My Best Friend's Stepmother's Niece Is Off Limits novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Walk-In Cooler
Noor corners Lark in the walk-in cooler at midnight; they share no relation, and Lark says the family will never see it that way.
At midnight I cornered the bride's niece in my walk-in cooler.
Technically she was the stepmother's niece, and the bride was my best friend, but I wasn't thinking in family trees.
I was thinking that Lark Delacroix had walked away from my cake table four hours ago without saying a word.
She had stood there with a plate in her hand and her mouth full of my lemon tart.
Her eyes had closed.
Then Cass's stepmother had said her name across the hall, and Lark had left the plate on the cloth and gone.
I run a small bakery in Somerville.
I'm Noor Haddad, I'm twenty-eight, and I don't like it when someone eats my work and disappears.
So when the last guest left the Marblehead boathouse, I told my two helpers to go home.
I carried the leftover tray of tarts into the walk-in to put away.
The door clicked behind me, and the cold wrapped around my forearms.
"I was hoping you'd come in here," Lark said.
She was sitting on an upturned milk crate between the butter and the cream.
She wore a green summer dress and her brother's grey fleece over it, and her long red-brown braid lay over one shoulder.
I nearly dropped the tray.
"You've been in my cooler for how long?"
"Forty minutes," she said. "I counted tarts."
"Why are you hiding in a refrigerator?"
"Because everyone upstairs is talking about me at the same time."
She stood up.
She was tall enough that I had to lift my chin to look at her.
"You left your plate," I said. "Half a tart. That's rude."
"I didn't leave it, I ran from it."
"From my tart?"
"From you," Lark said. "You watched me eat it."
I had.
I had watched her eat it.
My face was warm, which was a stupid thing to feel in a room that was thirty-eight degrees.
"I watch everybody eat," I said. "It's my job."
"You didn't watch the bride's uncle eat. He had three slices."
"He didn't close his eyes."
Lark laughed, low and short, and the sound filled the whole cold room.
I put the tray on a shelf, because my hands needed to be somewhere.
"I'm Noor," I said.
"I know. Cass talks about you like you're the weather."
"And you're Pru's niece."
"Lark." She held out her hand. "Delacroix. Pru is my dad's older sister, so I'm the niece nobody can forget."
I took her hand.
Her fingers were cold and her palm was warm, and I held it a second longer than I should have.
"Cass said her stepmother had a niece," I said. "She didn't say you were..."
"Tall?"
"Standing in my walk-in."
She smiled.
There was a smear of white cream at the corner of her lip, from the tart she'd stolen from the tray just now.
"You've got something," I said.
"Where?"
I didn't answer, because my thumb was already there.
I wiped the cream off the corner of her mouth, slowly, and neither of us breathed.
Her lips were soft, and the cold made the heat of her breath feel like something I could count.
"That was very professional," Lark said quietly.
"I'm a professional."
"You're shaking."
"It's thirty-eight degrees in here."
"Noor."
She said my name.
All day, relatives had told me the same thing, smiling.
They said Lark was family, and off limits.
I'd laughed it off over the coffee urn, because I hadn't met her yet and had no reason to be offended.
"Your family keeps telling me I'm supposed to stay away from you," I said.
"I know."
"We aren't related."
"I know that too."
"I'm Cass's friend. I'm not in your family. I'm not in anyone's family here, I'm just the woman with the tarts."
"That's what I keep telling myself," Lark said.
She was close enough now that I could smell lemon and the salt from the harbor.
"It's an old family law," she said.
"My aunt says it like scripture. My cousins say it like a joke, and then they enforce it like scripture."
"Whose law is it?"
"Nobody knows. It's just always been there."
"That's a bad reason to follow a law."
"It's a very good reason to keep your voice down in a refrigerator."
I laughed, helplessly, and she leaned in.
Her mouth found the corner of mine, where she'd been stained with cream a minute before.
It was barely a kiss, just a warm press in a cold room.
My eyes closed on their own.
When she pulled away, I was holding the front of her fleece in my fist.
I didn't remember grabbing it.
"Everyone will enforce it," Lark whispered. "Starting at breakfast."
"Let them."
"You haven't met my aunt."
Upstairs, a door banged, and heavy footsteps crossed the hall above us.
Pru Aldrich's voice carried down the stairwell, bright and carrying.
"Lark? Lark Delacroix, where have you gone to?"
Lark let go of me and slipped past me to the door.
She stopped with her hand on the latch and looked back at me.
"Tomorrow," she said. "Save me a corner piece."
The door clicked, and I stood alone among the butter and the cream.
I was still holding half a tart, and I did not remember picking it up.
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