Page 18 of The Pumpkin Bride

He crossed the threshold. “Tonight only, Princess. Tomorrow, you’re gone.”

The door rattled in its frame. Add that to the pile of things the broadsheets and books got wrong about orcs—they possessed integrity. Deftly, she threaded a needle from the kit, then stitched the split pillow closed. Soothing, this kind of work. Rewarding, too, making order from chaos.

And as for leaving tomorrow?

She thought not.

Chapter 5

By midday, Bram had been out of the cottage for hours. Inside, his sweet Marigold was currently darning sheets and pillows. Tonight she’d sleep on them, likely feet away from him. Bram tapped his forehead with the blunt side of the hatchet’s head. Maybe if he tapped hard enough, he’d beat sense into himself.

What on earth had he done?

Nothing smart, that was for sure. He paced thirty yards down the fence line to cool his heated blood. Between his true love and his nemesis arriving within minutes of each other, it was a miracle he’d kept his wits about him. Though if he’d had more wits, to protect her from the curse, he should’ve immediately orcked out and sent her screaming away from his doorstep.

Now he was stuck with her.

Crispin was a puffed-up rogue, and Bram had no regrets about hiding Marigold from him. But harboring her? If Marigold was caught, Jask Bone-Cracker was as good as vivisected. Had he listened to her five years ago, all this might have been avoided.

The prince, the curse, everything.

They were both twenty-three then, and she’d fought with him tooth and claw over his plan to find his fortune in Harvest Hollow. Sir Patrick, the knight who raised him, had breathed his last, and Bram’s social status was tenuous at best. Marigold was convinced her parents would allow a love match between them since her father had received special permission to marry her mother. Magical thinking, that. Love match? A silver lining. Marigold’s mother, Queen Elowen, belonged to the realm’s wealthiest merchant family. With her, she brought Thornwick’s coffers a welcome infusion of gold.

He—the fostered child of a mid-level knight—did not.

But he had potential. At least, he used to.

A few paces away, Barnaby stretched his neck, then split Bram’s brain with an impressive shriek.

“Really, Barnaby?” Bram wiggled his pinky in his ear. “It’s almost noon.”

As the rooster strutted away, Bram hacked at the sapling that threatened the fence post’s integrity. In his quest to avoid the woman in his cottage, he’d blazed through his routine chores. He’d watered, fed, and milked the cow; scattered feed for the chickens and collected their eggs; then let the pig out to forage in the forest. Normally, the mundane work helped him sort through his growing list of problems, which included:

Marigold required safe passage back to Thornwick.

He couldn’t leave the farm.

Jask Bone-Cracker had no friends to tap for help. Unless he counted Alfred the Carter or Barnaby, which he did not.

If he revealed himself to Marigold, she would die.

He ached to reveal himself to Marigold. His favorite person in the world was right there, no farther away than a ten-year-old could throw a mid-sized pumpkin. The funniest, smartest, most empathetic, and beautiful person he’d known in his twenty-eight years. She was stitched into the very fabric of his soul, his heart, his body.

His very excitable body.

Which meant he needed to stay out here. Perhaps forever. Discipline was a core value of knighthood, but this was beyond him. The root cellar might be an alternative place to lay his head. After watering the pumpkin patch and vegetable garden, he was no closer to a solution for escorting Marigold to safety when he himself could not escort her. The growl in his stomach begged him to stop for a meal.

But then he’d be back in the cottage. With her.

He ran his hand down his face. Perhaps there was something in the root cellar besides cider, onions, and carrots? As he headed toward the cellar door, an urgent bell clanged in the distance. What was that? Had Alfred gotten a new bell that sounded like the one that called fire brigade? He glanced over his shoulder. No—this ringing came from the front of the cottage.

Marigold.

The world bounced and shifted as he sprinted through the courtyard and around to the front of his home. There she stood, on the porch, shielding her eyes as she scanned the horizon.

“What’s wrong?” he panted.

She dropped the bell pull. “Nothing’s wrong. Why do you ask?”