Page 2 of Chef’s Kiss (A Knights Through Time #20)

K ansas—Present Day

Summer

The UPS driver looked deeply concerned about Rachel Carter’s level of excitement over an ordinary package.

“It’s a book,” she explained, practically vibrating as she signed for the battered cardboard box. “A really old book. Like, medieval old. From eBay.”

“Uh-huh.” He backed away slowly, the way people did when she got going about fermentation processes or the proper way to temper chocolate. “Have a nice day, ma’am.”

Rachel barely heard him, already tearing into the packaging with the dedication of someone who’d spent two weeks in a bidding war with someone called YeOldeBookWyrm . Inside, wrapped in what looked like old newspaper from the 1970s, was her prize: A Treatise on the Mystical Art of Cookery .

The leather binding felt ancient under her fingers, soft as butter left too long on the counter. The pages released a smell that made her think of her grandmother’s attic and church incense and something else—something that whispered of age and secrets and possibly some health code violations.

“Oh, you beautiful, questionable life choice,” she murmured, running her fingers over the elaborate script on the cover. Three hundred dollars. She’d spent three hundred dollars on this. Her blog followers on Bites & Brutality had better appreciate Medieval Monday.

Ten hours later, Rachel stood in front of the living room window of her apartment, watching Brad’s Prius disappear into the Mulvane night with zero regret and moderate relief.

“I just think you’re not taking life seriously,” he’d said over overpriced tapas that would have been embarrassing even if they hadn’t been in Wichita. “A food blog isn’t a real career, Rachel. This is Kansas, not New York.”

Right. Because being a pharmaceutical sales rep was so much more noble. At least she didn’t have to pretend tiny portions of mediocre chorizo were “transcendent” to make a sale.

She kicked off her heels, the uncomfortable ones she’d worn because they made her legs look great, and fat lot of good that had done, and padded to her kitchen.

The medieval cookbook sat on the counter where she’d left it, practically glowing with possibility.

Or maybe that was the St. Germain talking.

She’d started drinking the moment she got home, mixing it with Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante because if she was going to be single forever, she might as well have good cocktails.

“Screw it,” she announced to her empty apartment. “Let’s cook something weird.”

She cranked up her speakers, Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar On Me” filling the space with appropriate cooking energy.

Given that it was eleven o’clock on a Friday night, her neighbors would hate her, but her neighbors also thought her “ethnic” spice usage was too adventurous, so their opinions were automatically invalid.

The cookbook fell open to a recipe that looked marginally less likely to kill someone than the others.

“Sawse for a Capon,” read the heading in elaborate script.

The margins were covered in notes, some in Latin, some in what might have been Middle English, and one that just appeared to be a drawing of a very upset chicken.

Rachel set up her phone to record, taking another sip of her cocktail. The bubbles made everything feel slightly softer around the edges, like looking at the world through Instagram’s best filter.

“Okay, medieval food fans,” she said to her camera, dancing to the music.

“It’s almost midnight, I’ve had a spectacularly boring date with a man who thinks salt is spicy, and we’re going to cook something from this definitely cursed cookbook I bought from someone who probably lives in their mom’s basement. ”

Thunder rumbled in the distance. Summer storms in Kansas were as predictable as disappointing dates—they showed up uninvited, made a lot of noise, and left everything a mess.

She started pulling ingredients, reading the recipe out loud in what she thought was a medieval accent but probably sounded more like someone having a stroke. “’Take verjuice and draw it through a strainer.’ Sure, let me just grab my verjuice from the verjuice aisle at Whole Foods.”

The cookbook’s pages felt strange under her fingers, almost warm.

When she turned them, scents rose that shouldn’t have been there.

Saffron, though there was no saffron in her kitchen.

The salt-sweet smell of the sea, even though she was about as landlocked as humanly possible.

Rosemary growing wild on hills she’d never seen.

“That’s... weird.” She sniffed the pages directly, and the smell intensified. Cinnamon bark. Crushed roses. Something metallic and dark, like old blood or ancient iron.

Pour some sugar on me, in the name of love...

The music seemed to fade slightly, even though she hadn’t touched the volume. The cookbook’s pages fluttered despite the absence of any breeze.

“Okay, focusing,” Rachel muttered, grabbing her knife.

The expensive Japanese one, because if she was going to die alone surrounded by cats, at least she’d have good knives.

Well, not that she had any cats, or any pets for that matter, but if she did…

“The recipe calls for ‘diverse precious spices,’ which I’m interpreting as a personal challenge to my spice rack. ”

She chopped shallots, the rhythm matching the beat of “Rock of Ages” now playing. The storm was getting closer, the wind rattling her windows. The lights flickered once, twice.

“Should probably stop cooking,” she told her phone camera, a bit tipsy. “But that would be the responsible thing to do, and we don’t do that here at Bites & Brutality .”

Lightning flashed, illuminating her kitchen in stark white. In that moment, she could have sworn the cookbook’s pages glowed, just for a second. The writing seemed to shift, rearrange itself into something almost readable, almost?—

The knife slipped.

“Son of a—” Blood welled from the cut across her left index finger, bright and shocking. She instinctively jerked her hand back, sending droplets spattering across the open cookbook.

The blood hit the parchment.

Lightning struck. Inside her apartment. She was never going to drink again.

The world exploded into sensation—blinding white light that seemed to pour through her eyeballs directly into her brain.

The taste of copper and electricity and something ancient beyond words.

A sound like the universe tearing, like reality admitting it had made a mistake.

The smell of ozone and roses and the sea, so strong she could taste it.

The last coherent thought she had was that she’d left the stove on.

Then she was falling up, into light that burned and froze simultaneously, through space that wasn’t space, through time that ran backward and forward and sideways all at once.

Rachel woke to the taste of mud and the absolute certainty that St. Germain and bubbly were never, ever mixing in her stomach again.

She pushed herself up, spitting dirt, and what she desperately hoped was just grass. Everything hurt in new and innovative ways, like she’d been through a blender set to pulverize.

“What the hell?—”

The words died in her throat.

This was not Mulvane, Kansas. “Where’s my apartment?” One of her friends, Sara Jenkins, had a problem with sleepwalking, but her? Never. And even if she had, wherever she was, wasn’t anywhere she could have feasibly walked.

She lay in a muddy field beneath an early morning sky that was all wrong.

Too many stars, like someone had turned off all the light pollution in the world.

Rolling hills stretched in every direction, not a power line or cell tower in sight.

The air smelled of rain and earth and growing things, and not a hint of exhaust fumes or that weird chemical smell that haunted every American city.

Her phone was dead. Of course. Because the universe had a sense of humor, and it was mean.

Thunder rumbled overhead, not the familiar thunder that preceded tornadoes and insurance claims, but something older, more personal, like the sky was expressing opinions about her presence.

“Okay,” she said to no one, to the universe, to her three thousand blog followers who would never believe this. “Okay. This is fine. I’m having a stroke. Or Brad slipped something in my drink. That boring bastard finally got interesting.”

In the distance, through the pre-dawn gloom and drizzling rain, she could make out walls. A ruined castle. An actual, honest-to-God castle, like something from every BBC adaptation she’d ever binge-watched while eating ice cream and mourning her love life.

She started walking, her Docs making obscene sounds in the mud.

Her “I Like My Coffee Like I Like My Books” shirt was soaked through, clinging in ways that would have been embarrassing if anyone had been around to see.

As she got closer to the castle, she could smell woodsmoke and something cooking—meat and herbs and bread that would definitely violate several modern dietary restrictions.

She found a garden, or what had probably been a garden before it went feral.

Stone walls enclosed beds that had clearly given up on formal and gone straight to jungle.

Herbs released their scent as she pushed through—rosemary, lavender, something medicinal and bitter.

Roses climbed what remained of the trellis, heavy with rain and neglect.

“If this is a coma dream,” she muttered, “at least the production values are?—”

“What in the name of all the saints are you doing in my garden?”

The voice was rough honey poured over broken glass. Rachel spun, nearly face-planting in the mud, and found herself staring at what could only be described as Peak Knightly Brooding.

He stood in the garden path like someone had commissioned a statue of repressed anger and then brought it to life through sheer force of scowl.

Black hair fell past his shoulders, rain-darkened and practically screaming for conditioner.

A scar cut through one eyebrow—the kind romance heroes got from defending virtue or fighting wars or whatever knightly types did between plagues.

Black leather that had seen better centuries. Hand on an actual sword.

But his eyes—oh my, his eyes. Blue like winter frost, like judgment day, like every purple prose description she’d ever mocked in her romance novel reviews. Currently narrowed at her with suspicion that could have peeled paint.

“I said,” he growled, stepping closer, and wow, they grew them tall wherever she was, “what are you doing here? Who sent you?”

Rachel’s brain, still processing the whole ‘I’m not in my apartment’ situation, struggled to understand him and then form words. “I’m—I’m lost?”

“Lost.” He said it like she’d claimed to be a unicorn. His gaze traveled from her mud-caked Docs to her soaked shirt, pausing at the text across her chest with visible confusion. “What manner of...” He gestured at her entire person. “What are you wearing? What do those symbols mean?”

“It’s about coffee,” she said weakly. “It’s a joke. About coffee and books.”

His expression suggested he found neither coffee nor books particularly amusing. “You’re a thief. Or a spy. Which is it?”

“I’m a food blogger!”

Silence. Even the rain seemed to pause for effect.

“A what?”

“I write about food. On the inter—I mean, I’m a cook. Sort of.”

Something shifted in his expression, dangerous in a whole new way. “Someone sent a cook. To mock me.”

“No one sent me! There was this cookbook and lightning and I woke up here—” She stopped. She sounded insane. She sounded like someone who believed in crystal healing and Mercury in retrograde.

He moved faster than someone that large should be able to, his hand closing around her upper arm. Firm but not painful. This close, she could smell him—leather and rain and, unexpectedly, something that made her think of kitchens. Cinnamon. Pepper. The ghost of good bread.

“You’ll come with me,” he said, already marching her toward the castle. “The others will want to see this.”

“Others?”

That’s when she noticed something in his other hand. Something small and rectangular.

“Is that—is that my phone?”

He held it up like evidence at a witch trial, which, considering the circumstances, might not have been far off. “This fell from your... garments. Some sort of talisman? It bears strange symbols and captured light before it died.”

“It’s not a talisman, it’s technology, it’s—” She stopped. How could he not know what an iPhone was?

“Sorcery, then.” He said it with the tired tone of someone who’d had a really long day and just discovered it was getting longer. “Of course. Because this damnable day wasn’t cursed enough.”

As he dragged her toward the castle, her dead phone clutched in his hand like evidence of witchcraft, Rachel had a single, crystal-clear thought.

She should have given Brad a second chance. Boring was suddenly looking pretty good.