently bonded over how useless our fathers were during the onset of labor. I literally learned to walk holding Jay’s hand.” The dimple by her mouth deepened again. “My aunt said we were crawling around the floor together, playing as usual, and I spotted a packet of biscuits. Motivated by sugar even then. I was determined to get to it, but I kept falling over when I tried to stand up. So Jay clambered to his feet as well, grabbed my hand, and off we toddled.” She lifted one shoulder. “He’s my brother, for all intents and purposes.” As Sylvie spoke of the other man, her preoccupied expression diffused into affectionate softness. The door opened to admit yet another customer, setting off the soundtrack of birdsong and a few piano notes of Moonlight Sonata to accompany her raptures.