Battle Royal

by Lucy Parker

  “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.

  Sylvie raised her eyebrows. She’d recognized that Patrick had been conventionally handsome, but she hadn’t before considered him attractive, which was a very different beast. Here, however . . . In the sexiness stakes, she’d personally rank a three-piece suit with a waistcoat well over visible abs, and she could understand the light in his companion’s eyes.

  With laughter in every line of her fascinating face, a vivacious brunette looked into the camera, but one hand was caught and held tightly in Patrick’s, their fingers linked together. Even in a photograph, the woman emanated an aura of restrained energy that reminded Sylvie a bit of Pet De Vere.

  She wished it were a digital photograph so she could zoom in—so used to Instagram that any time she saw a photo, her finger twitched toward an invisible “like” button—but really, no higher resolution was necessary. In the instant when the camera flash had captured this moment for posterity, their body language was baldly explicit.

  The woman had quite rounded cheeks and a very pointed chin, and she’d depicted both features with ruthless accuracy in her pencil drawings on the envelope.

  Without a word, Sylvie handed the envelope to Dominic, as she continued to stare at the photo of Prince Patrick and presumably Jessica Maple-Moore.

  Jessie.

  Dominic studied the pencil drawings without comment, before reaching for the photograph.

  “Clearly,” Sylvie said, “Rosie was not the only person who cared about Patrick.”

  When Dolores came to collect them at the end of her shift, Dominic indicated the box they’d meticulously repacked and set aside, and suggested quietly that she might want to double-check to whom the contents had been bequeathed.

  Dolores glanced at it—and them—curiously, and took the box under her arm. “Found what you were looking for?” she asked them when they returned to the busy, blessedly warm public rooms.

  A tiny beat, before Dominic said, “Not yet. But I think the first stones have been laid.”

  “Coming back tomorrow?”

  A small glint replaced the thoughtful look on his face. “I have to see a man about a horse tomorrow. Or a woman with enough alcohol to anesthetize one.”

  When he went to retrieve their coats, Dolores twinkled at her. “Goodness, was that almost a smile I saw? I’d assume that Patrick and Rachmaninoff worked their magic even on Dominic, but I suspect the credit belongs a little closer to home.”

  Sylvie’s mind had been half back in the archives room, and it took a moment to register Dolores’s smiling inference. For the fiftieth time that day, a spreading flush was a pulsing beat in her cheeks.

  Before she could voice a denial in what would likely be an astounding display of inarticulacy, Dolores said, “I’ve never seen his body language like that. And I’ve known him for some time now. My love has known him even longer.” She nodded over Sylvie’s shoulder, warmth and delight suffusing every line of her f
ace.

  Sylvie turned to see another elderly woman sitting patiently on an armchair near the doors. Her dark brown skin creased into countless wrinkles with the most gorgeous smile as she saw them looking. She blew Dolores a kiss.

  “Isobel.” Acres of emotion in a few syllables. “My fiancée.”

  “Congratulations.” Sylvie returned Isobel’s wave when it moved to her. Smiling, she pulled a card out of her bag. “If you need a cake for the wedding, please give me a call.”

  Dolores laughed and took the card. “I’m afraid Dominic won my loyalty a long time ago, but I’ve heard some very interesting tales of a magical forest and bubbling cauldrons in Notting Hill. The cake I can’t commission, but a cocktail?”

  “On the house. Anytime.” Sylvie couldn’t help it. She had to ask. “What did you mean about his body language?”

  “So entirely tuned into someone else.” Dolores considered. “Somehow curved into someone else, without moving a muscle. Aware of their every movement, without so much as a glance.”

  Sylvie shook her head slightly, but it wasn’t quite “no.” She wasn’t sure what it was. She hesitated. “You said you owed Dominic a favor—”

  “I owe Dominic my life. Quite literally.” Dolores gestured five more minutes to Isobel, but the other woman was now talking to Dominic, who’d spotted her and walked over to crouch by her chair. “Years ago, he was catering the desserts for a function I’d organized. When he arrived to deliver the cake, I was forty-five minutes late to the venue. I made it clear to him in our initial meetings that I prized punctuality in myself and expected it in others. I’m never late. He barely knew me, and he had another commitment that evening that would have resulted in a lucrative ongoing contract, I was later told by a member of his staff. But he had a feeling something was wrong. He came looking at my former workplace, and he found me. Fallen through the floor of a rotting heritage building, cold, bleeding, and alone.” A shadow momentarily darkened her eyes at the memory. “For hours. Dominic called emergency services, he stayed with me, he talked to me even though he’s clearly about as naturally chatty as The Thinker, and when the structure collapsed again before help arrived, he dislocated his shoulder keeping me from falling another level.”

  Sylvie didn’t know what to say.

  Before she had to find words, Dolores continued, “It’s no exaggeration to say I would have died that night without him. But he gifted me my life twice. It was through him that I met Isobel. She knew his family when he was a young child and met him again as an adult. He introduced us at an awards dinner.” Where before she had been open, almost garrulous, here she stopped. She looked into Sylvie’s face, and there was something so . . . dissecting in that look, Sylvie felt as if a sci-fi scanner were running over her body, somehow drawing out every last secret of her past, every minute facet of her character.

  She felt oddly nervous suddenly, but whatever silent test Dolores was conducting, apparently she passed. The older woman gave small nod. “Isobel has told me,” she said very quietly, “a little of what she knows of Dominic’s early childhood. She wasn’t in a position to intervene, but she wished desperately that she could, on more than one occasion.”

  Something cold and angry clutched in a ball in Sylvie’s stomach. She wanted to ask. And she didn’t want to invade Dominic’s privacy so acutely behind his back.

  Dolores answered the unspoken. “Not abuse in the form that the law would recognize. Grievous neglect couched in luxury. He was entirely given over to the care of a nanny, who didn’t believe in coddling children, as she put it. The woman shouldn’t have even had the care of a houseplant,” she added with a distinct bite. “Let alone a child with nowhere to go and no one for whom he could reach. ‘I’ve never felt so helpless,’ Isobel said to me once. ‘A touch-starved five-year-old. I’d have liked to load his parents into a cannon.’”

  Dominic had said goodbye to Isobel and returned then with their coats. He cast a glance between them, that laser focus sharpening on Sylvie’s face. She was trying very hard to keep her expression clear of emotion. His eyes narrowed. After a moment, he merely queried, “Ready?”

  Silently, Sylvie nodded, and Dominic shot her another look before he held out her coat so she could slip her arms into the sleeves.

  Dolores patted his own arm fondly. “I’ll look into the items you’ve flagged.” Her gaze softened on Sylvie. “Have a good evening. Bring her again.”

  When they opened the door to walk back outside, the icy wind was a frigid blast, rocketing down Sylvie’s spine. She drew her coat tighter across her chest, and couldn’t help noticing that he stepped to the left, apparently unconsciously taking the brunt of the wind.

  Dominic stood looking down at her. His query was abrupt. “Are you all right?”

  “I am,” she said slowly. She looked back at the stone walls of Abbey Hall. All things considered, and in a comparatively short amount of time, she felt as if she’d stepped into that building with one path on the horizon, and suddenly someone had opened up a dozen different avenues of possibility.

  Her gaze returned to dust over the taut line of his stubbled jaw, the sprinkling of pale freckles above his collar, the unreadable expression in his eyes.

  Evenly, he commented, “Not quite what I expected to find in there.”

  No.

  Nor her.

  Chapter Nine

  De Vere’s

  Mission: Midnight Elixir, the Cake

  Attempt 8

  9

  10

  11

  “Yes, I did think we were going to be there all night.”

  —Liam Boateng, highly paid, highly annoyed sous-chef, De Vere’s

  The cake was perfectly golden, rich, with a good crumb. And it tasted like nothing on Earth.

  Liam lowered his napkin from his mouth. His shoulders were still wracked with small shudders. “Literally the first time I’ve ever had to spit something out in this kitchen.”

  Dominic leaned both fists on the countertop. If he could develop telekinesis powers through sheer will, that platter would fly into the bin on its own and save him the trouble.

  “Reduce the vanilla,” he said over his shoulder to the assistant currently mixing the next batch. “The boysenberry is giving a note far too sour. Need to counterbalance with the white chocolate. And the absinthe—”

  “Has to go.” Liam was physically scrubbing his tongue with the napkin.

  “It’s an important component of the flavor profile, but it’s overwhelming. And cut the theatrics. I’ve had enough on set.” He reached for a piece of paper and started scrawling with a pen. “Maybe if we introduce that note in the second icing layer. Could use a spray . . .”

  “May I make a suggestion?”

  He scribbled a diagram, added a ratio of liquid to dry ingredients. “Yes.”

  Liam smacked a massive tablet of dark Belgian chocolate on the counter next to the hell cake. “Stick with chocolate.”

  Sugar Fair

  Sylvie leaned on the counter, darkly eyeing the array of cakes. Two looked great, one would be acceptable if it’d been pulled off a supermarket bargain shelf, the other two would net a failing grade as a school project.

  Gingerly, she poked one of the decent-looking examples with her fork, brought another small mouthful to her lips.

  Which puckered as soon as the renewed taste of that cake hit her senses.

  She dropped the fork and looked up at Jay and Mabel, both lingering for the verdict.

  “They’re all disgusting. And pace yourself with those,” she added warningly to Mabel, who was slurping at another of the Midnight Elixir takeaway cups Sylvie had asked Penny to purchase. Partly because they needed the drink for comparative purposes. Partly to keep the intern occupied and not dissolving into tears for the third time that week. “It’s all fun and games until it throws a punch like Mike Tyson and you start complimenting people on their fleshly assets.”

  “Sorry?” Jay finished hiding his cake sample in th
e bin and shot her an amused glance.

  “Mabs, how many of those have you had?” Sylvie asked, and her assistant lowered the cup.

  “Four. Neither my brain nor my stomach is weak.” Mabel finished the remaining Elixir in the cup, extended an elegant hand and tapped the bottle of absinthe. “And this isn’t going to work in the mix. You need a more subtle delivery agent for the flavor note.”

  She sailed out in a perfectly straight line, steady as a rock.

  “I’m aggrieved,” Sylvie remarked, and Jay rested his hand on her head.

  “Welcome to my world.”

  De Vere’s

  “It’s not purple.” Pet sounded personally offended.

  Dominic looked up from the Midnight Elixir cake. Version #WhoTheFuckKnows. “Why would it be purple?”

  “Because the drink is purple.” She took another sip from the takeaway cup. “It’s good, too.” He didn’t need her pointed look at the cake to fill in the unspoken: Unlike that.

  “I thought it was black,” Liam murmured.

  “Isn’t it brown?” A cluster of assistants gathered around to peer into the cups.

  Dominic pressed his thumb and forefinger against his browbone and speculated on the sensation of an imploding brain.

  Sugar Fair

  “It’s better,” Jay said, chewing thoughtfully. His jaw shifted as he turned the cake over on his tongue, weighing the flavors. “Much better than the last one.”

  Sylvie took another bite. The cake was packed with flavor, not in the least dry, and it looked pretty, since she’d added a tiny sprinkling of gold glitter dust. “It is much better,” she agreed slowly, and took another bite. Chewed. Thought. Flung down the fork. “It’s still horrible.”

  “Foul.” Jay shoved his own plate away and reached for a bottle of water. He cracked the top and drank a third in one shot. “How goes the second part of the mission?”