In fact—
“You know,” she said slowly, winding the fallen gold ribbon tighter and tighter around her thumb, “you have the tableside manner of the shark from Jaws, but the actual basis of your criticism on the show is usually sound. You know what you’re talking about, and you bring that experience to the set.”
Dominic removed some padding from the box and lifted out a bundle of more velvet. “My experience tells me that’s not ending in a compliment.”
“But,” Sylvie went on with emphasis, “you have an awful lot to say about my business, none of it good, for someone who, as far as I’m aware, has never actually stepped foot in the place.”
His veiled gaze raised from the unknown object held so gently in his hands.
“Tomorrow night, the last booking in the Dark Forest ends at nine.” The ribbon tore in her grip. This was likely the biggest mistake since she’d screwed up the mechanism in that unicorn cake, but apparently she was dedicated to committing it. “Consider this your official invitation into enemy territory. Meet me downstairs at quarter past nine, and I’ll give you your very own potions class. If you’re going to denigrate my hard work, you might as well know what you’re talking about.”
The offer ended in just the shade of a taunt, and his jaw tightened on what had likely been an instinctive “not a chance in a hell.”
In the silence, the ticking of the grandfather clock sounded like a warning.
Bad-idea, bad-idea, bad-idea.
Tick-tock, listen to the clock, tick-tock, the man’s a cock.
With deft, sensitive hands that had rescued a stranded earthworm and eyes that could betray the most profound understanding . . .
“I have a business meeting tomorrow.” She imagined he’d sound similarly enthusiastic if she’d invited him to a joint colonoscopy. “Half nine?”
She slipped her phone out of her bag, tapped it into her calendar, and wiggled the screen at him. “Done. See you there. And unlike the Starlight Circus, I make no secret of high booze content.” She refastened her bag. “Speaking of, Rosie should probably have a heads-up that Johnny’s daily pick-me-up contains enough alcohol to anesthetize a horse. Even sober, he’s pretty disastrously frank for a public figure.”
“I wonder if that relationship is going to last the long haul.”
“I hope it does. The way they look at each other. Not everyone gets that in their life.”
For just a moment, they looked at each other again.
Bad-idea.
With a tiny, abrupt movement of his head, Dominic unwrapped the velvet bundle on his palm and lifted out the object within.
“Oh!” Sylvie’s exclamation was involuntary. “How beautiful.”
It was a tiny cast-glass sculpture of a globe, a perfect little Earth on a minuscule glass stand. Immediately, before she remembered a few manners, Sylvie reached out for it, her gloves brushing over Dominic’s as she touched the exquisite piece of art. It was a working model, turning on a hinge as she stroked the surface.
“Amazing,” she said fervently, spellbound by the sparkle of light around every curve. “The skill in this. May I—?”
He passed it carefully into her hands, his attention on her face rather than the miniature masterpiece he’d uncovered. “You said your aunt was a glass expert and an artist. Your sugar work has always been exceptional.” One of the few areas of her work he’d commended without reservation four years ago, usually accompanied by mutterings about wasting perfect technique on such frivolous subject matter. “There’s the hand of an artist in your sculptural pieces. Are you a glass artist, as well?”
“Mallory started teaching me when I was six, and I went to art school before I switched to the culinary field. Glass art was my specialty. Inevitably, after being carried around museums every weekend as a toddler, I’d grow to love it or hate it. I love it.” She’d combined the best of both worlds with her sugar art, but sometimes she still missed creating works that lasted longer than a party. She couldn’t stop staring at the globe. “But I’ll never in my life be able to make something like this.”
Very, very delicately, she turned it over, looking for a clue as to the artist. On the base of the stand, engraved in elegant, neat letters were the words: ALL THE WORLD AND STILL ONLY YOU. And underneath, simply: JESSIE.
“Jessie,” Sylvie murmured aloud. This was a piece that ought to be in a museum, not merely a gallery, but she was very familiar with British glass artists both past and present, and that didn’t ring any bells. “Was this just shoved in a carton of random files?” She was massively offended on behalf of the globe, the unknown Jessie, and Patrick, because nobody could have owned this and not treasured it.
Frowning, Dominic was looking through the rest of the box. “This hasn’t been catalogued yet,” he said, “and I’m not sure it was meant to be here. I suspect all of these items came straight from Patrick’s bedroom, and probably ought to have been taken by Rosie. She seemed to be the only one who really cared about him.” He held up a pretty little antique clock, a well-dog-eared copy of Murder on the Orient Express, and poignantly, a hand-drawn old birthday card, inscribed in a childish hand. Loves and hugs and the moon and back, from Rosie.
A couple of vinyl records were sticking out the top of the box, and curiously, Sylvie pulled one out. She could almost guess what it would be before she saw the sleeve. “Rachmaninoff. Probably not performed as well as his own interpretation.” She turned it over and the record slipped out; as she hastily caught it before it could fall, two items drifted to the ground. “Crap.”
She bent to pick them up and stopped, looking down at what she held in her hands. An envelope, yellowed with age. Just an ordinary envelope that had obviously once contained a gas bill. But it was covered with little pencil sketches and notes, still visible despite the passing years, in two different hands. Playful line drawings of a couple lounging by a stream, the figure of a man with his head in a woman’s lap. The same man climbing a tree, his face teasing and alight with laughter. The woman standing with hands on hips, her visible disapproval justified as her lover—for lover he obviously was—tumbled to the ground in the next vignette. Despite his own folly, she bent to kiss his head.
In a neat cursive, a hand had written: I don’t know what you’d do without me.
And a man’s scrawl in return: Never leave me then and we won’t find out.
Sylvie knew the handwriting of the latter. She’d already seen several examples of Patrick’s correspondence today.
The envelope was addressed to Jessica Maple-Moore at Primrose Cottage in a village near Oxford.
Pulling her gaze from the drawings, she looked at the other fallen object. A photograph. No posed studio shot this time. A candid photo of two people sitting on stone steps leading up to a wooden door. The railings either side of their bodies barely held back a profusion of blooming primroses.
A thirtysomething Prince Patrick, wearing an exquisitely cut wool suit, couture in every line, sitting with an arm hooked around his bent knee. With a watch chain hanging from his pocket, he looked more Downton Abbey than the wannabe rocker of his younger days. His dark hair was combed back, slicked to his head, and a smile played about his mouth as he turned his head toward the woman beside him. Relaxed and obviously happy, he looked like an entirely different man.