Page 10

He carried six empty crates. New crates, freshly sanded, the corners smooth. He set them by my stairs and stood in my shop, filling it, smelling like herbs and woodsmoke.

“These are for heavy things,” he said. “Books. Pots and pans.”

“You built me packing crates?”

“I had the boards.”

The corners had been dovetailed. Nobody dovetailed a packing crate. I took in the sanded edges, and my chest went warm in a way I had no business feeling.

So I did what I always do when I’m disconcerted. I put the kettle on.

“Sit,” I said, pointing to the bench I hadn’t yet dragged back to its wall. “It’s freezing out. Let me at least pour you a bracing mug of chamomile tea before you help me load your wagon. On the house, as a thanks for the crates and the temporary home.”

He didn’t sit, but he stayed. He propped a hip against the end of my counter, and I got down the tin from the shelf where I’d set aside his next week’s order.

I brewed while he watched. This never happened. For two years, other than after the storm, he’d taken his tin and left, rationing his words on the way out. Now he stood at my counter, watching my hands with his ale-colored eyes.

I talked the entire time, because I always talked when my hands were busy and I was nervous.

“The fair committee is meeting tomorrow night. Mrs. Honeycake wants me to work the tea booth, which I already knew, and Asha and Aris are designing the kissing booth this week. Aris says the word ‘booth’ undersells it. She has drawings. There are ornate decorations in the drawings, Goran.”

“Hm.”

“Bram’s been working on his blush and puckering up. Rufus is charging him for lessons, I’ve heard, a quarter-copper each time.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile yet.

I poured his cup. The steam came up soft and sweet, the herb holding a subtle warmth underneath I didn’t quite recognize. Last fall, Mama said I’d overdried the batch, and maybe she was right.

He wrapped his hand around the cup, and it vanished. He drank half of it in one swallow and set the cup down. Too carefully, the china tapping the counter twice, like his hand had lost its aim. The bases of his horns went gold. Then darker gold. Then a color I had no name for, one I’d seen deep in the middle of a fire. It spread up under his hairline while his pupils opened black.

“Goran?”

The growl that came out of him rattled the tins on the shelf. It went straight through my apron and my dress and my good sense. It didn’t frighten me. My body knew that before my head caught up. He turned toward me, with the counter between us, but then it wasn’t, because he’d come around it in four strides.

Heat rolled off him like a stove door swinging open.

I backed up a step. The shelf met my shoulders.

He followed.

One of his arms came up over my head, his palm landing flat against the wall. The warm bulk of him bowed down and in, closer and closer, until his nose grazed the side of my throat.

He breathed in, deep and slow.

“Rain.” My name came out of him wrecked, half a word and half a growl, and he buried it in my neck. His breath spread heat across my collarbone. My hands had grabbed onto his suspenders at some point. Nobody put my hands there but me, and they gripped and hauled. I couldn’t move an ogre. But he made a sound against my throat like I’d managed to do it anyway.

“Rain…” he rasped.

I should’ve been reaching for the counter bell. Any sensible witch would’ve reached for the counter bell.

I tipped my head sideways and gave him more room.

He went still. All of him, all at once. Then he tore himself back off me so fast the faelamps guttered and flared. He stood a short distance away with both hands lifted, his palms out and his fingers spread.

As he gaped at them, a look of horror filled his face, every bit of it aimed at himself.

“Goran, what⁠—”