Eliza looked at him, her eyes glistening. “That was not me,” Lachlan’s own eyes pleaded with her. They were so big and full,and like molten chocolate. She stared deeply into them. She wanted to believe him. She really did.
But that was the problem.
Even he was too good to be true. Too kind. Too handsome. Too good. Isadora believed she had a good thing until she was left alone with nothing but a note and an abandoned home the very next day.
Maybe Isadora hadn’t seen the signs, either, but they were there. But once she finally did, it had been too late. Ernest was already gone.
A happy ending wasn’t how this ended for Lachlan and her. The gingerbread house was cursed, after all. Maybe Isadora was right in trying to protect future women from the same fate.
“It’s been fun, Lachlan.” She breathed at last. “But even the house knows what’s for the best.”
“Eliza—” He started, but she backed away from him.
“Go.” She swallowed back the tears. “Please.”
She blinked, and a tear fell. Lachlan blew out a frustrated breath, but he didn’t object. Didn’t say a word. Just crossed the room to grab his things.
He stopped at the door and turned. One last chance for Eliza to take it all back if she wanted—and she almost did. The words were on the very edge of her lips, ready to slip by.
But he slipped through the door quicker than she could speak. The lock clicked into place; one final note, the ending to some old, sad song.
She heard the engine of his rented Land Rover flare to life, and the house didn’t protest as the wheels crunched through the freshly fallen snow and down the long driveway.
The record player scratched to life, the slow drawl of “I’ll be home for Christmas” piping from the disc.
The magic was still here. But Lachlan was gone.
Long after the snow had settled from its earlier storm, and the stars had sprinkled themselves across the sky like a topping to a complicated recipe, Eliza did what Eliza did best: she baked. Lachlan truly wasn’t coming back.
He’d left at the first opportunity, probably hopped on the first class train to be with his mum and sister for Christmas instead of being here. Or he might’ve just driven straight home,going ninety to nothing to get out of this crazy town so he could get back to selling his million dollar coastal mansions.
Eliza knew that once they both traveled their separate ways home, and left the gingerbread walls and enchanted kitchen behind, they both would chalk up this entire week to being some odd fluke. A sugar-coated fever dream.
Puffcake tried to console Eliza by wrapping himself around her on her shoulder, nestling his nose into the crux of her neck. She stroked his spine lazily, the tears seeming to come at random.
The house had also tried to console her plenty of times. The kitchen egged her on into using the recipe books in the cabinet, and sugar and butter made their way onto the kitchen island without Eliza even having to pull the ingredients down herself. It knew exactly what she had in mind, except she didn’t want to look at a single recipe card.
This time, she wanted to bake straight from memory.
This was her nan’s recipe. Which, she supposed, most of them were. At least, the fundamentals were always her nan’s. But this one was something her nan was famously known for back in her quiet corner of London: her Victoria sponge.
It was a five-layered cake with a thick homemade buttercream icing between each piece of fluffy vanilla cake, spread with raspberry jam in between. Her nan made it every year for Christmas, but that was about the only time of year she did because it was about as extensive a recipe as one could get.
But that was the point tonight.
If she started now, she might finish before sunrise, but she wasn’t in a hurry.
Eliza wrapped her apron around her waist, tied her long blonde strands into a pony, and pulled her last scrap of dignity together. She wouldn’t feel sorry for herself. She came here to doexactly this: bake in the best kitchen in all of Britain—possibly all of the world. Lachlan only did her a favor by leaving her alone.
“Guess this is what I wanted from the get-go, isn’t it, Puffcake?” she sighed. “Good riddance.”
At least that’s what she told herself, anyway.
Even Puffcake seemed to see straight through the lie.
They were never meant to last. Their love—if it could even be called that—only lasted a week. She’d known biscuits to have lasted longer before they grew stale.
It was her fault for thinking it could last, her fault for even hoping.
