‘What do you want me to do first?’ Amy said.
‘How much cooking have you done?’ he asked, lifting a large white board and a sharp knife, placing both in front of her.
‘A bit.’
Her reticence had him deciding to give her something relatively easy to do. Tad lifted some white peaches from a bowl on the windowsill, selecting three of the firmer ones. ‘Would you slice these into half-inch wedges, please?’
‘Skin on?’
‘Aye. Give them a quick rinse first.’
As he assembled the rest of the ingredients, Tad kept an eye on Amy’s progress. The way she sliced the peaches suggested she’d done rather more than the ‘bit’ of cooking she’d admitted to. As she wiped juice-laden fingers against the edge of her apron and returned his grin, Tad caught his breath. She looked right at home alongside him at the stainless-steel counter, a beautiful smile and the ability to wield a knife – win-win as far as Tad was concerned.
Doing his best to focus, he tipped flour, sugar and butter into the mixer, then fetched one of the lemons from the teaching room and handed it to her, unhooking a zester from the utensil rack.
‘Grate the zest of about half the lemon in, then we can blend those ingredients together,’ he said, reaching into a cupboard for a fluted tart tin.
‘Are we the only people staying at Casa del Cibo this week?’ Amy asked.
‘No. One guest arrived a couple of days ago and is dining with friends elsewhere this evening. He used to be a regular, apparently, coming to stay every month or so. This is his first time with me, though. More folks arrived earlier today and are out and about enjoying the town. They’ll be back for champagne and canapés, and we’ll be nice and busy by Tuesday with a group coming for a shorter break.’
‘That’s a lot of people to keep an eye on,’ Amy said, reaching around the mixer for the control lever and pulsing the dry ingredients into the butter. This woman knew what she was doing, so why had she been so dismissive of her abilities? ‘Have you always been a cookery teacher?’ she asked.
As Tad gave her a potted version of his work history, he handed her the rest of the ingredients. It was like having sous-chef, Matteo, in the room, taking some of the workload from him. Although Matteo didn’t smell anything like as good as Amy did.
‘If it’s more of a dough, does it need to be kneaded?’ she said, grinning at the homophone. ‘Is it a needy dough?’ she added.
‘Ha, very funny, but no, it doesn’t require much work,’ he said. ‘Just enough to bring it together, otherwise the finished result will be too heavy.’
With a sprinkle of flour on the work surface, Tad stood back and watched as Amy scraped the mixture from the bowl, swallowing hard when he found himself fixated by the movements of her fingers, the way they became coated in the glutinous mixture as it squeezed between her knuckles. He distracted his wayward thoughts as he pushed forward the tart tin and explained how she should press the dough evenly over the base and up the sides.
With the dough in place, Amy cleaned her hands as he spread a liberal coating of peach jam over the base of the dough and between them they arranged the peach slices in a concentric pattern. Being this close to her gave Tad unfettered access to the soft fragrant notes of the remnants of her shampoo, and he found it hard to ignore the way she flicked a strand of her hair away from her neck with the back of a peach-juice-splattered hand. He wondered how it would feel to kiss her, right there, millimetres below her ear.
He shook his head and took a step back. What was he doing? This was a guest, and he was a professional who needed to maintain his focus. But he couldn’t seem to stop his gaze from straying to her again, frowning as conflict flowed through him. He needed to focus on his work – especially with Billie Forsythe-Rogers in the house. Plus, Clare was arriving in a few days – a visit he’d been looking forward to for longer than he cared to mention. The thought of seeing Clare had his heart leaping into his throat, so why was he allowing Amy any headspace?
Tad slid the tart into the oven. ‘I’ll take it from here,’ he said. His words sounded brusque, as though he was issuing her with a dismissal – he supposed he was, really, and Amy took the cue, leaving the room with a smile of thanks and a gentle question about timings for dinner.
* * *
Tad’s White Peach Tart
180g self-raising flour
30g granulated sugar
½ teaspoon baking powder
Grated zest of ½ a lemon
100g unsalted butter, softened
1 large egg, plus another large egg yolk
Peach jam
3–4 firm white peaches, cut into wedges
Icing sugar to decorate
