Julia’s much in demand now. The work she did at Elliot’s caught the eye of one of the better-known guests, who asked if she could come have a look at his dining room. She did, and soon she was redoing all the public rooms, and then the bedrooms, one of which she now enjoys on a more personal level. She limits the number of clients she takes on, insisting that doing so really allows her to focus on each one’s needs. Exclusivity breeds demand, and she prices accordingly.
So she’ll be up to pick through the remains, and then she, Susan, and Meg will have their monthly dinner and drinks, and catch up. Meg will undoubtedly fill her elder sister in on how utterly adorable her new therapist is (Susan, of course, has already heard it all many times) and how he really seems to listen. Whether it’s the looks or the listening, he seems to be doing Meg a world of good. She hasn’t tried a fad diet for months, and the boys have stopped worrying they’re going to die.
Susan remembers that Meg has a choir concert in two weeks and wonders if she can persuade Julia to make a special trip north to see it. Bernard is a lost cause, but Kay will surely be there. She is, after all, taking some time off to relax and be with family, and she seems especially committed to the latter bit. She comes up to visit every chance she gets. She’s put in a mighty effort with Chris, and it seems the ice between them is thawing, slowly, although Susan is sure the past and everything that happened will always lie between them.
Lauren will probably come too. Probably. She has less time on her hands now she’s back at school and actually applying herself, having been scared straight, to some extent, by her near miss with internet infamy.
Rufus wasn’t joking when he said he’d put the fear of God into Liam. The boy was so remorseful about sharing the photograph that he’d shown up at Lauren’s to apologize in person, only to find both of her parents there, demanding some sort of explanation. Once they got it, they put the fear of God into the boy as well. Russell bellowed that he’d telephone Liam’s father and every single person he knew to make sure the boy never got hired anywhere if he even so much as thought about telling someone about those photographs.
Liam, stammering, handed his phone over. “Keep it, just keep it!” he gabbled, racing back out the door. He transferred to another school, and that was the last of it. But Helen wasn’t taking any chances and kept Lauren on a tight leash now. So it was probably for the best that Russell lost the election.
The sound of Chris shuffling out of the bedroom breaks her reverie. He joins her in the kitchen, blinking and rubbing his face. His hair is wild, and he has a two-day red-gold stubble that she rubs affectionately when he approaches.
“Thought you might sleep in,” Susan croons, pouring him a cup of tea and topping it up with milk.
“Ta,” he croaks, drinking. “Meeting with the business manager at nine,” he explains.
“Ahh. Let me guess—your very own line of nonstick spatulas.” They exchange playful smiles.
“Tartan ones, of course. For the international market,” he jibes back before dropping a kiss on her cheek and wandering over to the window to drink his tea and look out at Leith.
They’ve been living together—officially—since October. It happened so gradually, neither of them even seemed to notice. She brought over a few necessities, and he quietly made room in his drawers for them. By the end of September, she realized she hadn’t spent a single night at Moray Place for more than two weeks. And two weeks after that, Chris, frowning into the sitting room area, said, “I think it’s time for us to buy a new sofa.”
And that was pretty much it. The joint choosing and purchasing of a sofa—something they both liked and wanted to live with—was the deciding factor. Susan brought the rest of her things, and that was that.
“When are you two going to get married?” Kay is now asking, echoed occasionally by Meg.
“No time for that now,” Susan always answers. Both of them were playing to full houses—she at Elliot’s and he at Seòin. Gloria has done some television cooking specials on Saturday mornings; Chris is being wooed by the producers of another cooking competition show. There are talks of cookbooks on both sides, and merchandising on his. Chris Baker could very well become a brand.
It’s hard, but they make sure to set time aside for the two of them. Tonight is their night. Seòin is closed, and Rab will hold down the pastry fort at Elliot’s.
“Breakfast?” Susan offers, setting a pan on the stove. It’s one of her grandfather’s—no one objected to her taking most of the pots and pans from Moray Place when she moved out. Chris’s home kitchen was so poorly equipped it had become an ongoing joke with them.
“Aren’t you a chef?” she’d giggled, that long-ago day they cleared the air and came back together. After hours of energetic lovemaking, they realized they were famished, and of course Chris wanted to make their pasta dish. But five minutes of desperate searching through his kitchen cupboards yielded only a single tiny saucepan, a bottle of olive oil, and three withered cloves of garlic.
“I cook everything at the restaurant,” he sheepishly explained.
Susan pulled him close and kissed him, and for a while they forgot about the pasta.
But even lovers must eat sometime—and visiting sisters too, something the pair of them became very much aware of when Beth burst in, looking for sustenance at the end of a long day at the Festivals, and caught the pair of them.
Everyone froze, blinked a few times, and then Beth said, “I’ll just go down the chippy, hey? Back in forty minutes. Exactly forty minutes. And I’ll take the dog with me as well.” She scooped up Ginger, shielding the dog’s eyes, as if she was in danger of being corrupted. By the time she came back, everyone was slightly more presentable, and Beth turned it into a joke that Susan readily bought into, so it was less a painfully uncomfortable memory and more one that just made everyone laugh, especially once they were a few whiskies into an evening.
Susan smiles at the memory as she gets to work beating eggs for breakfast. Chris abandons the window, sets his mug in the sink, and wraps his arms around her waist from behind, nibbling on a bit of bare flesh between the edge of her shirt collar and the base of her neck. The stubble tickles tantalizingly.
“We could start date night early,” he whispers. She closes her eyes for a moment as her stomach quivers and she feels a throb between her legs—a sensation that falls in that delicious spot between pleasure and pain.
“I’d love to,” she murmurs back, turning to face him and wrapping her arms around his neck. “But Rab’ll be here soon, and I don’t think he’s quite as likely to laugh certain things off as Beth is.”
“Humorless little bastard,” Chris murmurs, lightly kissing her forehead, temples, chin, neck, nose, and finally lips.
“Mmm. It’s my own fault for suggesting he come by so we could toss ideas back and forth on the walk-in,” she says. “So blame me, if you like.”
“I do blame you, for stealing him in the first place,” Chris answers, nibbling her bottom lip. “That was mean.”
“He could have stayed at Seòin. He chose to be my apprentice.”
“You made him an offer he couldn’t refuse! The promise of a job as head pastry chef?”