“Sylvie.” He spoke very low, their browbones touching. “I don’t know what to say. It’s less surprising to me than it is to you.” When she lifted her gaze, he smiled faintly. “Nobody understands better where he’s coming from than me.”
She’d experienced multiple emotions after Jay’s confession, none of them positive. When Dominic spoke, however—butterflies.
Or perhaps, like the pinpoint lights flitting around the walls, “fireflies” were a better description. Bright little sparks of joy, lighting up the darkness.
She’d fallen so much in love with him that it hurt.
“Where is he now?” Dominic asked, his voice going husky in response to whatever he saw flashing in her eyes then.
“I don’t know. He asked for some space. Time off.”
In an absent reaction to the caw of the raven clock on the wall, they had both stirred to get up. The raven popped out to announce the fifty-minute mark in each hour and no other time. The utter randomness had appealed to her for this room. That particular caw meant that the last of the staff should be signing out upstairs, and she needed to make sure her Midnight Elixir cake sample was secure for tomorrow before she locked up.
At this point, who bloody knew what was going to happen with the royal wedding, but—she had to have faith in Rosie and Johnny. And right now, all she could do was fulfill her part of the commitment.
She had a responsibility to the people upstairs to see this through.
She had a responsibility to herself to bloody rock this.
They had almost finished dressing when she voiced the last painful revelation about Jay. “He talked of pulling out of Sugar Fair.”
This time, Dominic went completely rigid. Not in the good way that usually culminated in mutually shaking thighs.
“He what?” His voice was sharp. He was not impressed, and was still informing her of that fact, as if she hadn’t already said three times she agreed it wasn’t acceptable to throw that at her and at the business, and that it bordered on emotional blackmail, when they entered the kitchen—and almost walked straight into a wrathful dandelion.
A patronizing description of a human being, nevertheless accurate as Penny faced them with streaks of red in her cheeks. She was so cross that her hair seemed to be quivering, yet even in her towering rage she maintained that vague vibe, as if one strong puff of breath would send her thoughts scattering every which way.
“How dare you have the Starlight Circus shut down,” she snapped, her hair wiggling more vigorously as a punctuation mark.
It was such a bizarre moment that it took a second to absorb the words.
“They shut it down?” Sylvie had vindictively hoped Darren would cop a whopping fine for his shoddy hygiene practices; she hadn’t dared to hope they’d actually hazard-tape the door.
Having consumed multiple foodstuffs from his bacteria den, she didn’t want to think too hard about how bad the kitchens must have been.
Otherwise—what a delightful twist in an otherwise shit of a day.
Between that and the orgasm, and the confirmation that she was utterly, bone-deep, soul-hard in love with the man beside her, it was definitely ending on an upward curve.
“Thanks to you.”
“Thanks to the hygiene failures and probably dangerous cost-cutting of your . . . boyfriend?” Dominic was using the face and voice most calculated to send Operation Cake contestants scurrying around corners. Sylvie could have told him not to bother—all variation in tone bounced off Penny like an impenetrable shield in a video game.
She also didn’t mention that the space between the concentric circles of Stern Dominic and Sexy Dominic was rapidly narrowing, lest he become perversely affable in response.
She looked sharply from his very icy face to Penny’s. “Boyfriend?”
“She was coming out of Darren Clyde’s kitchens the other night,” he said, without looking away from the other woman. “And made a very fast retreat when she saw you.”
“You’re connected with Darren?” Sylvie was trying to fit those pieces together in her mind. Failing miserably. “A relationship with Darren?”
What in the actual fuck was going on at the moment?
At this point, if Pet suddenly popped out from a corner and revealed herself a secret agent for MI5, she wouldn’t even blink.
“Why did you say it like that?” Penny asked defensively. “Why wouldn’t we be a couple?”
Sylvie just looked at her, totally wordless, before she turned to Dominic. “I don’t want to be alarmist, but I believed I’ve single-handedly cracked the space-time continuum. This is a parallel universe after all. And it’s very odd.”
“Penny Pops.” Dominic had decided to add verisimilitude to her theory by making nonsensical statements.
“I’m sorry? Pops what? Pops who?”
“On Clyde’s god-awful menu. There was an item called a Penny Pop. I assumed it was a nod to old-fashioned penny sweets.”
Penny had the almighty nerve to clasp her hands over her navel and sway in love-struck gratification. “No, it was a nod to me. In recognition of all my help with the development of the menu.”
Her intern might be falling out of her rage and back into walking dreamworld, but Sylvie was taking a swift turn down the path of being seriously pissed off.
“Did you take this job just to pass information along to Darren?”
Penny blinked at her. “Of course. But I did appreciate all that advice you gave me. I don’t really remember much of it, but . . .”
A shrug.
Sylvie lifted her hand to her temple. For Christ’s sake, said she in her head and Dominic aloud.
“It was Darren’s idea that I apply.” Penny looked suddenly proud. “But I’m the one who realized in the interview that if I said I had no family, either, you’d probably feel sorry for me. And you did.” She was patently delighted by her own manipulation.
Sylvie immediately slipped her hand sideways and pressed her palm against Dominic’s ribs as he took an instinctive step forward.
As tempting as it was to cheer him on, he really couldn’t chuck her staff members out the window.
With a slightly aggrieved note, as if Darren had been claiming all the credit for their misdeeds, Penny added, “And it was my idea to get the photo off your phone and give it to that reporter.”
Sylvie’s breath caught, and Dominic went very still.
Behind Penny, the door to the shop floor had opened silently. Mabel stood there with a lollipop in her hand, also listening.
“It did get rid of her,” the intern pointed out, as if Sylvie ought to be grateful. Her smile widened. “She wasn’t interested in the cake at all after that. If you’re going to have such private discussions in your office, you really should have spent less on tacky kitsch and more on soundproofing.”
“You took the photo off my phone? You broke into my phone?” Sylvie’s voice lifted in pitch, and Penny lifted her nose.
“You left it on your desk, unlocked. Again, poor security, boss.”
At which point, she fucking tutted.
Sylvie breathed in deeply.
Rosie and Johnny’s relationship was being ripped to shreds, with the press and public pawing over the pieces like wild dogs.
The emotional chasm between Dominic and Pet had been torn even wider.