Page 147 of Tall, Royal Hater
“If you tell me the email and password, I can set it up.”
“That would be—”
Someone crashed into the room, whipping several heads up and around, including mine.
Michael, Kai’s equerry married to the head pastry chef, Roger, righted the chair he knocked over. With an attempt to mask the look of panic on his boyish, freckled face, he headed straight for Esmeralda at the back, laying the last of the lanterns on the table at the head of the room with Fay.
Dread dripped down my spine.
Oh, for fuck’s sake. What now?
“Adam,” I said as I rapidly set the laptop down on the table. I opened up a new document to type on. “I’m going to leave you with the email and password, and then I’ll come back to check, okay?”
“Okay.”
I barely spared a second to give him a grateful smile before I hiked the skirt of my dress in my hands and rushed towards the small table.
Michael was dressed in a crisp black suit. Fay was in his dark blue suit trousers and white shirt, but his waistcoat, blazer, and tie were missing. And Esmeralda looked gorgeous in the deep blood-red dress Candy had designed for her, but her makeup was missing some final touches.
“…it just means the painting can’t go on the table yet,” Michael finished, unable to keep still.
“What do you mean the painting can’t go on the table yet?” I asked.
Michael swerved around wide-eyed, and Esmeralda and Fay grimaced. “It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine, really. I came to assure you of that,” he said rapidly with waves of his hands.
I gritted my teeth. “What happened?”
He pulled in a deep breath. “A chunk of the cake fell off while they were setting it on the table, but luckily Lola was there so she caught it, and now Roger, Pierre, and her are fixing it, but they need the table for now, so I was told to come tell Prince Fay to delay grabbing the painting for twenty minutes.”
My brain just about kept up with his word vomit, and the more he spoke, the narrower I squinted as a hard pulse throbbed in my temple. “The cake, what?” I asked slowly.
Michael gulped as Esmeralda stepped up beside him. “I’m sure it’s fine—Mariyah!”
I swung around and charged off down the rolled-out carpet towards the exit. Michael followed closely behind me, assuringme repeatedly it was fine, but I ignored him. I had to see for myself.
Around the corner was the entrance to the public dining hall, where the reception and dinner were being held. And situated in the bottom corner of that room was the round table positioned against a rectangular table, both draped in an ivory-coloured cloth.
There was in fact a big vanilla sponge chunk missing from the middle tier of the four-tiered wedding cake where Roger was working in a thin layer of buttercream over the crumbled side. On the rectangular table, Lola and Pierre were trying to hide the evidence of the mishap on the broken chunk, while Shehryar watched with his hands on his hips.
Nothing about the situation lookedfine. It looked like a fucking surgery theatre.
“What the fuck happened?”
Four heads turned in my direction, and their faces fell.
“Michael, you had one job,” Lola, the second sous chef, said, shaking her head of red curly locks.
“I know, but she saw me so what was I supposed to do?” Michael defended, and Pierre grinned, shaking his head.
“What happened to the cake?” I said again, moving closer.
Shehryar’s hulking body appeared in front of me to my side, and he banded an arm across my stomach, gently slowing me down to a stop. “It’s okay, Mariyah. They’re fixing it.”
“Okay?” I echoed in disbelief. “Shehryar, half the cake is on the other table. How the fuck does that look okay to you?”
“Hey,” Pierre said, his voice soft with reassurance. “Don’t you trust me, Mar? We won’t let you down. We’ll have it fixed before the guests arrive. I promise.”
“We will,” Lola confirmed with a positive grin. “And it’ll look like nothing ever happened to it.”
