A Tart Affair in the Riviera A Mills and Swoon short by Sarnia
The French Riviera was unseasonably warm and offensively smug. Lady Honoria Bellweather had arrived with three trunks of silk, one cousin (mildly forgettable), and a vague desire not to get arrested....this time. She had not, at any point, intended to seduce a Hungarian count. That simply happened. Count Miklós Várady was, in her defence, tall, unreasonably bronzed, and cursed with the kind of accent that made even his hat sound suggestive. He was also in possession of a pastry yacht. “Do you mean a yacht for pastries or a pastry in the shape of a yacht?” she’d asked, suspicious. “Both,” he had replied, with a smirk that had probably unbuttoned dozens of corsets across Eastern Europe. The trouble began, naturally, with a tart. Not Honoria this time (though the local bishop would argue otherwise), but an actual lemon tart served during the Ambassadors’ Gala at Villa Les Oiseaux, a soirée so exclusive even the waiters required breeding. One minute, the tart sat proudly atop a silve...