She pointed a finger at him, and he noticed she was careful to hold back, to not actually jab it against his chest. “We are baking a cake.”
He held up his hands in surrender. “Whatever you say, Sadie.”
This time they fell into step next to each other, and he caught her sneaking glances at him from the corner of her eye.
“Do you know how to bake?” he asked when they were only a few feet from the kitchen door, needing to distract himself from what had happened the last time he was in that space.
“It’s not that different from brewing,” she admitted softly.
“Tastes better, though.” He was relieved to see her smile, a little of the tension draining from her.
“Potions taste bad on purpose. Water-witches don’t want to be pestered needlessly.”
Twenty-Four
???
Sadie had decidedon baking because there would be other people in the kitchen. She needed that external barrier while she was with Nicholas. If she had thought Madeleine would have let her get away with it, she would have tried to talk her way out of spending the day with him at all.
They pushed through the door, and Nicholas’s attention immediately went to one side, to the stools in front of one workbench. No, to one stool. The stool.
She felt her cheeks heat and realized she might have made a mistake. Yes, the cook and her helpers were bustling around the space, but the reminder of what had happened here loomed larger.
“Cake,” she said desperately, a little louder than she had intended.
The cook, a tall woman with hawkish features, looked over at them. “Cake? I don’t have any cake prepared. My lord, you are supposed to give me notice for things like that! Or is it that Miss Abigail? I tell you now if she is demanding cake, she will just have to wait.”
“No one is demanding cake, Mrs. Benson,” Sadie informed the cook. “We are going to bake a cake, if it won’t be too much of a disturbance to have us in the kitchen?”
At this point, Sadie wouldn’t press if Mrs. Benson objected. She didn’t know what else she could do with Nicholas that would keep them around people, but being with him here was probably a mistake. Though he kept suppressing them, thoughts of the other night rose to the surface of Nicholas’s mind constantly.
The manor’s cook squinted at them. “I suppose I can spare you that counter over there.” She pointed toward a counter—luckily notthecounter. “If you’re going to make a mess in my kitchen, though, you are responsible for cleaning it up, too. Guest or no guest. Baron or no baron.”
“Of course, Mrs. Benson,” Nicholas reassured her. “We’ll leave your space cleaner than we found it.”
Sadie glared at him. “Don’t promise the impossible. Do you see how clean she keeps this place?”
The cook cackled. “I like this one, my lord.”
Hazel eyes locked on her. “So do I, Mrs. Benson. So do I.”
Sadie spun to the work area the cook had directed them toward. “We’ll need flour, sugar, butter, and eggs,” she told Nicholas without looking at him.
While he gathered the ingredients, she found bowls, a wooden spoon, whisk, cake tin, and measuring cups. When Nicholas joined her, she made short work of cracking the eggs and adding a scoop of sugar then handed him the bowl and the whisk. “Beat these.”
He accepted the bowl and began to stir. “Sadie, are you ever going to look at me again? I will even accept glares, if that is all I can get.”
She obligingly glared at him. “We’re not doing this.”
He sighed. “Fine. For today only, I’ll pretend nothing happened. But only if you will as well and start talking to me again.”
It wasn’t that easy, since his promise wouldn’t extend to control over his thoughts, but Sadie wanted to accept. Shewanted to go back to the easy conversations they had shared. And even if no promise could actually make the other night not have happened, pretending would probably work better than ignoring. “Fine.”
Nicholas set the bowl of eggs and sugar down. “Did you enjoy yourself in the brewing room yesterday?”
Not sure how to answer that question, she looked in the bowl, then shoved it back at him. “Those aren’t done. You need to put some muscle into it, Nick. You are beating, not just stirring.”
He groaned. “Sadie, I know I just promised to pretend nothing happened, but that means you can’t call me Nick. I can’t be held responsible for my reaction to hearing that name from you after—”
