If Millie noticed or disapproved of the change in sleeping arrangements, she didn’t say anything. And she must have noticed. Sophie’s bed had been untouched whereas Daniel’s bed was a total shambles with wet clothes trailing from the shower to the bed, even though she’d tried to minimise the damage. There was no way Daniel’s housekeeper could miss the carnage or fail to extrapolate from it the facts.
Yet Millie’s smile appeared genuine when she brought Sophie a cup of lemon-scented tea halfway through the morning. ‘How’s it going, lovey?’ she asked, peering over Sophie’s shoulder at pictures of wedding cakes she had pulled from the Internet. ‘Ooh, aren’t they lovely? I used to dabble with wedding cakes—nothing like these modern ones, of course—before I got work in the café.’
Sophie nodded absently. It was the full and pitiful extent of her work this morning, she reflected, this thin pile of pictures. She’d convinced herself it was work, even though she’d found nothing that nearly approximated the traditional and simple tiered cake Monica had hinted at—like the cake her parents had had at their wedding—even though her mind had been miles away.
Or, rather, hours ago.
If last night had blown away her every inhibition, this morning’s efforts had blown her mind. Daniel was the kind of lover you only read about in books. Nobody could make love that many times in one night, she’d been convinced. Nobody.
But Daniel had. And every time had been different, every time better, in some undefined way.
No wonder she hadn’t been able to focus on her work. She was still trying to count up the different ways he’d made love to her, the number of orgasms he’d brought her to in just one night.
‘Hmm?’ she murmured vaguely; some hint of a message had been in Millie’s words that was struggling to strike a chord.
‘I could never do these fancy mudcake or cream-puff things,’ Millie continued, pointing to a picture of a croquembouche. ‘Mine were more the old-fashioned type. But these are pretty.’
Finally her words worked their way through the fog that had been Sophie’s morning. She swung her chair around. ‘You make wedding cakes?’
Millie looked abashed. ‘Well, I used to. I once won a bake-off competition with my fruit-cake recipe. I’m not so good at learning fancy new stuff—like all this Vietnamese and Thai cuisine I know Mr Caruana would like, for instance—but I do a pretty mean classic wedding cake.’
Sophie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. ‘Monica wants a traditional cake. Something like—’ She scrabbled through the papers on her desk for a copy of the old photograph, diving on it when she found it. ‘Something like this.’
‘Oh!’ Millie took the copy and gave a wistful sigh. ‘So that’s her parents, then. I never met them, you know. But doesn’t Monica resemble her mother so?’
Sophie agreed. The likeness was uncanny, whereas Daniel seemed more of a blend, the strength of his father’s nose and jawline coupled with the high cheek-bones and generosity of his mother’s lips.
‘Oh, and that cake,’ Millie continued. ‘I made one just like it for Sybil Martin’s wedding, only we had fresh roses rather than orchids.’ She shook her head and clucked. ‘Hard work, keeping those roses fresh-looking in this climate, I tell you. We had them in the cooler until the last moment.’
‘You made a cake like this?’
‘A piece of cake!’ the older woman said before laughing at her own joke.
‘Millie, do you think you could you make one for Monica and Jake? In return, maybe I could teach you how to cook Thai. It’s dead easy, really. Much easier than producing a wedding cake.’
The woman’s smile vanished, though there was just the tiniest glimmer of interest mixed with the disbelief in her eyes. ‘You really want me to have a go at a wedding cake, then?’
‘I’m serious. I’d pay you, of course. I wouldn’t expect you to do all that work for nothing. And we’ll have a Thai cooking-class first chance we get.’
Daniel let himself into the house, weary, hot and disgruntled. His day had been a waste. The fallout from the aborted Townsville conference had consumed most of the day’s overt efforts, while secretly he’d been waiting for his phone to beep, waiting for the message that would spell the end to his affair with Sophie. Because there was no way Fletcher would turn down two million in cold, hard cash, surely?
Something good wafted from the direction of the kitchen, spicy, aromatic and flavoured with garlic, ginger and fresh herbs; his stomach growled so appreciatively he had to investigate for himself, if only to grab a beer and find out how long it would be before he could eat.