“Two weeks?” A week was an eternity of moments to wait.
“They have to age a bit,” Chef insisted. “Traditionally I should have given then a full four weeks, but they’ll do.”
“Two weeks,” Gizelle moaned. “That’s a lot of anticipation.”
“Anticipation makes them taste better,” Chef said with a booming laugh.
“Something has to,” Breck said dryly, beside Gizelle.
“Won’t they be stale in two weeks?” Gizelle said suspiciously, glancing between the head waiter and Chef. Was this a joke? The staff was always making jokes she didn’t understand.
“It’s got too much booze to go stale,” Breck scoffed. “It’s basically trumped up fruitcake that you set fire to.”
Gizelle knew they were joking then. “You’re teasing me!”
They laughed then, kindly, but Chef shook his head. “He’s basically right,” the big man admitted. “It’s more like a fruitcake with a lot of brandy than a true pudding.”
“And you light it on fire?”
“Only for a moment,” Chef assured her.
“Not nearly long enough,” Breck added.
Gizelle still wasn’t sure that they weren’t fooling her, but she accepted that she wasn’t going to be getting any figgy pudding that day.
“Christmas cannot get here soon enough,” she sighed. Then she wandered out of the kitchen to find Conall.
Chapter 36
Conall considered the Christmas lights hanging around the bar.
He hated Christmas: the gaudy decorations, the crushing pressure to buy the perfect presents, the memory of music. He had a hundred reasons to detest the whole season.
And now he had one reason to love it.
One wild-haired, wide-eyed woman who’d never done any of it before, whose every tentative smile made him want to move the world for her.
His laptop was open on the bar in front of him, grinding through the sluggish connection to the Internet. A dozen priority emails from the previous few days needed his attention, each one sounding more urgent than the last. Signature needed, approval required, get back to me immediately, are you ignoring your texts?
He grinned, imagining what kind of chaos the emails he’d just sent were going to set off. For once he had a reason to be glad he couldn’t manage phone calls. Texts and email at least gave him some buffer.
Not that he was dealing with any of them now.
The page he was loading finally resolved, and he scrolled down, impulsively adding anything that appealed to him to his cart.
He was going to make sure that Gizelle had the perfect Christmas. It was going to cost a fortune in express shipping to get things here in time, but he could not imagine a better way to spend the money.
She’s here, his elk warned, as excited for the surprise as he was.
Conall shut the laptop as Gizelle tripped across the tiles to him.
“How was the figgy pudding?” he asked as she sidled into his arms with a sigh and all the sounds in the world seemed to crowd into his ears. He kissed the crown of her head.
“Two weeks,” Gizelle said in despair. “I have to wait until Christmas to taste it.”
Conall remembered that exquisite anguish of anticipation. Though Gizelle’s voice was sad, her eyes were sparkling, and the familiar tension that hummed in her body seemed more like excitement than fear.
“Time will fly by,” Conall promised.