My Best Friend's Stepmother's Niece Is Off Limits novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Family Law

At breakfast Pru states the rule in front of sixty relatives and Cass seconds it; Lark pulls Noor into dry storage and kisses her.

At seven the next morning I was setting out cardamom buns on the long table.

Pru Aldrich tapped her coffee cup with a spoon.

Sixty relatives stopped talking at once.

Pru is fifty-four, with a silver bob and pearl earrings, and she runs the Aldrich-Delacroix reunion like a small country.

"Good morning, everyone," she said. "Three quick announcements before the eggs."

Gordon Aldrich, her husband, stood at the grill outside the open doors.

He held a spatula and wore the face of a man who had heard this speech before.

"One, the bonfire is at nine tonight."

"Two, the clambake is tomorrow, and Noor Haddad's desserts are here for all of us."

Everyone clapped for me.

I raised a tray of buns, and I felt Lark looking at me from the far end of the table.

She sat between two older cousins in a navy sweater, with her braid pinned up and her coffee untouched.

"Three," Pru said. "For the newcomers."

She looked straight at me.

"Family law. Lark is off limits to Cass's side. Like a cousin."

A few relatives murmured the old line along with her, smiling.

I put the tray down very carefully.

"Off limits for what?" I asked.

"For anything," Pru said. "It's family law, Noor. You're Cass's best friend, so you're on Cass's side."

"I'm on the side that makes the pastries."

"You're on Cass's side," Pru repeated, pleasantly.

Cass came up beside me with a mug and her hair still wet from the shower.

She is twenty-eight, blond, loud, and the person I have loved longest who isn't my mother.

"Don't look at me like that," Cass said. "It's the rule. It's always been the rule."

"Who made it?"

"No idea. It's like the speed limit." She grinned. "Lark's family. Hands off. Easy."

"What about Lark? Does she have an opinion?"

Every head turned to the far end of the table.

Lark lifted her coffee cup, took a very slow sip, and set it down.

"I think the buns smell wonderful," she said.

Everyone laughed, and the room went back to eggs.

I went back to the kitchen with my face burning.

The boathouse kitchen is a long steel room with three ovens and the walk-in cooler at the back.

I started the pavlova for the afternoon, because beating egg whites is the closest I come to screaming.

I whipped eight whites into stiff peaks while the machine roared, and I thought, Off limits.

Like a cousin.

I have one cousin in Beirut and one in Detroit, and both of them are very safe.

The door behind me opened at ten past eight.

I didn't turn around.

"If you're here for the buns, they're out front," I said.

"I'm not here for the buns."

The mixer went off under my hand.

Lark stood in the doorway with her sleeves pushed up and her braid half undone.

"My aunt is on the porch with the caterer for the tent," she said. "I have about four minutes."

"I'm not the one who made the rule."

"I know. I came to say I'm sorry about breakfast."

"You drank your coffee."

"I didn't know what else to do."

Her voice cracked a little, and it made me soften.

"I've sat at that table every Labor Day for thirteen years. Nobody ever asked me a thing."

"I'd ask," I said. "If I could see you at the table."

"You could see me. You did see me."

"Lark, we aren't family. There's a rule that says we are, and it's wrong."

"I know it's wrong."

"So why do we follow it?"

She crossed the floor and took the whisk out of my hand.

She put it in the sink.

"Because if we don't follow it, I have to say out loud what I want," she said.

"What do you want?"

"That," Lark said, and pulled me through the pantry door.

The dry storage room is the size of a closet, with flour sacks on one wall and sugar on the other.

She backed me against the sacks, and a little cloud of white rose from the burlap.

Her hands settled on my waist, big and sure.

Mine went up into her half-undone braid, and the pins fell somewhere on the floor.

This time it wasn't a brush of a kiss at the corner of a mouth.

It was a real one, slow at first and then not slow.

She tasted like coffee and the orange peel she had stolen from my station.

She kissed like she'd been thinking about it all night.

I made a noise I hadn't planned on, and she answered it with a smile against my lip.

"You're covered in flour," Lark whispered.

"So are you."

She looked down at the front of her navy sweater, which now had two floury handprints on it.

"I'm going to have to explain this," she said.

"Say the pastry chef grabbed you."

"I'll say you tackled me over a bag of sugar."

"That's closer to what happened."

She laughed, and the laugh went all through me.

Out in the hall, a screen door slapped, and Pru's voice said something sharp about tent poles.

Lark straightened my collar and stepped back.

She looked at me the way she had looked at the lemon tart, with her eyes half shut and her chin tipped up.

"There's a loft above the boat bay," she said.

"It has a ladder and an old couch. I used to hide there as a kid."

"Is that an invitation?"

"After the bonfire. Everyone will be drunk on marshmallows."

"Lark."

"Tell me no," she said. "Right now. I'll never mention it again."

I should have said it.

I looked at her flour-white sleeves, her loose hair, her mouth.

"What time?" I asked.

"Midnight," Lark said. "Bring a corner piece."

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