“Don’t give me that look,” she told him, punching the dough with perhaps more violence than necessary. “I’m handling this like a mature adult. A mature adult who just happens to be trapped in the Middle Ages with the most attractive man to ever brood dramatically while tending rosemary.”
The cat’s purr suggested he found her definition of “mature adult” somewhat lacking.
The kitchen door opened with a creak that made her pulse quicken, followed by footsteps she’d learned to recognize despite herself. Heavy but graceful, confident but somehow careful—the walk of someone who’d learned to move through the world ready for either battle or ballroom, depending on the circumstances.
“The sage needs harvesting,” Tristan bellowed—well, not bellowed exactly, but his voice carried that commanding quality that made servants scurry to do his bidding, and made her pulse do interesting things. “Before the heat of the day wilts it beyond use.”
Rachel glanced up from her bread dough to find him standing in the doorway, and her brain temporarily forgot how to process visual information. His hair was mussed from working in the garden, and there was a streak of dirt across one high cheekbone that made her want to reach out and brush it away. The linen shirt she’d been admiring from afar was now damp with honest sweat, clinging to the defined muscles of his chest and arms in ways that should probably be illegal in any century.
“Right,” she said, proud of how normal her voice sounded despite the fact that her mouth had gone desert-dry. “Sage. For cooking. Very practical. Very innocent thoughts about herbs.”
He raised an eyebrow at her muttered commentary. “What are you babbling about?”
“Nothing important,” she replied quickly, wiping flour from her hands with a cloth that had seen better decades. “Just talking to myself. It’s a bad habit I picked up from living alone too long.”
He tilted his head, a frown on his breathtaking face. “You lived alone?” The question seemed to surprise him as much as it did her, slipping out with genuine curiosity rather than his usual careful formality.
“For three years,” she admitted, following him toward the herb garden. The morning air was sweet with the scent of roses and lavender, warm enough to make her grateful for the light chemise and blue linen kirtle—she’d finally given in to Mistress Caldwell’s pointed comments about proper attire and allowed Tristan to give her two dresses, though she drew the line at the complicated headpieces, instead preferring to put her hair in a bun.
“It wasn’t so bad. No one to judge my cooking disasters or comment on my tendency to binge-watch crime shows while eating ice cream directly from the container.”
“Crime shows?”
She waved a hand dismissively, stepping carefully around a patch of particularly aggressive mint that seemed determined to take over the entire garden.
“Entertainment. Stories about people solving mysteries, catching bad guys, that sort of thing. Very popular where I come from.”
“And ice cream?”
“Frozen sweetened cream. Like... like if you took the best parts of custard and made them cold enough to numb your tongue.”
She caught his expression of polite bewilderment and laughed. “Never mind. The point is, living alone was fine. Quiet. Predictable. No surprises.”
“No one to share meals with,” he observed, kneeling beside a flourishing patch of sage that released its earthy scent into the warming air. “No one to appreciate your skills.”
There was something in his voice that made her look at him more closely. “Is that why you stopped cooking? Because there was no one left who understood what it meant to you?”
His hands stilled on the herbs, and for a moment the garden was quiet except for the distant lowing of cattle and the drone of bees among the lavender. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of old pain carefully contained.
“My mother used to say that food prepared with love tastes different than food prepared from mere necessity. That the cook’s heart seasons every dish, whether they will it or not.” He straightened, a handful of sage leaves cupped in his palms like tiny green treasures.
“After her death, after my father’s disappointment, after Guy’s betrayal... there seemed little point in seasoning aught with what remained of my heart.”
The raw pain in his admission made her chest ache. “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”
“’Tis merely practical,” he said, though his careful mask couldn’t quite hide the vulnerability beneath. “Why waste good spices on bitterness?”
“Because,” Rachel said, stepping closer despite every instinct that told her she was entering dangerous territory, “sometimes the act of creating something beautiful is what reminds you that your heart is still working. Even when it feels broken.”
He looked at her then, really looked at her, and she felt the force of his attention like sunlight breaking through clouds. Those winter-blue eyes seemed to catalog every detail of her face, as if he were trying to memorize her features for some future moment when she wouldn’t be standing so close.
“Is that why you continued writing about food?” he asked quietly. “Even when no one appreciated your skill?”
The question hit closer to home than she’d expected, and she found herself answering with an honesty that surprised them both.
“I kept writing because I hoped that somewhere out there was someone who would understand. Someone who would read my words and think, ‘Yes, this person gets it. This person knows that food is more than fuel, that cooking is more than a chore, that sharing a perfect meal can be like sharing a piece of your soul.’”
“And did you find such a person?”
