Page 18 of The Tea Witch’s Secret

"Oh." I looked into the mirror, not entirely sure what to do with that information.

Eva must have noticed something on my face, because she smiled in a different way. "Which hairpin do you want today?" she asked.

"This one is fine," I said, picking up my carved wooden hairpin and handing it to her.

She looked like she might want to say something else, but didn't, and twisted my hair up into my preferred style instead. But none of that erased what she'd said to me, or the fact that I needed to decide what to do about it.

Chapter 11

Pepper

Nervous energy hung in the kitchen between Lian and me, and it had nothing to do with the heavy rain outside and the occasional clap of thunder or flash of lightning. I wasn't worried about the storm, not now we had Eva and Max at Purple Oak. I wasn't sure how their magic worked exactly, but there was a reason why two of the Brewsters had gone overseas to find a pair of weather witches and why I had been asked to take good care of them. They could make a real difference to whatever place they settled down in, and I was to treat them as very important guests.

So maybe it wasn't very smart of me to be getting closer to Lian. Feelings always complicated a situation, and if I ended up hurting her or offending her, that could ruin all the hard work everyone had put in to get the weather witches here and working for the village. I should keep my distance, but I couldn't go through with that. Not when Lian was sitting in my kitchen looking so beautiful. Her smooth black hair was neatly pinned in a twist with a hairpin. I wasn't sure how she made it happen, but it looked so elegant, especially with the long lines of her neck.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It had been a long time since I'd had this strong of a reaction to someone like this.

I was heading for trouble if I couldn't get it under control.

"So these are the mooncake moulds," Lian said as she pulled wooden moulds from a red bag with golden patterns on it. She set four wooden blanks on the table, each of them with two carved indentations in them, and all of them varnished well. But I could also tell that they'd been well used. I hadn't worked in a kitchen for my entire adult life without being able to recognise a well-loved and cared-for piece of equipment.

"They're beautiful," I said, admiring the patterns by running my fingers over them. They were expertly carved and had a lot of detail, which did worry me a little for how they were going to come out when we made the mooncakes. But Lian didn't seem worried about that, so I assumed she knew what she was doing.

Lian looked proud. "Thank you. They were a gift from my uncle for my twelfth birthday."

"So you press this on top of the mooncake, and it leaves indentations?" I asked, checking if I understood the process right.

"The other way around," she said. "We shape the dough around the filling, and then press them in the mould to give them their shape and pattern."

"And they don't get stuck there?"

"Not if you use enough rice flour," she assured me with a small smile.

"Do they come out as beautiful as the pattern?" I asked. "Even once they're baked?"

"If we've done them right then they will," she answered.

I laughed. "No pressure then."

It was hard to read the expression on her face and what it might mean, but if I were honest, I was a little too distracted by the heart shape of her mouth and the way she moved it when she was thinking. For the first time in my life, it was going to be a little touch-and-go whether I would be able to focus on the baking or not.

I moved over to the stove where I had two pots boiling away. One of them was filled with red beans and the other with the lotus seeds that had been soaked overnight and were now going through the next part of the cooking process for the mooncake filling. I had never seen them before, but they looked a bit like white beans with holes in the middle.

Lian used a spoon to fish out some of the lotus seeds to examine them. "I think those are cooked enough. We can start grinding."

Something sparked in my stomach, something hot and untameable. "I do like a bit of grinding."

She looked confused, as she often did when I made a joke. It was cute, even if I was trying to make her smile. And maybe trying to figure out if she might be interested in something more.

"We'll grind them into a fine paste with sugar or honey to sweeten them," Lian said, simply continuing with the mooncake lesson as if I hadn't just made a suggestive comment.

Either she didn't know the other meaning of grinding, or she wasn't interested in me like that. It was hard to tell, really hard to tell. There were times when she seemed very distant and polite, but then there were moments where it seemed like there was more. Like her interest in me was beyond us working together. I just had to figure out which was her true feelings towards me.

I thought about it while I drained the hot water from the seeds and transferred them into my mortar. I rolled up my sleeves and got to work, pounding and grinding the pestle into the basin. I wanted to make jokes about it, but I had a feeling they would be lost on Lian, which was a shame. Maybe after she'd been in Purple Oak for longer and was more used to the language, she'd find them funny.

The lotus seeds were easy to squash and turned into a beige paste faster than I expected. It looked like it could've been made out of white beans, and it made me curious about what it was going to taste like.

"I've never had anything with lotus seeds in them," I said once I was finished.