"Bonne nuit," Jacques offered from the counter.
"See? Even the toaster thinks you need rest."
Luna hopped down from the counter and wound between Cassie's ankles—a rare gesture of affection from a cat who usually treated physical contact as beneath her dignity.
"It'll be okay," the cat said, almost gently. "You're a mess, but you're not hopeless. I've seen hopeless. You're just... chaotic."
"Is that supposed to be comforting?"
"It's the best I've got. I'm a cat."
Cassie looked at Liam. Liam looked back. Between them, the wrench sat on the counter, quiescent but watchful. The binding hummed in the air, invisible but present, tying them together in ways neither of them had chosen.
"Tomorrow," he said.
"Tomorrow," she agreed.
Luna was already padding toward the bedroom, tail high. "I get the left side of the bed. You kick."
"You've always slept wherever you wanted."
"Yes, but now I can tell you about it. Progress."
Cassie followed her cat down the hallway, leaving Liam in the kitchen with the glowing wrench and the talking toaster and the full weight of a magical disaster neither of them had signed up for.
Tomorrow, Margaret would come.
Tomorrow, they'd start fixing this.
Tonight, she just had to survive sleeping in a house that had opinions about her emotional state, while a man she'd accidentally kidnapped slept in her guest room, while her cat narrated her dreams.
Piece of cake.
The walls flickered a nervous shade of yellow.
Even the house wasn't convinced.
3
ONE TINY SPELL. ONE BIG MISTAKE
Five days of cohabitation with a magically bound Scottish handyman had taught Cassie several things.
One: Liam MacLeod was insufferably competent. He'd fixed her gutters, her fence gate, the squeaky step on the back porch, and something complicated in the attic that she hadn't even known was broken. All while wearing Derek's increasingly ridiculous leftover wardrobe—yesterday it had been a polo shirt that said "I'd Rather Be Golfing" stretched across his chest like a cry for help.
Two: The man consumed an ungodly amount of tea. She'd had to make an emergency grocery delivery order because he'd gone through her entire dusty box of Earl Grey in forty-eight hours and looked at her coffee maker like it had personally offended his ancestors.
Three: Living with someone you were magically bound to but trying very hard not to be attracted to was absolutely, categorically, cosmically unfair.
"You're staring again," he said without looking up from the cabinet hinge he was adjusting.
"I'm not staring. I'm... supervising."
"Aye. Very supervisory, that look."
She grabbed her coffee mug—the one she'd spelled to stay perpetually warm, one of her first successful intentional spells—and retreated to the table. The binding was still there, a constant hum in the background of her awareness. Not painful, just... present. Like having an extra sense she didn't know what to do with.
They'd settled into careful parallel lines. Polite. Professional. He helped train her in the basics when Margaret came by—grounding, shielding, how to direct magic instead of just leaking it everywhere. She practiced without complaint. They ate meals at the same table without making eye contact.
